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Nuclear Option
Special> Nuclear Option
UPDATED: September 21, 2007 NO.39 SEP. 27, 2007
Safety First
Ensuring safety while peacefully utilizing nuclear energy is a top priority for China
By LAN XINZHEN
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With regard to missile attacks, Huo believes that it is entirely unnecessary to worry. Since all the nuclear facilities in the world are under coordination of the International Atomic Energy Agency, countries that use nuclear energy have formed an alliance. If one country attacks another nation's nuclear power plants, it amounts to a declaration of war on all the nuclear facilities of the world.

People living nearby to nuclear power plants often worry that there will be harms to their health, even if no leaks occur. According to Qu, nuclear power plants carry out checks of radioactive substances on a regular basis. With present research and monitoring, no cases have been found that radiation produced by nuclear power plants hurts people's health.

From its establishment, Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant set up 36 real time automatic monitoring systems within a 3-km radius, and testing air, water, soil and farm and sideline products within a 50-km radius. The power plant often buys sheep to measure contents of radioactive substances as their "canaries in the coalmine." All checks show that there have been no abnormal environmental changes around Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant.

Disposal of nuclear waste

Since it takes tens of thousands of years for nuclear waste to decay to the point where it is harmless to human beings, how to dispose of the waste becomes one of the key problems for the construction of China's nuclear power plants.

According to Huo, there is a large pool more than 10 meters deep in every nuclear power plant where waste of nuclear reactors is cooled. During the cooling process, radioactivity of the nuclear waste will decay. After cooling down, the waste is disposed, after first extracting useful substances and then burying the waste deep underground. At present, waste from the nuclear power plants in China is kept in pools and is not yet in the stage of deep burying.

Wang Ju, Assistant Director of the Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology of China National Nuclear Corp., is an expert of nuclear waste disposal in China. On many public occasions, Wang has proposed that in the present stage, deep burying is the most practical way to dispose high radioactive substances. This means cutting an underground disposal storehouse.

Nuclear waste is divided into two categories: highly radioactive and medium and low radioactive waste. By now, China has established two disposal fields for medium and low radioactive waste in Yumen of Gansu Province and Beilong in Guangdong Province. In terms of disposal of medium and low radioactive nuclear waste, China has mature technologies.

To dispose of highly radioactive nuclear waste, Beishan in Gansu Province is the best place selected by Wang. The bedrock there is granite and the tectonic activity is stable. Within thousands of kilometers of radius, it is desolate and uninhabited, the climate is dry, there is little rain and the evaporation volume is high. After a site for a disposal storehouse is fixed, an underground laboratory needs to be built for testing various technologies. Experiments carried out underground have the same conditions as future deep burying, such as underground temperature, pressure and water flow. By now, Wang has carried out several drilling tests for the construction of an underground laboratory for the Beishan nuclear waste disposal storehouse. They might fix the site for the underground laboratory in 2015 and finish construction by 2025.

According to Qu, deep burying is generally accepted as the international practice. "At present the largest threat we can expect to the underground disposal storehouses is erosion from underground water," Qu said. "At the same time, faults, earthquakes and other factors are under consideration. This is what computer emulation systems must do. After all the research is completed, it will take another five to 10 years to construct the disposal storehouse itself. Therefore, it will be around 2040 when China can establish the disposal storehouse for highly radioactive nuclear waste."

In the medium- and long-term plan for nuclear waste disposal launched by the Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense in the first half of 2005, there will be only one permanent disposal storehouse for highly radioactive nuclear waste with a designed life of 10,000 years (the decaying period of radioactive substances is 10,000 years), storing all the nuclear waste produced all over China in 100-200 years and being permanently closed when it is full. That is to say, China will need to establish the second permanent disposal storehouse for highly radioactive nuclear waste in at least 100 years.

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