nuclear-news

Nuclear power nightmare unfolding in Karachi?

Outcry and fear as Pakistan builds new nuclear reactors in dangerous Karachi WP, By Tim Craig March 5 KARACHI, Pakistan — World leaders have fretted for years that terrorists may try to steal one of Pakistan’s nuclear bombs and detonate it in a foreign country. But some Karachi residents say the real nuclear nightmare is unfolding here in Pakistan’s largest and most volatile city.

On the edge of Karachi, on an earthquake-prone seafront vulnerable to tsunamis and not far from where al-Qaeda militants nearly hijacked a Pakistan navy vessel last fall, China is supplying two large nuclear reactors for energy-starved Pakistan.

The new plants, utilizing a cutting-edge design not yet in use anywhere in the world, will each supply 1,100 megawatts to Pakistan’s national energy grid. The reactors are being built next to a much smaller 1970s-era reactor located on a popular beach where fishermen still make wooden boats by hand.

But the new ACP-1000 reactors will also stand less than 20 miles from downtown Karachi, a dense and rapidly growing metropolis of about 20 million residents.

Now, in a rare public challenge to the Islamabad government’s nuclear ambitions, some Pakistanis are pushing back. Of all places to locate a reactor, they argue, who could possibly make a case for this one?

“You are talking about a city one-third the population of the United Kingdom,” said Abdul Sattar Pirzada, a Karachi lawyer who is seeking to get the project halted. “If there would be an accident, this would cripple Karachi, and if you cripple Karachi, you cripple Pakistan.”

In recommendations pertaining to nuclear plant construction in the United States, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says a new reactor should be sited away from very densely populated areas, preferably with fewer than 500 people per square mile within a 20-mile radius. That zone around Karachi’s power plant holds about 6,450 people per square mile, Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani nuclear physicist, wrote in Newsweek Pakistan last year……..

the country’s progressive movement is evolving, sparking novelconfrontations between activists and government over environmental and public safety issues. And the prospect of 20-story reactors rising next to a public beach used for swimming, camel rides and picnics is a vivid illustration of what’s at stake………

Zia Mian, a Pakistani physicist at the Program of Science and Global Security at Princeton University who is also fighting the project, notes that the existing Canadian reactor was designed in the 1960s to generate just 100 megawatts of electricity. The new reactors will produce 22 times that amount and use a combined 40 to 60 tons of enriched-uranium fuel each, he said. And each year, one-third of that spent fuel will also be removed from the core and stored in large containment pools at the plant, Mian said. “You put all of that together, and the hazards are unimaginably larger,” he said…….http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/outcry-and-fear-as-pakistan-builds-new-nuclear-reactors-in-dangerous-karachi/2015/03/05/425e8e70-bc59-11e4-9dfb-03366e719af8_story.html

March 6, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Pakistan, safety