nuclear-news

Beijing may have come up with a solution: floating nuclear power plants.

A state-owned company, China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, is planning to build a fleet of the vessels to provide electricity to remote locations including offshore oil platforms and the contentious man-made islands, the state-run newspaper Global Times reported on Friday.

The paper quoted an executive at the company, Liu Zhengguo, as saying that “demand is pretty strong” for the floating power stations, which would be built by one of its subsidiaries.

In January, Xu Dazhe, the director of the China Atomic Energy Authority,told reporters in Beijing that China was planning to develop offshore floating nuclear energy plants, saying they “must undergo a rigorous, scientific evaluation,” but also linking these to China’s desire to become a “maritime power.”……

Typhoons regularly cross the South China Sea, and ships and submarines that run on nuclear power generally have the means to quickly sail away from a storm. It is unclear how mobile or seaworthy these reactor ships will be. Safety regulations for the seaborne reactors are being drawn up and reviewed, Global Times said, quoting Tang Bo, an official at China’s National Nuclear Safety Administration.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and the director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that in the event of a major nuclear accident at a floating barge, like a meltdown of the reactor core, winds could carry radioactivity to large population centers.

“The floating nuke accident scenario also carries with it the potential for molten parts of the reactor core burning through the bottom of the barge to reach the water below,” Mr. Lochbaum wrote in an email. “The water is good for cooling, but not good for containment.”……..

Gregory B. Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at C.S.I.S. said it was too soon to tell how a possible deployment of the floating nuclear power stations would play out in the complicated politics of the South China Sea, though he said it was “potentially worrisome.”

“But it appears that the idea hasn’t gotten any farther than conceptualization yet, so we seem to have years to wait before we find out,” Mr. Poling wrote in an email.

A rendering of a possible Chinese floating nuclear power station was published on the English-language website of Global Times’s parent company, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily. The image showed the small ship or barge next to a pier, surrounded by what looked like floating ice. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/world/asia/china-nuclear-power-south-china-sea.html?_r=0