China's energy worries
- By Geoffrey Murray
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China.org.cn, August 24, 2011
Following meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan earlier this year, many nuclear nations began reexamining their fission future. Germany plans to abandon nuclear power by 2022, and Italy will no longer restart a stagnating nuclear industry. Even France, which gets most of its electricity from this source, is considering a retreat.
After the Fukushima disaster, Japan took as many as 39 of the nation's 54 reactors offline. Before the accident, nuclear supplied 30 percent of national power and had been expected to grow to 50 percent by 2030.
Abandoning this policy will come with a high economic price. The Institute of Energy Economics in Tokyo claims that, if idled reactors do not begin producing electricity again within the next couple of months, energy shortages in summer 2012 could possibly reduce Japan's gross domestic product by US$98bn, or 5.6 percent.
China, meanwhile, is moving ahead with construction of new reactors around the country confident that their safety can be guaranteed.
That's the critical point. Japan thought the same until the earthquake and tsunami cruelly exposed the false optimism of the power industry and government.
I am haunted by words of an e-mail received the other day from an old friend in Tokyo. 'The Fukushima crisis rumbles on, even if no longer making big headlines overseas,' he wrote. 'It's slowly coming out how much the food has been poisoned - cesium well over the safe limit in all kinds of food and even beef (after cattle ate contaminated straw). Huge amounts of irradiated water were also released into the sea, which means even seafood is suspect - an invisible and long-term menace of great concern to families with young children.'
As a great lover of Japanese raw fish, I don't like the sound of that last part.
What are China's options? Hydropower is a growth sector but is vulnerable to drought and there are also concerns of rivers drying up, damaging agriculture and creating ecological problems in some regions as water is diverted from the main streams.
Wind power seemed to promise much; yet, a series of glitches in the operation of wind farms in Gansu Province and cuts in government funding as part of fiscal tightening has cut heavily into the industry's profit expectations and dampened enthusiasm.
While prices of solar power panel prices have been falling in recent years they are still too high to offer a large-scale alternative, and a long-debated idea for a national program of subsidies has yet to get off the ground.
Looks like we'll have to turn down the air conditioning and sweat sometimes at the very least.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/geoffreymurray.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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