Japan leery of China's nuclear energy
plans By Phar Kim Beng
TOKYO
- Japan knows about nuclear power - from Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and from its own nuclear accidents. And it's
worried that China's voracious appetite for energy, its
poor record of industrial safety and its plan to build
more nuclear reactors could mean major accidents
affecting North Asia.
Japan, which stands to
gain financially from China's desperate need for energy
to fuel its high-powered economy, increasingly is
worried that Beijing's pledge to rely on nuclear power
is potentially dangerous, posing serious safety issues
for China and Japan. Japan has had its own safety
problems with nuclear power and doesn't want more
business at the cost of human life.
More than
half of China's economy is driven by manufacturing, 54%
according to a report by the Far Eastern Economic
Review. Economists such as Andy Xie at JPMorganChase
affirmed that more than one-third of Chinese consumption
is already responsible for Japan's pulsating yearly
growth and its economic recovery.
According to
British Petroleum (BP) statistics, in response to the
country's gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 9.1%,
China's total energy demand surged 13.8% in 2003.
Increase in electricity demand in China last year
accounted for 50 gigawatts of total global growth of
70GW (a gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts, a megawatt is a
million watts).
With oil being so expensive and
prices so volatile and the reliance on coal
environmentally hazardous, China plans to follow South
Korea and Japan by developing its own nuclear industry
to generate electricity.
Wealthier nations such
as Japan and South Korea, which lack their own natural
resources, have already developed large nuclear
industries to buttress their economies. Some 39% of
electricity, in both countries, is generated from 52
reactors in Japan and 19 in South Korea.
Both
Japan and South Korea plan to build more nuclear plants,
although the outcome in Japan remains unclear as a
string of accidents and falsification reports have
rattled the confidence of the Japanese public in nuclear
energy.
In contrast, China currently has nine
nuclear reactors, with two more Russian models under
construction, expected to be operational by the end of
next year.
According to the latest US government
report, Beijing plans to buy 20 more reactors from the
United States. Since China is a signatory to the
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), such sales, especially
from Westinghouse Electric Co LLC, are expected to sail
through in the next two months without opposition - on
the condition that China does not sell the technology or
parts to another country.
China's existing nine
reactors have a combined capacity of 6,500 megawatts,
supplying just under 2% of the country's electricity.
There is therefore a great deal of room for the growth
in Chinese nuclear energy. Indeed, before the end of
this year, China has already proposed inviting
international tenders for four more reactors, each
capable of producing about 1,000MW and costing about
US$1.5 billion apiece.
In terms of output, this
would be similar to the two 1,000MW VVER-type Russian
reactors under construction at Tianwan, on China's east
coast. (VVER is a Russian designation for a reactor type
referred to in the West as PWR, for pressurized-water
reactor.)
The power stations form part of a
longer-term plan to raise China's nuclear capacity to
just under 40,000MW by 2020, according to Zhang Huazhu,
vice minister in charge of the Commission of Science,
Technology and Industry for National Defense.
The $30 billion development program earmarked
for 2020 will require the construction of about two
reactors a year, says the World Nuclear Association
(WNA), "similar in scale to the large French nuclear
construction program undertaken in the 1980s".
However, at China's current rate of energy
consumption and economic growth, even if its 2020
nuclear energy plans all come to fruition, they will by
then only account for just over 4% of the country's
total installed power-generating capacity, according to
WNA analysts.
Nor would China's move to nuclear
energy be able to alter its reliance on oil and
hydrocarbon - after all, very little petroleum is used
to generate electricity. In this sense, just as China
builds more nuclear reactors, there is no guarantee that
China would become environmentally cleaner, or energy
self-sufficient.
China's nuclear energy
trajectory does not sit well with the Japanese
government. But this official anxiety has not been
translated yet into any tangible action to persuade
China to seek other sources of energy. This is because
Japanese society is not yet sufficiently aware of the
China nuclear-reactor issue to put pressure on the
Japanese bureaucracy in turn to put pressure on China.
Sachiko Takahashi, a security analyst at Waseda
University, told Asia Times Online that while the
government may be concerned, "the Japanese society
remains oblivious to the risk posed by China's
increasing reliance on nuclear energy".
Yet the
concern over China's nuclear-energy plans is palpable
among Japanese watchers of China. Ryukichi Imai, a
senior security expert at the Institute of International
Policy Studies (IIPS), a think-tank close to former
prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, says that at the
current rate, multiple "China Chernobyls" - a reference
to the world's worst nuclear disaster in Soviet Ukraine
in April 1986 - will significantly undermine Japan's
economic and social welfare. (The radioactivity released
at Chernobyl was 100 times as great as that of the bomb
dropped on Hiroshima, Japan; more than 30 were killed
outright, more died later, 135,000 were evacuated, 10
years later babies were born with birth defects; the
effects still are being felt.)
Japanese attuned
to this line of analysis cannot help but agree,
especially given Japan's poor record of maintaining the
safety of its own nuclear reactors.
Fears about
the safety of the country's 52 nuclear power plants
soared in 1999, when a radiation leak northeast of Tokyo
killed two workers and exposed hundreds to radiation. A
2002 investigation revealed that Tokyo Electric Power,
the world's largest private utility, systematically lied
about the appearance of cracks in its reactors during
the 1980s and 1990s.
The company later
temporarily shut down all 17 of its reactors for
inspections to reassure the public they were safe.
Yet this August, Japan suffered its deadliest
nuclear power plant accident, in Mihama, a small city
320km west of Tokyo in Fukui prefecture, when a bursting
steam pipe killed at least four workers and injured
seven others.
However, while the safety concerns
are only now emerging, Japanese companies have become
starry-eyed about doing business with powerhouse China,
eager to participate in its economic expansion and its
energy industry. The three big players in Japan's
power-system-related businesses are Toshiba Corp,
Hitachi Ltd and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd (MHI).
MHI won a bulk contract last year to supply 10
gas turbines to be installed at four thermal plants in
China. The contract helped MHI become the world's top
supplier of gas turbines last year. According to the
latest figures, MHI's profits in 2003 improved by 42%,
largely due to its trade in China.
MHI is
Japan's only builder of PWRs, the type of nuclear
reactors that the Chinese government is planning to
commission.
"We have learned that China is
considering construction of eight or more nuclear
reactors," an MHI official said, adding that the company
plans to tie up with Westinghouse Electric Co LLC of the
United States in bidding for those projects.
Nevertheless, despite such enthusiastic embrace
of China by the Japanese private sector, there clearly
are some efforts to prevent China from going down the
nuclear path too swiftly or recklessly.
Professor Nobuo Okawara of Kyushu University
told Asia Times Online that being so close to China,
"Japanese pressures to influence China's internal and
international developments can only grow in time, and
issue." As such, Tokyo in particular has tried to
encourage China to meet its energy needs by building
more pipelines and by relying on liquefied natural gas
(LNG).
According to Michael Green, a leading
Japan expert in the Council on Foreign Relations, "From
Japan's perspective, funding for pipelines inside China
or [an] international co-development scheme for the
Spratly or Senkaku islands increase interdependence and
decrease the prospects that China will embark on a
dangerous program of naval modernization to protect sea
lanes of communication that are so vital to Japan."
Still, Japan is clearly caught on the horns of a
dilemma with this proposal. This is because if China
were to take this advice fully to heart, the reach of
Chinese pipelines would also extend all the way into
Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Russia, thus reducing
the strategic influence of Japan. The governing Liberal
Democratic Party is aware of this paradox. Hence it has
encouraged the establishment of an Asian Energy
Community to coordinate this cooperation with China.
Phar Kim Beng is a regular contributor
to Asia Times Online. He is currently on a Sumitomo
Foundation fellowship, where he is studying the state of
Japanese social sciences. He was trained in
international relations and strategic studies, first at
Cambridge University, later Fletcher School of Economics
and Harvard University.
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