China’s Three Gorges Dam has the ability to survive nuclear attack, a hydropower expert has claimed following heated discussions about the safety of the nation’s nuclear projects and their implications on the dam, mainland media reports.
Zhang Boting, deputy secretary general of China Society for Hydropower Engineering, said the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, located on the Yangtze River, had been designed as a concrete gravity dam, so that it was sturdier and would be resistant to nuclear attack, the news website Thepaper.cn in a report on Monday.
The dam would not collapse even after a massive attack, the website quoted Zhang as saying.
Zhang also said in views, which first appeared in a commentary on the society’s website on March 8, that there had been a wrong perception among some nuclear experts, who had argued that national security had not been a concern during the design process of the Three Gorges Dam project.
Thepaper.cn’s report appeared after Xinhua said on Sunday that China had installed a key component of its first fourth-generation nuclear energy system at a power plant in Shandong province.
Most of China’s nuclear power plants are currently located in costal provinces, including Guangdong, Fujian and Shandong.
Beijing suspended its proposals for building nuclear power plants at inland sites, including those along the Yangtze River in Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi, following Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011 and over domestic safety concerns about China’s nuclear facilities.
Academics expressed concerns about the safety of the nation’s inland nuclear projects and their implications on the Three Gorges Dam.
They had claimed that the designs of these projects did not take into consideration the possibility of them being attacked by nuclear weapons, and that it was unsafe to build nuclear plants along the Yangtze River.
On Sunday a 25 metre-high, 610-tonne pressure vessel was lifted in placed by a crane at the Huaneng Shidao Bay nuclear power plant, Xinhua reported.
As part of the fourth-generation concept, the reactor will be able to shut down safely in the event of an emergency without causing a reactor core meltdown or large leak of radioactive material.
Sunday’s successful installation marked a major step towards fulfilling Beijing’s goal in the new 13th five-year plan, which involves building six to eight nuclear reactors each year.
Construction of the controversial Three Gorges Dam, in Yichang, Hubei province, began in 1994. Its first turbine was connected to the grid in 2003, with the final one was connected up in 2012.
More than 1.2 million people were displaced as the water in the dam started accumulating in 2003 and submerged scores of towns and communities.
In the past China’s state-run media praised the Three Gorges Dam for generating more than 88.2 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity in 2012 – more than France’s entire yearly output of renewable energy, and exceeding the project’s original goal.
The huge reservoir was also hailed for lessening the floods that had plagued the Yangtze River, claiming thousands of lives as recently as 1998.
However, the dam was blamed for amplifying changes in weather patterns that in 2011 produced the Yangtze’s largest drought in half a century, while heavy rainfall has continued to flood cities downstream, killing hundreds of people.
