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Beijing suspends nuclear plant approvals

China suspended approvals for new nuclear power plants yesterday and ordered comprehensive checks of existing facilities to close safety loopholes amid growing concern stoked by Japan's unfolding crisis.

In a surprise move, the State Council also announced that it would review and adjust its ambitious plan to expand the nuclear power sector by 2020, which Beijing hopes will help reduce the country's reliance on coal and cut emissions of greenhouse gases.

For the past few days, as Japan's nuclear crisis worsened in the wake of Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami, senior mainland energy officials had insisted that Beijing would stick to its nuclear expansion plan.

Interestingly, yesterday's State Council statement did not mention Beijing's ambition to boost its nuclear power sector in the next five years, with at least 34 new plants planned and approved by the central government and 25 being built.

Beijing plans to build nuclear plants with a total installed capacity of 40,000 megawatts by 2015 as part of its plan to significantly increase the share of non-fossil fuels in its energy mix.

Any slowdown in China's rapid nuclear expansion would be a radical departure from longstanding policy, but even a temporary suspension shows the authorities are sensitive to public fears about the threat of nuclear accidents.

Analysts hailed the decisions made at a meeting chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao yesterday as 'timely' and 'necessary' after a string of Western countries also announced plans to review or even freeze their nuclear development due to growing public fears over nuclear safety.

Lin Boqiang , director of Xiamen University's Centre for China Energy Economics Research, said Beijing had gone a step further than many other countries in suspending the approval of new projects pending a safety review.

'This is important given China's nuclear power capacity expansion is the world's largest. While it is too early to tell if China's long-term nuclear power strategy will change, the review will likely see some delays in new project approvals,' he said.

Professor Woo Chung-hoo, a nuclear specialist at Polytechnic University, said: 'China still has a long way to go in catching up to European standards of nuclear safety and management and in building up a larger expert team.'

According to the statement, the country 'will tighten approval for new nuclear power plants, accelerate the compilation of a nuclear safety plan and revise and perfect the medium- and long-term nuclear development plan'.

The approval of nuclear projects, including those in the preliminary stages of development, will be temporarily suspended pending the completion of the nuclear safety plan. '[We] will carry out a comprehensive check of all the nuclear plants that are under construction,' the statement said.

It also promised to 'thoroughly tackle any hazards' and said construction that failed 'the most advanced nuclear safety standards' would be immediately halted.

The government also announced that it would conduct safety assessments of the mainland's 13 operating nuclear reactors to ensure their 'absolute safety'.

The statement said the government had detected no abnormal levels of radiation in China from Japan, amid widespread rumours that coastal cities may have been affected by radiation unleashed from Japan's quake-hit Fukushima nuclear plant.

The environment ministry released a regulation on the building of nuclear power plants recently, saying all of them must be located far away from cities and populated areas.

According to the new rule, nuclear power facilities would not be allowed within five kilometres of any township of 10,000 people or within 10 kilometres of towns of 100,000 people, nor would they be allowed to be built in quake-prone areas, the Legal Daily reported yesterday.

Despite growing public concerns over the safety of nuclear development, senior environment and energy officials - including National Development and Reform Commission vice-chairman Xie Zhenhua and deputy environment minister Zhang Lijun - have sought to play down the impact of Japan's nuclear crisis, saying there was no need to review the nuclear policy.

Zhang said at the weekend that China's 12th five-year plan and its 'determination for developing nuclear power will not change'.

Additional reporting by Eric Ng and Joyce Ng

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