Power Play

Late Monday night, a major nuclear investment company announced that workers at the Daya Bay nuclear plant in Guangdong had been exposed to radition equivalent to two chest X-rays. The incident, which occured on October 23, stemmed from a leak in a pipe that carries hot water from the plant’s two reactors. The leak was so small that international regulations don’t even require it be reported to the public—but there have been 15 so-called “level one” incidents since 2000 at Daya Bay, according to the South China Morning Post.

Daya Bay is the source of all the nuclear energy Hong Kong consumes. And as green fever continues to spread, our reliance on the Daya Bay plant will only grow. To reduce the SAR’s reliance on coal and other carbon-emitting energy sources, the Hong Kong government vows that by 2020 the amount of nuclear energy Hong Kong uses will double—making it the single biggest nuclear power-consuming city in Asia. But is that the kind of list we want to top?

In September, the Environmental Protection Department released a consultation document that set out measures to curb the territory’s greenhouse-gas emissions. It describes various proposals toward that end, but the main strategy the government proposes is to adjust the composition of the kinds of energy we bring in for everyday use.

Currently, Hong Kong relies overwhelmingly on coal as fuel for electricity generation. In 2009, coal made up about 54 percent of Hong Kong’s energy mix. Natural gas and nuclear energy both account for about 23 percent of the energy mix, respectively. Under the government’s plan, nuclear energy would replace coal as the main supplier of Hong Kong’s energy—meaning, in the future, about 50 percent of electricity will be generated by nuclear energy. The next-biggest contributor to Hong Kong’s energy mix will be natural gas, constituting 40 percent, while coal will make up less than 10 percent.

The government cites a lot of reasons to back up its proposal. In the September document, the government describes nuclear energy as cheap and reliable, adding that its effect on the environment is negligible because it doesn’t emit greenhouse gases as part of the electricity generation process. The government holds that increasing nuclear energy imports would help avoid an over-reliance on natural gas, which is preferable to coal but still contributes significantly to global carbon emissions. And since Hong Kong doesn’t have its own nuclear plant and there are no plans to build one in the territory, all of this necessitates tapping into the increasing number of nuclear power generation projects on the mainland. In the report, the government states that Hong Kong should “take advantage” of such developments.

While the government portrays nuclear energy as a close-to-perfect solution, experts and environmentalists do not think that the consultation document has fully outlined the potential consequences of such a decision.

“I don’t think that the government has provided sufficient information for the public and other stakeholders to understand the decision,” says Dr. Daphne Mah, Senior Research Associate of the Kadoorie Institute of the University of Hong Kong. “The government views the import of more nuclear energy from the point of carbon emission and technological possibilities. Of course, these are core dimensions to consider. But for nuclear energy, there are a lot of controversial aspects that should be discussed. For example, the location of the new nuclear plant, the risk of nuclear explosion and the storage of nuclear waste.”