China’s Three Gorges Dam ‘can survive nuclear attack’ says nation’s hydropower expert after academics raise safety concerns

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.