Wenzhou Train Crash Highlights Risks of China’s Nuclear Program

COULD A TECHNOLOGY mishap akin to Saturday's deadly train crash near Wenzhou, China happen at one of China's 40 operating or planned nuclear power reactors?

This past weekend's high-speed train collision resulted in (at least) 39 dead and about 200 more injured. Authorities are blaming inexperienced rail employees as well as a signal light design flaw that they say allowed the second train to plow into the one in front.

Before this deadly incident, China's high-speed rail program had already been plagued by power outages and safety concerns. Experts are attributing China's high-speed rail woes to its policies of adapting foreign technologies without the means to adequately operate and maintain them.

The risky strategy isn't just being used by China's Ministry of Railways, it's also the foundation of the country's nuclear power program.

Kevin Jianjun Tu and David Livingston warn in a Jamestown Foundation report:

The accident is a “canary in the coal mine”, as it were, for a much larger structural challenge facing China. The breadth of Chinese ambitions to indigenize foreign technologies and scale them for mass deployment has simply outpaced its ability to plan, operate and staff these complex undertakings in a safe and sustainable manner. This is true in the case of high-speed rail, and it threatens to become the overarching storyline for the country’s nuclear energy program.

The Wenzhou train accident wasn't a result of a "physical deficiency," but was due to gaps in China's realm of understanding when it absorbed a smorgasbord of foreign technologies and adapted them quickly for its own high-speed rail program. Managers have skimped on training their workers. From the Jamestown Foundation piece:

Four foreign companies—Siemens of Germany, Alstom of France, Bombardier of Canada and Kawasaki of Japan—have been involved heavily in the development of the Chinese high-speed system since 2004. In its haste to build a stronger domestic industry and ensure that rail development would not benefit only foreign companies, the country has undertaken a concerted effort to indigenize these technologies at a breakneck pace, adding marginal improvements and enhancements along the way

[...]

Before the commissioning of the Beijing-Tianjin Intercity Railway in August 2008, a German expert required drivers of China’s first 350 km/h bullet train receive two to three months’ intensive training. Nevertheless, to save time ahead of the field test, these drivers were ordered to shorten the duration of their training to only 10 days.

In order to meet its 2020 targets, Beijing has pushed forward with ambitious nuclear plans, aiming to quadruple (or more) its current operational capacity of 10.8 GW (gigawatts). China adapts nuclear technologies from France, Canada, Russia, and the United States, but, the report says:

From the perspectives of design standardization, operation safety and ease of maintenance, the existence of too many types of nuclear reactors is considered a very risky approach to deploying nuclear power generation technology in any given country.

In response to Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster, China's nuclear program is putting more of its money into newer, untested technologies that are intended to be electronically failsafe. However, the Jamestown Foundation notes:

No amount of technical innovation can eliminate the risk of human-induced errors associated with the design, construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning and disaster response of nuclear power plants. … No matter how theoretically sound newer-generation nuclear technologies appear, such technologies may never have been sufficiently tested in any part of the world. All newer-generation nuclear technologies still impose significant risks in terms of design experience, construction safety, and operational reliability.

Doesn't matter how great the technology is, human-induced errors are always a possibility, and the lack of training exacerabates the potential for those hazards.

The Washington-based think-tank's dire warning:

If Beijing resumes its massive nuclear expansion plan without paying adequate attention to lessons drawn from the failures of its railway safety, any major nuclear accident in one of China’s increasingly numerous reactors could create shockwaves that are difficult for China’s vulnerable political system to tackle.

(Photo: The Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. Wikimedia Commons.)