Greenpeace Hong Kong slams nuclear 'complacency' on Daya Bay

Greenpeace slams nuclear 'complacency' on Daya Bay
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Kenneth Foo 
The Standard


A green group yesterday slammed the government's nuclear disaster contingency measures as "dangerously outdated" and urged it to abandon plans for future atomic expansion.


Greenpeace said the fallout from any meltdown at the Daya Bay nuclear plant in Guangdong will be many times that of the Fukushima disaster last year in Japan.



http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
http://www.facebook.com/nukefree



The group claimed the 20-kilometer evacuation zone around the Daya Bay plant in current plans is insufficient as winds can carry radiation fallout as far as 80 kilometers (not just 80 km!) . Hong Kong is just 50km away from the plant.


There are also no risk assessments and detailed emergency plans to protect the people of Hong Kong from the health and economic repercussions of a nuclear disaster, it said.


"It is ridiculous that governments can approve nuclear reactors but are not ready to protect people from nuclear risks, hazards and disasters," said senior campaigner Prentice Koo Wai-muk.


"You can finish reading the whole emergency plan in a matter of minutes because there is simply nothing there."


He also urged the government to shelve plans to double the amount of power generated through nuclear means by 2020 (Stop import any Nuclear Power!) .


CLP Holdings has a 25 percent stake in Daya Bay, which supplies about 23 percent of the territory's electricity.


Security Bureau officials have rated the chances of a meltdown on the scale of Fukushima at three in 100 million.


This led Koo to accuse them of complacency as Fukushima officials had estimated the chances of a nuclear disaster to be as low as one in a million, but the disaster still occurred.