Safety and tech have improved, stresses expert

A new nuclear plant will not bring radiation hazards, says Hong Kong Nuclear Society chairman Luk Bing-lam.

Luk said that any potential new nuclear station could be in a Greater Bay Area city farther away than Daya Bay in Shenzhen.

The current technology in the mainland is 10 times safer than the technology at Daya Bay plant, where reinforcement work had taken place after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 in Japan, Luk told The Standard.

He said Daya Bay and other nuclear power plants in the mainland adopted a technology that is different from Fukushima Daiichi.

"For the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and Fukushima Power Station, they used boiling water reactors, and they did not have a containment building to enclose the nuclear reactor," Luk said. "Because of that there is a higher chance of leakage."

Most of the nuclear power plants in China use a pressurized water reactor. Luk said these power plants have a thick protection - in reinforced steel, concrete or lead structures.

He used the example of the nuclear meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania in the United States in 1979.

Since the crippled reactor was a pressurized water one, the thick containment building over the reactor made the incident less severe, Luk said.

When asked about how the Hong Kong government can do more to monitor Daya Bay, he said the Hong Kong Observatory and Electrical and Mechanical Services Department have been responsible for analyzing the plant's data.

"But I would say it will be great to see continuous improvements," he added.

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