Antinuclear

The $6 billion plant would have supplied fuel for the country’s rapidly expanding nuclear power industry. But the plan was dropped in the face of public opposition, the first case of its kind in China, said Keith Florig, a risk-management researcher at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.

The protest, and its fallout, are important events in a country that has 22 nuclear power reactors under construction and more planned, as well as a growing international business selling nuclear energy technology to countries including Argentina, Britain and Pakistan. Mr. Florig said that this “rate of development hasn’t happened since the late 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S. and Soviet Union.”

At the same time, Mr. Florig characterized China as being underprepared for dealing with the public opinion issues that have plagued nuclear energy in developed countries.

He said that about 15 years ago he had interviewed Chinese energy officials to find out what they knew about nuclear energy development in the West. He found that they were uniformly focused on the technical challenges of controlling nuclear fission and using the heat it produced to boil water, create steam and power electric turbines. No one seemed to be aware of the social, political and economic challenges….