 Taiwan wants to work with China on nuclear safetyTaipei (AFP) March 23, 2011 - Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou on Wednesday urged China to work with the island on nuclear power safety in the wake of the nuclear crisis in neighbouring Japan. Ma, also chairman of the ruling Kuomintang party, said the two sides should discuss cooperation in order to limit the damage in the event of an accident, especially as China has previously announced plans for dozens of new plants. "Ensuring nuclear safety is an issue we must face... this is not only an issue between the two sides but a regional issue," he said at a meeting of top party officials. A nuclear power plant in Japan's Fukushima prefecture was critically damaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Ma's comments came after the foreign ministers of Japan, China and South Korea agreed over the weekend to boost cooperation on nuclear power safety and disaster preparedness. Anti-nuclear sentiments rose in Taiwan after the Japanese disaster, with more than 2,000 people rallying on Sunday to demand the government stop building a new nuclear power plant. Several recent polls also found that a majority of Taiwanese were worried about the safety of the island's three atomic energy facilities, which generate about 20 percent for overall power supply. Taiwan, like Japan, is in an earthquake-prone part of the Pacific basin. |
Washington (AFP) March 23, 2011 The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday it was launching a two-pronged review of US nuclear power plant safety amid the crisis at a Japanese complex hit by an earthquake and tsunami. The US regulator called for an agency task force to be set up to conduct "both short- and long-term analysis of the lessons that can be learned from the situation in Japan," the NRC said in a statement.
"Our focus is always on ensuring the health and safety of the American people through our licensing and oversight of plants and radioactive materials in this country," NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko said.
"Examining all the available information from Japan is essential to understanding the event's implications for the United States."
Tokyo has declared an exclusion zone with a radius of 20 kilometres (12 miles) around the northeastern Fukushima power station and evacuated tens of thousands of people, after it was crippled by the March 11 quake and tsunami.
Engineers hope to restart the cooling systems of all six reactors that were knocked out by the 14-meter (46-foot) tsunami, and they have already reconnected the wider facility to the national power grid.
But the crippled plant northeast of Tokyo has been leaking radiation and has suffered a series of explosions and fires since the country's worst natural disaster in nearly a century.
The NRC said the task force would provide updates on the work in 30, 60 and 90 days, and a full report with its recommendations should be published in six months.
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