Dr FH Panton CABINET OFFICE
4021
.ALL 1661 | Foreign, and Commonwealth Office 11 AUS 1786 London SW1A 2AH
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6 August 1986
PROPOSED STUDY OF CHINESE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY
1. We spoke yesterday about the idea of a study on the Chinese nuclear industry. The background and proposal are as follows.
2. As you will probably be aware, the issue of Hong Kong and Daya Bay has focussed attention in Whitehall on the safety record and prospects of the Chinese nuclear industry. While we are not in a position to give the people of Hong Kong assurances on the inherent safety of PWR designs, we should be able to do rather more in terms of ensuring that the Chinese nuclear safety system reaches high standards by the time Daya Bay comes on stream in the mid-1990s.
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3.
So far as I can establish we know relatively little about the Chinese nuclear programme and about its safety record. It would be helpful to put together a study on these, drawing on all available sources, and divided into two parts The first would be basically historical, Looking at the existing Chinese nuclear industry and what we know of its safety record. The second part would look at plans for nuclear development until the Late 1990s with special emphasis on the nuclear safety side and on identifying constraints in this area. If possible it would be useful to speak at an early stage to the Americans and perhaps also the French, since they may well be better informed in this area than we are ourselves. On the UK side, the UKAEA, and possibly also the CEGB, should be able to help. And I would certainly expect additional information for the second part of the paper to be forthcoming as a result of the technical discussions we are planning to have with the Chinese themselves (for background details see FCO telno 1670 to /Hong Kong, attached). We in the FCO might be able to add
information and comment to a first draft, but I regret
/ that
CONFIDENTIAL
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