Pakistan Opens Nuclear Power Plant
Pakistan opened a 330-megawatt nuclear power plant built with China on Thursday, saying Beijing had been contracted to construct two more reactors in a bid to ease a crippling energy shortage.
The plant is at Chashma in central Punjab province, where a Chinese-aided power plant of similar capacity is already operational.
"Today is a proud day for Pakistan and for Pakistan’s civil nuclear energy program," said Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani as he commissioned the second unit.
"It is yet another illustrious example of the Pakistan-China cooperation in the field of nuclear science and technology," he said.
The opening of Chashma-2 comes as Gilani is due to make a four-day official visit to China next week, with Pakistan under pressure over the US killing of Osama bin Laden in a covert raid in a garrison city on May 2.
Pakistan regards China as its closest ally and views the deals as extremely important to its moribund economy, which was dealt a huge blow by catastrophic flooding last year and suffers from sluggish Western investment.
"Completion of this project takes to even greater heights the long and time-tested friendship between the two countries and their people," said the Pakistani prime minister.
Pakistani plans to produce 8,000 megawatts of electricity by 2025 to address an energy shortfall which triggers violent protests each summer.
The nuclear-armed Muslim nation, with a population of 167 million, produces only 80 percent of its electricity needs, starving industry that has slumped in the face of recession and three years of Taliban-linked bombings.
Pakistan's atomic activities have sparked concern in the United States and India, which fear that nuclear material could fall into the hands of Taliban extremists operating near the Pakistani border with Afghanistan.
The May 2 raid that killed bin Laden around a mile from Pakistan's top military academy, seemingly without Pakistan's knowledge, has raised fears at home that nuclear installations are not safe from external threat.
The United States has reportedly set up an elite squad that could fly into Pakistan and attempt to secure its weapons if the government disintegrated.
In Chashma, Gilani confirmed that China has also been contracted to build two more reactors at the plant.
Construction was already underway on power plants C-3 and C-4 to help pave the way for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission to meet the government-assigned target of 8,800 megawatts by 2030, he said.
"The government of Pakistan will provide you full support to meet the targets," he told Chinese and Pakistani experts.
Pakistan says its nuclear plants meet U.N. atomic watchdog safeguards.
Western fears about nuclear proliferation from Pakistan spiked when scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan confessed in 2004 to sending nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, although he later retracted his remarks.
Source: Agence France Presse
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