Viet Nam's Nuclear Dreams

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times

Friday, March 02, 2012

Vietnam’s Nuclear Dreams Blossom Despite Doubts

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

HANOI, Vietnam — Inside an unheated classroom at the Institute for Nuclear Science and Technology here about 20 young government technicians from Vietnam’s incipient nuclear power industry kept on their winter jackets on the first morning of a 10-day workshop on radiation.

The workshop, sponsored by the semigovernmental Japan Atomic Energy Agency, started with Radiation Physics 101. The students then collected radiation samples with the help of Japanese specialists and analyzed them in a lab built by Japan.

“Nuclear power is important for Vietnam’s energy security, but, like fire, it has two sides,” said one of the students, Nguyen Xuan Thuy, 27. “We have to learn how to take advantage of its good side.”

As Vietnam prepares to begin one of the world’s most ambitious nuclear power programs, it is scrambling to raise from scratch a field of experts needed to operate and regulate nuclear power plants. The government, which is beefing up nuclear engineering programs at its universities and sending increasing numbers of young technicians abroad, says Vietnam will have enough qualified experts to safely manage an industry that is scheduled to grow from one nuclear reactor in 2020 to 10 reactors by 2030.

But some Vietnamese and foreign experts said that was too little time to establish a credible regulatory body, especially in a country with widespread corruption, poor safety standards and a lack of transparency. They said the overly ambitious timetable could lead to the kind of weak regulation, as well as collusive ties between regulators and operators, that contributed to the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan last year.