Xu Pei hat uns einen weiteren Text von Ciping Huang über die alarmierende Situation der Atom-Fabriken in der chinesischen Erdbebenregion geschickt. Inzwischen wird immer bedrückender, dass die Informationen westlichen Medien keine Nachfrage wert sind.

Readers’ Responses and Military Industrial Sites around the Sichuan Earthquake Area that People Should Take Precaution of– Ciping Huang 

Since the publication of my article “The International News Media Shouldnot Let Itself to be Misled by the Chinese Government” (newsletterA364-O105), I have received quite a few comments and questions, as well as information. Despite my questions of how well the Chinese government are handling the nuclear weaponry and radiation sources in the earthquake area, and reports of the heavy military involvement in this area, I was surprised to read earlier this week that the Chinese government announced that they had retrieved 30 of 32 nuclear sources and 2 others were located as well, a successful mission too good to be true.

From my own experiences working in the Chinese nuclear industry, I know  it could not be the case. There were many contaminations and nuclear accidents and mishandling that were not reported. So it is not a surprise that today the Chinese government has changed its story:besides 4 chemical leaks, they only retrieved 35 out of 50 nuclear units. I hope this is not the kind of honesty forced by an already exposed reality. Although not surprised, I am still outraged at a government which puts its own power and interests above the lives of tens of millions of people, regardless what they are doing could be disastrous to its people.

Almost one week after the earthquake, people were not allowed to enter most of An County, an area with many of Chinese missile and aerospace facilities and sites. Special troops sealed off the roads to the west and south direction from the epicenter.  So what really happened in these areas and the nuclear facilities in that region? The Nuclear Industrial Department announced that “6 people died, while the facility was not damaged” without further details as how 6 peopledied and 11 people injured from not being crushed by a falling building. The real details though was that in Factory 821 (i.e. BeiLongJiangNuclear Base) where the Plutonium is produced and nuclear heads are assembled, obviously there was at least one nuclear related incident due to the earthquake according to their own report: “While it was relatively difficult to self rescue, people were not afraid of radiation, nor contamination, and organized personnel to help Factory 821 repair nuclear storage and manufacturing buildings and enhance the nuclear facility. They made important contributions for more people’s lives and safety and avoided environment contamination.” (Try to read in between lines in the way a Chinese would do, you will find something in it.)

I do not know who these people are, but I do hope that they are not like the soldiers from the countryside who never knew what “nuclear radiation” means, yet stood guard in front of a contaminated building in the Institute I once worked, as well as the soldiers who received radiation doses from not knowing what the piles were that they slept next to when they were escorting nuclear materials from one place to another. In this issue, I include an incomplete, possibly not most updated information as a reference to the part of China’s nuclear program in the earthquake region, including a response to my previous article on May 16, 2008. One of the readers reminded that I should mention in my article the existence of the Weaponry Department (coded as Industrial Department 5) in MianYang, which co-existed with both Dept. 2 (nuclear)and Dept. 7 (aerospace) for the same purpose.

Well known Brand names from Industrial Department 5 includes a Brand name to outsiders known as: “Chang Hong”, which has been producing electronics including home appliances since 1980’s. MianYang, a city of 600,000 including my 6 college classmates of nuclear physics, is a typical product of the Chinese government’s “Third Frontier”. Since 1964, learning from the lesson of breaking up within the former USSR, the Chinese government decided to relocate and mobilize a large portion of its attention to the inner land. Among this relocation was the military industry for strategically planning because it is easy to hide in the mountains, although it always seems silly to me that they put the most important war related toys right on the earthquake fault lines, including stockpiles of nuclear warheads in the mountains west to MianYang, an area beautiful but dangerous. Many People’s army soldiers died in the construction of this “frontier”, including dying of misery from nuclear radiations that they never knew and understood even up till their death. Even after Mao’s death, they were still building nuclear missile launching pads, some were well captured by high-resolution spy satellites of the others.

Apparently, even the Chinese official news agency CCTV has implicated that the government had sent the nuclear and chemical protection troops into the area immediately after the earthquake. As a matter of fact, many people noticed the 21 people team that went to Sichuan right on May13 was lead by Vice Minister of Environment Protection Department, Li Gan Jie. But there was no mention the fact that he was really the head in charge of the “Nuclear Safety Bureau”. Here are some of more than a dozen facilities related to Sichuan, an important research and production military base for China, especially related to nuclear weapons, which Mr. Li Gan Jie must be paying attention of. Some facilities are overlapping with each other, or even under “dual leaderships”. Some of these facilities were difficult to reach and lost both communication and transportation for days due to the earthquake.

For the last 12 days, I have noticed that, unlike the other more civilian-oriented areas where the news media could enter, military areas such as An County had little news media coverage relatively.

1. SCAID (Sichuan Aerospace Industry Corporation) is an exclusiveregional company affiliated with China Science & Technology GroupCorporation. It is not only a key base for China’s launching rockets andmissiles but also one of the most important designers and manufacturersfor the Multiple Launch Rocket Weapon System. 
2. CARDC (China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center; code name: Base 29) headquartered in MianYang, but having varied institutes in An County. On the surface, it belongs to Industrial Department 7(Aerospace), but in reality it belongs to the Chinese Army. It is the largest of its kind in China, but not comparable to USA’s NASA and Russian equivalents.  
3. NPIC (Nuclear Power Institute of China, code name: Institute 909), in Jia Jiang; conducts nuclear reactor engineering and experiments related to Nuclear power.
4. CAEP (official name: Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics; some call as: China Engineering Physics Research Institute; code name:Institute 902 or Base 839 although some called it the 839 Project), in MianYang. Main purpose: nuclear weaponry.
5. Nuclear Fusion Research Institute (from Institute 503 of Chang Chun; code name: Institute 585) in Le Shan. Nuclear Fusion is the major direction there, which has received a lot of prizes and praise for the effort to make a “man-made sun”. Two years ago it made the claim of placing the “man-made sun” in “normal operation”, a result that was controversial even within my own classmates majoring in that field. The institute has China’s largest Tokamak-type reactor (the 2nd largest one is in Hefei, Anhui). It is interesting to note that this institute claims a cozy cooperation with the Department of Energy of the USA. 
6. Bei Long Jiang Nuclear Base (also code named Factory 821, was codenamed Factory 404), in Guang Yuan. Producing nuclear warheads and is China’s largest manufacturer of nuclear reactors, also has a factory producing Plutonium which is needed for modern nuclear weapons. 30,000 people. A likely nuclear accident site during the earthquake.
7. SWIP (Southwest Institute of Physics, initially code named Factory221), in Mian Yang. Was called as Northwest Nuclear Weapon Research Institute (code name: Institute 9 of National Defense) when is was basedin Qing Hai Province as China’s first nuclear weapon research base and responsible for China’s first atomic bomb. 
8. E Mei Machinery Manufacturer (code name: Factory 525, belong to the Nuclear Industrial Department)
9. Factory 814, in Le Shan. Producing heavy water, with 40,000 people.
10. Factory 816, in Fu Ling. It was for nuclear fuel, but now a fertilizer factory. It had a top secret project with a huge cave-in the1,100 meter mountain. But about 2 years ago they took out most of the computers (Sichuan had the country’s fastest computer Milky Way 1).
11. Factory 857, in Jiang You. Produced the hydrogen Bomb, and worked on the neutron bomb. This is where May 18, 2008’s 6.0 scale earthquake (largest aftershock after May 12’s) hit. It suffered a lot during the earthquake with many casualties and injured people.

I have no doubt that intelligent agencies like CIA (and DIA) know these information. However, I am disappointed that this kind of information has not received much media coverage and public awareness. Think what had happened in Chernobyl. Do we want to see it again? How could we prevent that? How can a government be responsible and transparent to their own people, and to the least put people’s lives and well-being as high as their own. I feel sorrow for those people who died and suffered due to the government’s arrogance, corruption, as well as people’s suffering from no freedom of press and no freedom of information, that even at the most dangerous time, they are not informed and knowledgeable of what is surrounding them and what might happen to them; and in the case of disaster, how to act to best protect themselves. At least, a democratic government must be more responsive to its people, and hopefully, more responsible.

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