BEIJING — China suspended approval on Wednesday of 28 planned nuclear power plants while it revised safety standards, making the surprise announcement after Premier Wen Jiabao met with top advisers to discuss Japan’s nuclear crisis.
The government said it was also requiring safety checks at all existing plants.
“We must fully grasp the importance and urgency of nuclear safety, and development of nuclear power must make safety the top priority,” the government said on its Web site.
The government also said that levels of radiation remained normal in China and that experts had concluded that the wind would scatter the radiation from Japan’s stricken Daiichi nuclear complex to the east over the Pacific Ocean, away from China. “This will not affect the health of our public,” the statement aid.
Three days ago, before the gravity of the nuclear disaster in Japan was clear, a top Chinese official restated China’s commitment to nuclear power.
“Some lessons we learn from Japan will be considered in the making of China’s nuclear power plans,” Liu Tienan, chief of China’s National Energy Bureau, said over the weekend. “But China will not change its determination and plan for developing nuclear power.”
China has been aggressively pursuing nuclear power as an alternative to oil and its main energy source, coal. Officials have said that 28 new nuclear plants had been approved, which would amount to roughly 40 percent of the plants now planned worldwide.
Construction has begun on 20 to 25 of the Chinese plants, according to industry experts and the World Nuclear Association, an international group that promotes nuclear energy. Thirteen plants are already in operation, according to the association’s Web site.
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