[Pak Daily Times] Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf...
on Tuesday launched the construction of the country's biggest atomic power plant and vowed to pursue further projects to make nuclear the largest energy source.
The 2,200-megawatt plant is to be built with Chinese technical assistance on the Arabian Sea coast at Paradise Beach, 40 kilometres west of Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
. Pakistain already has three operational nuclear plants generating a total of around 740MW of power and has begun work on a fourth, in addition to the one launched Tuesday. The government hopes nuclear energy will ultimately provide a relatively low-cost solution to the power cuts.
"This is one of the first steps of our goal of racing towards a loadshedding-free Pakistain," Nawaz told the audience at the site of the plant. The World Nuclear Association has estimated the cost of the new project at nearly $10 billion. Pakistain Atomic Energy Commission engineers will work on the project with help from the China Atomic Energy Authority. As Pakistain is not party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it is excluded from the international trade in nuclear materials and technology, and can rely only on its neighbour China for help.
Nawaz pledged to increase nuclear power generation capacity to 40,000MW in the long term as part of his energy plan. The setting up of the nuclear power plant is part of a string of projects aimed at overcoming the power shortage, which include wind energy generation of 2500MW, CASA project of 1000MW and Tarbella-V extension project, which is to be completed by 2017. The government has already initiated work on the Pakistain Power Park at Gaddani, which will have 10 coal-based power projects of 660MW each, besides plans to import LNG that will help reduce gas load-shedding from the next year.