A group of Hong Kong lawmakers, academics and environmentalists said Wednesday they will monitor an atomic plant in mainland China following the ongoing nuclear crisis in a quake-hit Japan.
The activists have criticised the government for failing to ensure proper oversight of the Daya Baya power plant, a nuclear facility that became operational in 1994 in China's Guangdong province.
The province is about 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Hong Kong's border and 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the centre of the teeming financial hub.
Activists decided to form the pressure group as Hong Kong's government has been "half-hearted" in keeping tabs on the plant, despite it being part-owned and managed by the city's largest electricity supplier, CLP Power.
"The city should be proactive in this — that's why we need to put pressure on them," Greenpeace campaigner Prentice Koo, who will sit on a 13-member monitoring committee, told AFP.
The committee have not called for the plant's closure, but said they will first gather information on Daya Baya's safety.
"The city has little say in something that has enormous potential impact on us," according to Chan King-ming, committee member and an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
"The nuclear plant is not in Hong Kong so its operator feels no obligation to report any leaks to us," he said, urging the plant's operators to be more transparent about its activities and any safety incidents.
The nuclear crisis in Japan has sparked concerns over the safety of nuclear power stations across the world.
Japan has imposed a 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the crisis-hit Fukushima No. 1 plant, saying radiation levels within that area could endanger human health.
The Daya Bay operator last year acknowledged possible cracks in fuel tubes, leading to abnormally high radioactivity.
A spokeswoman for Hong Kong's Security Bureau told AFP Wednesday that should an emergency occur, only the sparsely populated outlying island of Ping Chau, some 12 kilometres west of Daya Bay, and Mirs Bay will be evacuated.
It is unclear how many people will be affected on mainland China in the event of a radioactive leak, but CLP has said on its website that Daya Bay intends to evacuate only those within a five kilometre radius of the plant.
Hong Kong has said it plans to hold a nuclear emergency drill in 2012, which will test contingency plans for a nuclear accident at Daya Bay.
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