Engineer answers nation's call in desert
Why relinquish the prestige of teaching at one of France's top engineering schools to toil in the unforgiving desert mountains of the Beishan region in Gansu province? That was the question Chen Liang grappled with when he chose to embark on one of China's most ambitious projects.
The mission is to build China's first geological repository by 2050 to permanently lock away the "demons of nuclear technology"-the high-level radioactive waste that is the most dangerous byproduct of reactions inside nuclear power plants and the waste materials from recycled nuclear fuel.
The search for a candidate site, which began in 1985, was an undertaking that involved hundreds of Chinese scientists and engineers.