KARACHI, 25 October 2003 — Pakistan must build new dams to meet its needs as global warming and environmental changes are causing the depletion of water resources, the country’s top nuclear scientist warned yesterday.
The special adviser to the prime minister on strategic program, Dr. Ishfaq Ahmad Khan, said: “We must make more dams to store water resources as we do not know how much water our rivers would have in future.” Khan was speaking at the second national conference on “Non-Destructive Testing.”
He said that aside from causing floods and cyclones, global warming would reduce snow in the mountains and lead to scarcity of water.
He said ultimately the country would have to use nuclear technology to meet its energy needs. “In order to achieve a higher level of GDP, approximately 30,000 MW of electricity would be needed in the coming decades, and to meet this we would have to exploit our available energy resources like coal and hydrothermal power.”
But despite fully exploiting these and renewable energy resources, a big gap will be left. That can be bridged only through nuclear power, Khan said.
He said Pakistan was ideally suited to go in for the production of nuclear power as it had developed over the years the extensive infrastructure needed for this.
