Preparing for the next meltdown
AS MORE COUNTRIES EMBRACE nuclear power, the challenge becomes how to contain contamination if disaster strikes
TOKYO
hree major atomic accidents in 35 years are forcing the world’s nuclear industry to stop imagining it can prevent more catastrophes and to focus instead on how to contain them.
Of the 176 new reactors planned across the globe, half will be in nations that had no nuclear plants when disaster crippled the Three Mile Island reactor in the U.S. in 1979 and the Chornobyl reactor blew up in present-day Ukraine in 1986.
As countries such as China and India embrace atomic power even after the Fukushima reactor meltdowns in 2011 caused mass evacuations because of radiation fallout, scientists warn the next nuclear accident is waiting to happen and could be in a country with little experience to deal with it.
“The cold truth is that no matter what you do on the technological improvements side, accidents will occur — somewhere, someplace,” said Joonhong Ahn, a professor at the Department of Nuclear Engineering of University of California, Berkeley. The consequences of radiation release, contamination and evacuation of people is “clear and obvious,” Ahn said.
That means governments and citizens, not just nuclear utilities, should be prepared, he said.
While atomic power has fallen from favour in some western European countries since the Fukushima accident — Germany, for example, is shutting all of its nuclear plants — it’s gaining more traction in Asia as an alternative to coal.
China has 28 reactors under construction, while Russia, India and South Korea are building 21 more, according to the World Nuclear Association. Of the 176 reactors planned, 86 are in nations that had no nuclear plants 20 years ago, WNA data show.
Still, the association defends the global safety record of nuclear power, noting that the three high-profile disasters “are the only major accidents to have occurred in over 14,500 cumulative reactor-years of commercial nuclear power operation in 33 countries.”
The problem is that the causes of the three events followed no pattern, and the inability to immediately contain them escalated the episodes into global disasters with huge economic, environmental and political consequences. Even if no deaths have yet been officially linked to Fukushima radiation, for example, cleanup costs have soared to an estimated $196 billion U.S. and could take more than four decades to complete.
If nuclear is to remain a part of the world’s energy supply, the industry must come up with solutions to make sure contamination — and all other consequences — do not spread beyond station grounds, Gregory Jaczko, exchairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in an interview in Tokyo.
“We have this accident and people will say, you know, it was caused by this and that,” Jaczko said. “But the next accident is going to be some- thing different. Nobody can tell you where or when or what exactly it is going to be. You really need to do more on the consequence side.”
The official toll from the reactor explosion at Chornobyl was put at 31 deaths. Radiation cleanup work, however, involved about 600,000 people, while 200,000 locals had to be relocated.
The accident contaminated 150,000 kilometres of land and, according to the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, it was a factor in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In Japan, the meltdown of three Fukushima reactors helped unseat premier Naoto Kan and forced a mass evacuation affecting about 160,000 people, destroying local fishing, farming and tourism industries along the way.
It also brought tens of thousands of anti-nuclear protesters onto the streets in the country’s biggest demonstra- tions since the 1960s. Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant operator and once the world’s biggest non-state power producer, would have been bankrupted by the Fukushima accident but for billions of dollars in government aid.
The $196-billion cleanup bill was an estimate in a March 2012 report by the Tokyo-based Japan Center for Economic Research.
The cost of cleaning up Fukushima may be more than the total cost of building all the world’s nuclear plants to date, Jaczko said.
The problem with an engineering solution, an ever-better reactor design or grander safety systems is that based on the premise that all technology is fallible, those defence systems can also fail, Berkley’s Ahn said.
“This is an endless cycle,” Ahn said. “Whatever is your technology, however it is developed, we always have residual risk.”