Tsunami ‘speed bump’ for nuclear industry
A year after the Fukushima power plant disaster, it’s almost business as usual for atomic energy
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA— Within months of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the worst in 25 years, Germany, Belgium and Italy vowed to quit atomic energy. Twelve months on, the nuclear industry says it’s almost back to business as usual.
“Fukushima put a speed bump on the road to the nuclear renaissance,” said Ganpat Mani, president of Converdyn, a company that processes mined uranium, at a nuclear industry summit in Seoul last week. “It’s not going to delay the programs around the world.”
As Japan mourned the19,000 people killed or presumed dead from the earthquake and tsunami that also wrecked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station on March 11, 2011, India overrode six months of local protests to approve the start of its Kudankulam plant. In February, the United States gave the green light to build its first reactor in 30 years. And China is “very likely” to resume approval of new nuclear projects this year, said Sun Qin, president of China National Nuclear Corp.
With 650 million people in China and India living without access to electricity, those countries are looking to the atom to provide power without raising emissions and fossil fuel costs. Nuclear is not the only alternative to fossil fuels, but the use of renewable energy for now is restricted by technology and costs, according to South Korea’s Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik.
Indonesia, Egypt and Chile are among more than a dozen nations planning to build their first nuclear station to join the 30 countries operating atomic plants. Sixty-one reactors are currently under construction and a further162 units are planned, according to the World Nuclear Association.
The planned reactors alone have a greater capacity than all of the 435 reactors that supply 13.8 per cent of the world’s electricity today. By 2030 at least 60 units will need to be retired, the WNA estimates. Still, global nuclear capacity may grow by about 50 per cent to 600,000 megawatts by 2030, Luc Oursel, CEO of France’s state-controlled Areva, told reporters in Seoul. The nuclear industry has faced three major accidents in the past 32 years, the 1979 Three Mile Island core meltdown in the United States, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant explosion in the former Soviet Union, and Fukushima last year. After the first two, construction of new atomic plants in those countries was delayed for decades. U.S. utilities say they have installed an additional 300 pieces of major equipment to boost safety since Fukushima. The Japanese disaster has provided “many lessons, especially on how important nuclear safety is,” Kim Jong-shin, chairman of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. told reporters at the Seoul summit.
Still, the technology has no alternative that can provide “clean and sustainable energy,” Kim said. Given its role in medicine and national security, nuclear power is “indispensable.”