We Must Take a Very Hard Look at Nuclear Power

After two weeks of the continuing saga of a dangerous situation at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station, and just after things began to look a tad more optimistic, today there is a sobering new development, that there may have been a breach of the reactor core with much greater release of radiation than anyone thought.

So I feel it's time to comment on nuclear power. In an era when we hear, ad nauseam, about "reducing America's dependence on foreign oil," and when we also have grown less tolerant of the problems with burning fossil fuels like coal to generate electricity, nuclear power has, to some minds, been a power source that should not be overlooked.

However, a lot of people are afraid of nuclear power. The world has seen some chilling instances of what can happen to atomic power plants, in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania).

At one point it was argued that a standardized reactor design, such as they use in France, would simplify the design of new nuclear reactors and thus make them safer. So to speak, we would be building a "perfected" nuclear plant.

However, even barring earthquakes—and how foolish does it now seem to build nuclear plants in an earthquake-prone country like Japan?—there will always be mechanical failures and operator errors.

To draw an analogy from flying: We've got very good and well-tested planes, these days. Occasionally a plane still crashes, because of some unforeseen equipment problem, pilot error, or both.

I recently revisited the story of what happened at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. That plant had three lines of defense in the form of pumps for cooling water. Yet the operators did not believe the alarms that were going off—warning lights and sirens that signaled a loss of reactor cooling. Even worse and more incredible, they shut off the third line of backup pumps. (I wonder if anyone knows why they did that.)

So, you can build the most fail-safe, fool-proof, and idiot-proof reactor possible. You can train your operators to death. Yet there is no guarantee that they will do the right thing at all times. Human beings are always going to be the wild card, and human beings are fallible.

So you can reduce the statistical odds that something terrible will happen, but you can't get those odds down to zero. And the consequences of what can go wrong with a nuclear plant are very, very bad because radiation is very nasty stuff. It might be time to conclude that we don't want to take the risks.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

I Truly Feel for Japan

I feel so sorry for Japan. If you were writing a disaster novel, or the screenplay for one of those disaster movies, and you didn't care that you were just piling up disasters and didn’t worry about straining credibility—then you couldn't make up a more dire scenario than what has actually happened to Japan, with an earthquake, tsunami, and then meltdown of nuclear reactors.

Plus, some Japanese are old enough to have memories of World War II and the suffering that was wrought upon the people of Japan in that war: not just the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also—much less well known to the rest of the world—the fire-bombing of Tokyo, which leveled half the city, killed a disputed number of people (usually estimated at over 100,000, more than the direct death toll from the Hiroshima atomic bomb attacks, though I find different casualty estimates for the numbers of atomic bomb casualties, as well as for the Tokyo casualties), and left a million people homeless. Remember, it's not the everyday people who start a war, but it is they who suffer from it.

And, Japan has suffered other terrible earthquakes, including the Tokyo earthquake of 1923 and a more recent one in Kobe.

Not to mention that the survivors of the nuclear attacks in 1945 remember the terrible suffering and sickness and death from the effects of radiation rather than the direct bomb blasts. People were dying from radiation exposure for decades afterward. And now again—amidst the death and destruction from the quake and the tsunami, the Japanese now again must worry about the health effects of radiation exposure.

It's tempting to segue into some discussion of nuclear power, its pros and cons. One might say, simplistically, that it was very foolish to build nuclear plants in an earthquake-prone country. But remember that, first, Japan has few other energy resources. I understand that in California there are nuclear plants sitting right atop the San Andreas Fault. Also, right here in Illinois, we have many nuclear power plants that could be affected by the New Madrid Fault, near the southern tip of Illinois, which caused four of the biggest earthquakes ever in the U.S. So as I write this, I am sitting on almost the same type of hazard that the people of Japan were.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein