Nuclear power plants of Japan closed forever

THE LIGHTS ARE not going off all over Japan, but the nuclear power plants are. Of the 54 reactors in those plants, with a combined capacity of 47.5 gigawatts (GW, a thousand megawatts), only two are operating today. A good dozen are unlikely ever to reopen: six at Fukushima Dai-ichi, which suffered a calamitous triple meltdown after an earthquake and tsunami on March 11th 2011 (pictured above), and others either too close to those reactors or now considered to be at risk of similar disaster. The rest, bar two, have shut down for maintenance or “stress tests” since the Fukushima accident and not yet been cleared to start up again. It is quite possible that none of them will get that permission before the two still running shut for scheduled maintenance by the end of April.

Japan has been using nuclear power since the 1960s. In 2010 it got 30% of its electricity from nuclear plants. This spring it may well join the ranks of the 150 nations currently muddling through with all their atoms unsplit. If the shutdown happens, it will not be permanent; a good number of the reactors now closed are likely to be reopened. But it could still have symbolic importance. To do without something hitherto seen as a necessity opens the mind to new possibilities. Japan had previously expected its use of nuclear energy to increase somewhat. Now the share of nuclear power in Japan’s energy mix is more likely to shrink, and it could just vanish altogether.

In most places any foretaste of that newly plausible future will barely be noticed. Bullet trains will flash on; flat panels will continue to shine; toilet seats will still warm up; factories will hum as they hummed before. Almost everywhere, when people reach for the light switches in their homes, the lights will come on. But not quite everywhere. In Futaba, Namie and Naraha the lights will stay off, and no factories will hum: not for want of power but for want of people. The 100,000 or so people that once lived in those and other towns close to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant have been evacuated. Some 30,000 may never return. The triple meltdown at Fukushima a year ago was the world’s worst nuclear accident since the disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986. The damage extends far beyond a lost power station.

Oliver Morton in The Economist. Here

Nuclear power can never be made safe, never.

Victims of Chernobyl

With the ongoing disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, some people ask: can nuclear power be made safe? The answer is no. Nuclear power can never be made safe.
This was clearly explained by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the "father" of the U.S. nuclear navy and in charge of construction of the first nuclear power plant in the nation, Shippingport in Pennsylvania. Before a committee of Congress, as he retired from the navy in 1982, Rickover warned of the inherent lethality of nuclear power -- and urged that "we outlaw nuclear reactors."
The basic problem: radioactivity.

"I'll be philosophical," testified Rickover. "Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn't have any life -- fish or anything." This was from naturally-occurring cosmic radiation when the Earth was in the process of formation. "Gradually," said Rickover, "about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet ... reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin."

"Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible," he said. "Every time you produce radiation" a 'horrible force' is unleashed. By splitting the atom, people are recreating the poisons that precluded life from existing. "And I think there the human race is going to wreck itself," Rickover stated.

This was Rickover, a key figure in nuclear power history, not Greenpeace.

The problem is radioactivity -- unleashed when the atom is split. And it doesn't matter whether it's a General Electric boiling water reactor such as those that have erupted at Fukushima, or the Westinghouse pressurized water design, or Russian-designed plants like Chernobyl, or the "new, improved" nuclear plants being touted by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a nuclear scientist and zealous promoter of nuclear technology. All nuclear power plants produce radiation as well as radioactive poisons like the Cesium-137, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 that have been -- and continue to be -- spewed from the Fukushima plants.
Upon contact with life, these toxins destroy life. So from the time they're produced in a nuclear plant to when they're taken out as hotly radioactive "nuclear waste," they must be isolated from life -- for thousands, for some millions of years.

Karl Grossman in The Huffington Post. More Here

Fukushima : worldwide implications and global crisis

For several weeks, radioactive leaks from the Fukushima nuclear power plants have been incapacitating a large part of Japan. Information from the Japanese government and TEPCO, the power company that operates the site, has been sparse, often incomplete and sometimes contradictory. A confidential assessment by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission obtained by The New York Times suggests that the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant is far from stable. The report concludes that the Fukushima plant is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely.

The Fukushima disaster has become more than a local, regional or national Japanese event. The worldwide implications of the event are becoming apparent: though a major leak in a maintenance pit of the plant has been plugged, there is still a great likelihood that significant amounts of radioactive water will continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean; the worldwide Just-In-Time manufacturing cycle has been interrupted; and increased levels of radiation have been detected on the U.S. East Coast. Though the amount of radiation to reach the U.S. is small and poses no present danger, its presence demonstrates that the Fukushima event has global impact.

Circumstances are still evolving too fast and too out-of-control for the consequences to be fully appreciated in real time. Every day brings new revelations of failure and growing frustration in Japan and elsewhere. It has become obvious that not all the facts about the Fukushima tragedy will be known until the danger is long past.
In Japan, there continues to be uncertainty about the extent of the danger from radiation exposure and lack of information about how many people have already been exposed to health-impairing radiation. We don't know how much contamination has leaked into surrounding land and water or when and how those leaks can be repaired.

The Japanese government announced an evacuation zone extending 19 miles from the crippled Fukushima plants, the same distance as the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in Ukraine. But Japan is neither as large or as sparsely populated as Ukraine. Close to 73 percent of Japan is unsuitable for agricultural, industrial, or residential use. Millions of people could be dislocated in addition to those already homeless because of the quake. These people will need to be relocated and new homes will have to be created for them.

With the international challenge of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and national concerns about Congress being unable to agree on Federal Government funding, the U.S. news spotlight that was on Fukushima has been pointed elsewhere.

Stephen Brozak and Henry Bassman in abcnews. More Here

Nuclear Power: Fiction, Fear and Facts

If you've been reading or watching the news, you've probably been hearing a whole lot of information about the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan.

And how the recent earthquake and tsunami have combined to turn the above scene into a potential disaster.

At present, however, contamination has been minimal, and the damage -- thus far -- has been practically zero.
What do I mean? Let's explain -- in the simplest terms possible -- how radioactivity works. In order to understand it, we need to go inside the building blocks of matter -- atoms -- to their very cores.

The nucleus of atoms contain over 99.9% of their mass, and are made up of neutrons and protons. The number of protons determines what type of atom you are; for example, hydrogen has one proton, and is the first atom. But you could have different numbers of neutrons and still be hydrogen! Hydrogen actually has three different known isotopes, depending on whether it has zero, one, or two neutrons.

And while hydrogen and deuterium are stable, tritium is not, which means it's radioactive! And radioactive materials emit radiation of three different types: alpha, beta (which is the case for tritium), and gamma radiation.
And these three types of radiation do damage when they penetrate living tissue. What can they each penetrate?

Well, alpha radiation is the least damaging; a single sheet of paper (or the top layer of dead skin cells on the human body) is enough to stop it. Normal (unenriched) uranium gives off alpha radiation, and basically the only way to harm yourself with alpha radiation is to eat it, which is famously how Alexander Litvinenko was murdered, and how this drastic change (below) happened over the course of about three weeks.

Beta radiation is a little worse, and requires about a centimeter of wood, plastic, or a thin sheet of aluminum to stop it, but by far the most dangerous type of radiation is the high-energy gamma radiation.
Believe it or not, the human body actually, naturally, contains trace amounts of radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium. That's why encountering another human being will actually expose you to a small amount of radiation!

(Image credit: Ellen McManis, an undergraduate across town from me at Reed College.)

The "unit" that we measure radiation in humans in is a Sievert (Sv), and it takes a dose, more-or-less, of about whole Sv over the course of a year (or less) in order to do some real damage to a human being. Note how even the largest dose in the chart above, for a professional radiation worker, is 50 milliSieverts, or just 5% of what it would take to damage you.
Well, Randall of XKCD has created a beautiful chart showing just how much radiation came from nuclear "disasters" throughout history, including the present one in Japan. Here are some screen captures.

So, each daily dose for an "average" person very close to Fukushima is just 3.5 microSieverts, or less than what the "average" person in the middle of nowhere receives on a daily basis.
And if you look up the maximum level of radioactivity from Fukushima so far -- at the two sites 50 km NW of the plant -- here's how that compares.

First off, note that Three-Mile Island, the previous record-holder for second-worst nuclear disaster in history, was less bad for the worst person experiencing it than getting a mammogram is. And the worst dose anyone near Fukushima received is just 0.0036 Sieverts, or an amount you'd have to receive every single day to have anything to worry about.
It would seriously take a Chernobyl-style disaster to cause people to die from radiation poisoning, which is a gruesome way to go.
So -- some of you have emailed me -- if radiation is so bad, what's the deal with Ann Coulter?


Radiation is awful for human beings. Awful, terrible, and destructive to life, the only reason we ever treat anyone for anything (like cancer) with radiation is because we hope the radiation kills it faster than it kills you.
You want improved health because of radiation? Your only hope is to go live in a comic book Universe.


We have lots of good reasons to be appropriately afraid of nuclear physics, radiation, and radioactivity. The problem with energy and the environment -- as I see it -- is that we aren't afraid enough of coal, oil, and natural gas, all of which are worse for the environment than nuclear. But nuclear energy still has its problems, and a big one is that, if that 9.0 earthquake actually had its epicenter on the Fukushima reactor, we just might be talking about another Chernobyl.
But if I were in charge, and I had my choice of how to power the world, what would I do?

(Image credit: Sun Power Corp.)

Rather than considering it a "pipe dream" like our beloved Homer Simpson, let's take a good look at what solar panels are actually out there. The best ones can get about 19% of the incident solar energy converted into electricity. At sea level, that means about 19% of 700 Watts for every square-meter of solar panels we have.

See the "A" on the map above? Make a solar array about that size -- 35 miles by 35 miles -- and you can power the entire United States. Period. Day or night, winter or summer, rain or shine. No emissions, no pollution, no risk of radiation, no dependence on oil, coal, gas, no damage to the environment.
And if we did it -- if we invested in it and made it happen -- I think it would fix a huge number of our domestic problems: the economic ones, the employment ones, the manufacturing ones, etc.

How to make it happen? I wish I knew. We live in a world where Ann Coulter is on television telling people that radiation is good for you, and the informed citizen with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics has a blog with a few thousand readers on the internet. All I can do is hope that someone with the power to make it happen reads this, listens, and acts. We can all hope.

Ethan Sieget in Scienceblogs. More Here.

Do we need nuclear power in India? At what cost?

The nuclear power emergency in Japan has raised two major questions regarding nuclear power.

First, can a disaster comparable to the one in Japan happen here? The answer, of course, is yes — whether caused by an earthquake or some other event or series of events. Nature is unpredictable and human beings are fallible. It could happen.

So the second question is whether it makes sense to follow through on plans to increase our reliance on nuclear power, thus heightening the risk of a terrible problem occurring here. Is that a risk worth taking?

There has been a persistent tendency to ignore the toughest questions posed by nuclear power: What should be done with the waste? What are the consequences of a catastrophic accident in a populated area? How safe are the plants, really? Why would taxpayers have to shoulder so much of the financial risk of expanding the nation’s nuclear power capacity, an effort that would be wildly expensive?

A big part of the problem at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power station are the highly radioactive spent fuel rods kept in storage pools at the plant. What to do, ultimately, with such dangerous waste material is the nuclear power question without an answer. Nuclear advocates and public officials don’t talk about it much. Denial is the default position when it comes to nuclear waste.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said again this week that the 40-year-old Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester County, 35 miles north of New York City, should be closed. Try to imagine the difficulty, in the event of an emergency, of evacuating such an area with its millions of residents. “This plant in this proximity to New York City was never a good risk,” said the governor.

There are, blessedly, very few catastrophic accidents at nuclear power plants. And there have not been many deaths associated with them. The rarity of such accidents provides a comfort zone. We can look at the low probabilities and declare, “It can’t happen here.”

But what if it did happen here? What would the consequences be?

If Indian Point blew, how wide an area and how many people would be affected, and what would the cleanup costs be? 

Rigorously answering such questions is the only way to determine whether the potential risk to life and property is worthwhile.

The 104 commercial nuclear plants in the U.S. are getting old, and many have had serious problems over the years. There have been dozens of instances since 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island accident, in which nuclear reactors have had to be shut down for more than a year for safety reasons.

Building new plants can be breathtakingly expensive and requires government loan guarantees. Banks are not lining up to lend money on their own for construction of the newest generation of Indian Points.

In addition to the inherent risks with regard to safety and security, the nuclear industry has long been notorious for sky-high construction costs, feverish cost-overruns and projects that eventually are abandoned.

Nuclear power is hardly the pristine, economical, unambiguous answer to the nation’s energy needs and global warming concerns. It offers benefits and big-time shortcomings. Ultimately, the price may be much too high.

Bob Herbert in The New York Times. More Here.

Say NO to nuclear power. It is simply dangerous.

Let’s get this straight. The Fukushima crisis is the world’s worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. The earlier (partial, largely contained) meltdown at Three Mile Island (1979) pales beside it. The Fukushima reactors have spewed large amounts of radioactivity into the air. The vessel containing the core of Reactor 2, which fully lost water cover for hours, has been damaged. The fire in Reactor 4 released yet more radiotoxins. At the time of writing, only a miracle can prevent further radiation release.

The Fukushima disaster is the world’s first multi-reactor crisis; controlling it is more difficult. It also poses three special problems. Large quantities of spent fuel, containing extremely radioactive nuclear wastes, are stored in pools in the reactor building, following General Electric’s design. These are no longer being cooled. A spent fuel leak, spreading due to the flooding, could have unspeakably lethal effects.

Second, Fukushima reactors’ primary containment—similar to India’s Tarapur reactors, also GE-designed—has been found by a US laboratory to be vulnerable to molten fuel burning through the reactor vessel, eventually breaking out. Third, Reactor 3 burns a mix of uranium-plutonium oxide (MOX). Researchers say mox generally increases the consequences of severe accidents with large radioactivity releases, resulting in a five-fold increase in latent cancer fatalities.

Even if the Fukushima crisis doesn’t worsen further, it highlights the inherent hazards of nuclear power, in which small individual mishaps can precipitate a runaway crisis. The reactors were shut down by the earthquake; and their still-hot cores were no longer cooled. The diesel back-up came on, but went out in an hour. The loss of coolant led to the explosions and radioactivity releases.

That this happened in industrially advanced Japan, with high nuclear safety standards, underscores the gravity of the generic problem with nuclear reactors. They are all vulnerable to a catastrophic accident irrespective of safety measures. Nuclear power generation is also bound up with radiation exposure, harmful in all doses, and radioactive waste streams, which remain hazardous for thousands of years.

India’s nucleocrats have been in denial of these problems and suppressed their abysmal safety record. The list of failures is long: a serious fire at Narora, which moved from the turbine to the reactor room amidst panic-driven abandonment of fire-fighting procedures; collapse of a containment-dome safety system at Kaiga; frequent radiation exposure of workers and lay public to doses above the permissible; and the spiking of drinking water with deadly tritium in Kaiga. India has the distinction of running two of the world’s most contaminated reactors.

This necessitates a radical reform of the DAE, the government’s worst-performing department, which has never completed a project on time and within budget. We must have an independent, credible nuclear safety audit, with outside experts and civil society representatives. We must review our nuclear power policy for appropriateness, safety, costs, and public acceptance, based on a holistic view of the best ways of meeting our energy needs. If nuclear power emerges as the least desirable option, we should discard it. The environment ministry must also revoke all conditional clearances granted to nuclear projects, including Jaitapur.

Nuclear power has subjugated our energy policy and budgets to an unaccountable, self-perpetuating, pampered technocracy, imposed unacceptable hazards upon unwilling populations, and degraded our democracy. The juggernaut must be halted.

Praful Bidwai in Outlook. More Here.