March 2011

Fukushima and nuclear safety

Wasn't it Winston Churchill who warned of the dangers of becoming a slave to unforeseeable and uncontrollable events? And haven't we just experienced a barrage of uncontrollable events in the past few months?
Egypt's Mubarak was ousted, leading to an ongoing and currently less successful revolution in Libya, and widespread unrest across the Middle East, including Bahrain, Yemen and Tunisia. There was the Christchurch 6,3-magnitude earthquake on New Zealand's South Island, that is believed to have killed 185 people. Said at the time to have been ‘NZ's darkest day, this has already been superceded by the devastating 9,0 magnitude quake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan on Friday, 11 March.

The human cost of the tsunami is staggering: Nationally, more than 20 000 people are either dead or missing and, according to the British Red Cross, some 440 000 people have been evacuated or displaced from their homes. Property damage alone could amount to as much as US$35-billion and estimates of losses to Japanese output from damage to buildings, production and consumer activity range from 10-16-trillion yen, 120-202-billion US$.

On top of all that, the tsunami crippled - and almost certainly permanently destroyed the base load capacity - of the nuclear power station at Fukushima, raising fears of ‘nuclear meltdown'. The nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi and Fukushima Daini power stations were automatically shut down immediately after the earthquake, exactly as they were designed to do. But, after shut-down, the reactor cooling rods need to be kept cool for several days to prevent them from any significant melting and, more importantly, from damaging their containment shells. This should have been achieved by continuously pumping cooling water through the reactor cores to cool and deactivate them.

But pumps need power and the tsunami washed away all of the back-up diesel generators that were required to supply that power.

Is this evidence of the inherent dangers of nuclear power? Is it the fault of the greedy utility company? Is it the stupidity of the Japanese government for allowing a nuclear plant to be built on a coast so close to a fault line? After such an unforeseeable event, it is to our shame that we are so quick to seek someone or something to blame.

At the time of writing, Japan's nuclear agency has just raised its assessment of the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station from level 4 to level 5. This puts the disaster on the same level as the Three Mile Island disaster, which, along with the very first nuclear accident at Windscale, in the UK (now Sellafield), was the third most dangerous nuclear accident in history. The Three Mile Island accident resulted on no deaths at all and radiation levels in the immediate facility equivalent to the radiation dose of one chest x-ray.

As Michael Hanlon, the MailOnline's science editor points out, talk of Japan's nuclear catastrophe is a "peculiar misreading of the real situation. It illustrates a perverse desire to ignore what is by far and away the biggest story here - the thousands, most probably tens of thousands, of Japanese people who have been drowned, crushed, entombed in mud, burned alive and swept away by that black tide of death..."

I am a fervent evangelist for both doing things properly and for learning from one's mistakes, but surely the operators can be forgiven for not foreseeing the possibility that back-up generators could be washed away by an event of this proportion.

The Japanese government is already criticising itself for the speed of its response to the nuclear aspect of the disaster. Today, only eight days after the tsunami hit, power has been restored to the damaged pumps. The South African disaster relief team has just arrived and measured radiation levels are safe. The Japan nuclear agency says that radioactivity levels continue to fall at the plant. The Japanese Red Cross says that Tokyo is safe for international travelers and economics Minister Kaoru Yosanu says Japanese markets are not sufficiently destabilised to warrant joint G7 currency intervention or government purchases of shares.

The Japanese authorities have shown an amazing amount of tenacity in their successful efforts to contain radiation and keep the reactors cool. The Japanese deserve our empathy and help for their unforeseeable losses and our praise for their determined response to the whole tsunami crisis.

This crisis is not proof of the dangers of nuclear power. If anything, it is the opposite. If an old-technology nuclear plant like Fukushima Dai-ichi is shut down safely from here, and I am sure it will be, then we should see it as a massive endorsement for the safety of nuclear technology.

Peter Middleton

Please contact the editor Peter Middleton, or Dale Kelly on tel: +27 11 622 4770 or email: mechanical@crown.co.za for editorial; and Lyn Sara for your advertising requirements at lyns@crown.co.za.