The Fukushima Mistake: The Challenge of Responding Wisely

Rosatom's Third International Forum
John Ritch, General Director, World Nuclear Association

June 6-8 2011| Link to the original article

Over the past decade, many nations around the world reviewed their energy and environment policies and came inexorably to the same conclusion. For reasons of energy independence and environmental responsibility, they determined that nuclear power must play a central role in their national energy strategies for the 21st Century.

Recent events at Fukushima now compel us to assess three questions:

What have we learned from Fukushima? How should the custodians of nuclear power – in both government and industry – respond? Has Fukushima fundamentally altered the prospect of an expanded worldwide use of nuclear power?

What We Have Learned Thus Far: Known Truths Underscored

A starting point is to define Fukushima. Although the terms “nuclear disaster” and “nuclear tragedy” are commonly applied, there is reason to resist such usage. When 24,000 Japanese citizens have been killed by an enormous earthquake and a resulting tsunami which combined into one of the great calamities in that nation’s history, does it not seem a gross abuse of language to label as a disaster an occurrence incidental to that calamity which has not in itself produced a single fatality?

It is certainly true that some 100,000 people are likely to be delayed for a year in returning to the evacuation zone near the plant to begin rebuilding from the rubble of earthquake-tsunami destruction. But their exclusion for that period is, in large measure, a precautionary policy, explicitly designed to ensure against any possibility of radiation jeopardy to this populace. Even this severe inconvenience would be wrongly labeled as a disaster.

Certainly Fukushima was an “accident” – as that word applies to unplanned, unexpected events with undesirable results. But “accident” suggests operational error, as occurred at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. At Fukushima, we have witnessed instead the results of a fundamental error in design – arising from a failure of Japanese scientists, regulators and operators to properly imagine worst-case threats and to protect the reactors’ back-up cooling capabilities against such threats. An alternative is to choose the word “mistake”, while recognizing that the word “disaster” certainly applies to the event’s economic impact on Tepco and to its wide public impact on perceptions of nuclear power.

Whether we choose to call it an accident, a mistake, or a disaster, Fukushima has been educational primarily in reinforcing several truths we knew already about nuclear power and about the public and policy context that surround its use. Because of Fukushima, these truths are even clearer now:

1) Inevitability of Nuclear Events: First, nuclear accidents happen. This is not a trivial observation. In our rigorous efforts to build safety into nuclear power, we have properly embraced the mantra that a nuclear accident should never happen again. But we should never have confidence that we can succeed absolutely in this quest, and we should never expect the public to believe that we have. We must expect, and must concede, that human beings made mistakes, individually and collectively; and our aim must be to ensure, and explain persuasively, that even worst-case nuclear events are both exceedingly low in probability and increasingly small in consequence as nuclear technology continues to advance. Right now, most people, even non-nuclear scientists, assume that nuclear power carries the low probability of a highly harmful event. For those who believe in nuclear energy, the journey will be steeply uphill so long as that belief remains widespread. To repeat, we must establish technically, and explain convincingly, that nuclear events are both increasingly low in probability and increasingly low in consequence. That will be true and must be presented believably.

2) The Universal Necessity of Reliable Backup Cooling: Second, every nuclear reactor requires reliable post-shutdown cooling. Like a race-horse after the race, a nuclear reactor after shut-down needs a cooling down period to remove residual heat. Some advanced reactor designs will soon accomplish this internally, using natural physical principles. But for current reactors, post shut-down heat removal depends on a supply of external power.

It bears emphasis that the entire Japanese reactor fleet has repeatedly passed the test of shutting down successfully in response to past earthquakes, and did so again in March during the largest earthquake in Japanese history. Shut-down instantly lowers the reactor’s core power to only 6-7% of operational power, and it then takes just a few days of cooling for core power to drop below 1%. But for a reactor supplying electricity to, say, 700,000 people, even 1% is still the thermal power needed to generate electricity for seven thousand people – in other words, a great deal of heat must be dissipated.

This means that post-shutdown cooling is a critical non-nuclear aspect of nuclear technology, and Fukushima has imprinted on us indelibly how essential this function is to the safety and future of nuclear power. Our commitment to ensuring the reliability of post-shutdown cooling – in every reactor everywhere – must be absolute.

3) The Essential Safety of Nuclear Power: Third, despite widespread impressions to the contrary, Fukushima underscores the essential safety of nuclear power. At Fukushima, three operating reactors and one recently shut-down, ranging in age from 33 to 40 years, were assaulted first by the worst earthquake in Japan’s history. Its effect was devastating on the Fukushima locale, wiping out towns, power supplies, and hundreds of lives from among the friends, colleagues and families of those working at the power plant. One hour later, amidst this physical chaos and human tragedy, a gigantic tsunami flooded the plant’s backup diesel generators, which through mistaken planning were ill-equipped to survive it.

This left the four reactors and their spent fuel ponds dangerously uncooled for a sustained period. The result was radioactive releases from a combination of necessary pressure venting, fuel melt and breaches in full containment. The heroic efforts of Fukushima’s plant workers have earned the admiration of all us in the nuclear profession, but could not prevent leakages into nearby sea and land areas in excess of standard safety limits. This was truly a worst-case nuclear event.

Yet, so limited have been the releases, and so precautionary are Japan’s safety standards and evacuation policies, that it is still reasonable to expect that not a single radiation fatality will result from Fukushima. This is not a statement of complacency or indifference, but of simple fact. Meanwhile, we can estimate that in the days since Fukushima several thousands of people have died worldwide in the mining of fossil fuels and from the health consequences of fossil combustion. In any rational analysis, the “disaster” at Fukushima ought to be viewed in this context.

4) Media Frenzy is Today’s Norm: A fourth truth from Fukushima is that present-day media coverage is more inclined to frenzy than to balance in any event involving nuclear energy. In a world of competitive, round-the-clock, televised news, there is clearly a compulsion to cover any nuclear story as the industrial equivalent of a sex scandal. In today’s context, the terms “melt-down” and “radiation leak” are too titillating to resist, and we must expect this tendency to persist so long as we have failed to demythologize nuclear energy. Achieving that would mean creating much wider public understanding of radiation as a ubiquitous natural phenomenon and of the limited consequences of radioactive release likely to result even from worst-case events associated with nuclear power.

5) Weak Support Where Nuclear is an Ideological Issue: A fifth reality underscored by Fukushima is the bizarre weakness of support for nuclear power in a few technologically advanced European countries. The Swiss cabinet has initiated a nuclear phase-out. In Italy the Berlusconi government has shelved plans to reintroduce nuclear energy in the only country ever to abandon it. And the German coalition has now begun a nuclear shut-down that will render Germany less energy independent, more reliant on foreign gas and domestic coal, and with the economic burden of squandering hundreds of billions of Euros in valuable nuclear assets while greatly expanding its subsidy budget for renewables.

For an advanced industrial nation boasting Europe’s largest economy, this knee-jerk and potentially historic change in energy policy is a truly astonishing response to the flooding of several diesel generators half a world away on the east coast of Japan, and its heavy cost will be shared by German stockholders, taxpayers and consumers. Any national energy strategy should be geared to affordability, to reliability and to true – as opposed to illusory – environmental protection. Against those criteria, it is difficult to credit German claims that its new policy represents a bold step into the future.

6) Solidity of Support in Many Key Nations: A sixth truth, also shown in foreign reaction to Fukushima, is the solidity of public policy in support for nuclear power in most countries now using it. This is especially true in those countries planning major programs of nuclear new-build, led by China, India, Russia, Britain, South Africa, and South Korea. In other major nations too, including Brazil, France, Poland, and the USA, we see little evidence of lost momentum. Even in Japan, the new post-Fukushima policy affirms a renewed commitment to nuclear power along with a new emphasis on renewables and efficiency.

7) Thinness of Public Understanding: A seventh and countervailing reality is that public understanding of nuclear power in many countries remains thin and readily susceptible to misimpression. Where we see constancy in policy support for nuclear power, it relies mainly on consensus among policymakers and on nuclear power not becoming, in the country’s politics, an ideological litmus-test as it has in Germany. Nonetheless, Fukushima has undoubtedly produced a decline in public confidence in nuclear power in countries around the world, amidst a widespread impression that Japan’s natural catastrophe was seriously compounded by a manmade disaster. Once again we have learned that “radiation” ranks high as one of the most potent and evocative words in any language.

8) Continuing Power of the Chernobyl Myth: A closely related truth, vividly underscored by media coverage of Fukushima, is that the myth of Chernobyl retains a powerful hold on public consciousness and remains a main journalistic reference point with respect to the perceived dangers of nuclear power. I refer to the “myth” of Chernobyl because so few people understand that the Chernobyl reactor that exploded and caught fire in 1986 bears little relevance to any reactor now operating and because the real, scientifically analyzed consequences of Chernobyl differ so drastically from the public impression.

A genuine authority on Chernobyl consequences is Dr. Geraldine Thomas, a molecular pathologist who heads the Chernobyl Tissue Bank at Imperial College, London. Dr. Thomas reflects a broad scientific consensus in stating that the findings of radiation fatalities from Chernobyl are strictly limited – to several dozen persons severely irradiated while fighting the reactor fire (the so-called “liquidators”) and to a small number of public persons in the Chernobyl vicinity, statistically thought to be 16 in number, who should be assumed to have died from thyroid cancer caused by radioactive iodine emitted by the burning reactor.

As Dr. Thomas and many other Chernobyl authorities will attest, the allegation of any other radiation fatalities must depend on so-called “collective dose” theory, which is neither scientifically based nor logically persuasive. Its logic is not unlike concluding that because ingesting 1000 aspirins is always fatal, then one out of every thousand people taking a single aspirin can be expected to die.

But little of this is commonly understood, and when authorities raised Fukushima to level 7 as a “Serious Accident” on the International Nuclear Event Scale – a number theretofore assigned only to Chernobyl – millions around the world promptly concluded that they were witnessing a human catastrophe of immense proportions.

9) Nuclear Economics Remain Paramount: A final truth, underscored as we contemplate the potential worldwide policy and regulatory response to Fukushima, is that the economics of nuclear power remain crucial to its future. We all know that, compared to other major power technologies, nuclear is expensive to build and cheap to operate. It therefore requires an investment decision based on confidence in long-term amortization. In the past decade, even amidst growing confidence in the nuclear power’s worldwide future, we have seen the industry struggle in trying to limit capital costs while venturing to build new-generation reactors of even safer design. In countries where investment decisions are made by the private sector, it has become increasingly clear that at least some government involvement, in the form of assurances and guarantees, may be essential if the full clean-energy benefits of nuclear power are to be gained in a time frame dictated by increasingly urgent environmental need.

The already high entry-level costs of nuclear power render it crucially important that any regulatory actions in response to Fukushima be strictly gauged against the criterion of cost-effective safety gain.

Response by Government and Industry: Using the Institutional Tools at Hand

In a climate that is rife with the impulse to “do something” about Fukushima, it important to identify sound principles against which to judge any proposed response. These simple fundamentals offer a start:

1) Sound Institutional Framework for Response: First, we should recognize that we stand well-equipped institutionally with the means to examine the event at Fukushima and to draw and apply lessons from it. At the national level, nuclear regulators are already at work, and at the international level we have two immensely valuable mechanisms to guide the overall global response: the IAEA inter-governmentally and WANO as a private sector safety agency networking every power reactor worldwide. Cooperation within and among these institutional assets is now the task at hand.

WNA will do all possible to support both of these lead actors. With a membership that includes not only utilities but also nuclear reactor vendors, uranium miners and enrichers, fuel makers, and EPC companies, we are the one international organization spanning the entire global nuclear industry. In that capacity, we stand ready to coordinate participation by experts from these companies in any Fukushima-response activities initiated by the Agency and by WANO.

2) Focus Solely on Cost-Effective Measures: Second, Fukushima-response should focus solely on substantive measures promising real and cost-effective safety gain. A variety of topics, arising directly from the Fukushima event and relevant to every nuclear power plant, bear careful analysis using available institutions. These topics include measures to regain AC power in the event of blackout, to waterproof and otherwise protect diesel generators, and to ensure adequate battery coping times. Fukushima also requires a new focus on how best to optimize safety and efficiency in spent fuel management.

A proposal deserving deliberation – by the Agency and by WANO, perhaps in cooperation – comes from James Ellis, head of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations in Atlanta, who envisages an international emergency response unit, geared to rapid, expert-led action using pre-staged interoperable equipment. The very exploration of this concept could serve as a valuable stimulus to need-analysis and to preparations at the national level for emergency response.

As to Fukushima’s implications for reactor technology, new insights may emerge as the event is studied over time. That process will by its nature engage the world’s foremost experts in considering implications for reactor design. Reactor design has, of course, advanced considerably since the Daiichi plant was built, but it is well possible that the dynamics of what occurred in the hydrogen explosion, fuel melt and loss of full containment will inform the designers’ understanding.

3) Avoid Symbolic Gestures: Third, Fukushima-response should avoid symbolic steps offering little real gain. A case in point is the initiative whereby the UN Secretary General will convene various UN agencies this September in Manhattan to engage on the subject of preventing another Fukushima. As the IAEA is the UN’s well-established means to bring genuine expertise to bear on such objectives, it is difficult to see how this vaguely conceived conference can be more than an invitation to public posturing and political mischief.

Questions of symbolism-versus-substance also surround the coming “stress tests” instigated by the EU Commission at all European reactors. But here there is a clear positive side. This initiative has served to broaden safety consciousness to include greater emphasis on natural disasters, and it also represents a potentially constructive step in the direction of harmonizing international standards for power plant design. If the Commission’s initiative serves to stimulate genuinely cost-effective safety measures, it will have met the standard of substance over symbolism.

4) Review and Restart on Public Perception: Finally, we should carefully re-think the whole question of public perception of nuclear energy. In the 25 years since Chernobyl, industry and government have operated on the paradigm that by implementing ever tighter standards on nuclear safety while attaining an ever longer record of safe nuclear performance, we would build public confidence in nuclear power. This was not misguided, and was to a considerable degree successful. But it was incomplete. What Fukushima revealed so harshly is that both the media and the public have gotten only part of the message. The nuclear industry is still, in essence, regarded as safely managing Doomsday machines. In that concept, the word “Doomsday” will always trump the assertion of safe management.

We must act to change this widespread conception. If electricity is a vital public service and not simply a market commodity, and if the issue of how we generate electricity now bears urgently on the future of our Earthly environment, then a policy of laissez-faire will not suffice. We need to focus rigorously, in a cooperative effort involving government and industry, on just how we can enhance public understanding of this valuable asset. If nuclear power must play a central role in any strategy to avert radical climate change, then there exists a compelling public interest in building widespread awareness of the virtues of that technology.

We have facts in our favor. The question is how best to use facts to alleviate fears, instill confidence and enhance awareness of nuclear power’s environmental value. We should regard the effort to build this understanding as nothing less than an imperative of public policy.

In this quest, WNA has value to offer and would willingly partner with others. Our Public Information Service, available on the WNA website, is the world’s most heavily used resource on nuclear energy. It offers an encyclopedic range of up-to-date papers, including a portfolio of short papers specifically designed for schools. These offerings are hit at the encouraging rate of once every 5 seconds. Their limitation, however, is that they are delivered passively, reaching only those in search of knowledge and only in English. To overcome broad deficiencies in public awareness, what is needed is a focused approach designed on a country by country basis.

Such projects would require resources, but could prove supremely cost-effective. Certainly we know already that, in many countries, such information is sorely lacking or grossly distorted. Imagine, as a thought experiment, the difference in the relevant textbook information now reaching ordinary students in South Korea as against those in Europe and North America. Who here has any doubt that the Korean student will know more of what is true? By no coincidence, South Korea is quickly emerging as a world leader in nuclear power.

An Unchanged Reality: The Urgent Worldwide Need for Nuclear Power

As we shape a response to Fukushima, a basic truth is that this event – even if we call it a disaster – has done nothing to alter the realities that have led so many different nations in recent years to a common nuclear path. These realities are stark:

> World population will continue its explosive growth – from 3 billion in 1960 to almost 7 billion today, and from here upward toward 9 billion by the middle of this century.
> World energy demand will, in the lifetimes of our children, increase by a factor of three.
> Our world’s most capable climate scientists will continue to warn, with ever greater urgency, that we must, even as global energy consumption triples, cut worldwide carbon emissions by 80% – or risk changes in Earth’s climate so radical as to threaten much of civilization.
> And, even after Fukushima, it will remain true that the world’s nations can achieve this global clean-energy revolution only with a vastly expanded use of nuclear power.

Because Fukushima cannot change these momentous realities, our duty is to act so that nuclear power can play its central and necessary global role. In this quest, our tools – a combination of ever safer practice and ever better public education – are clearly known and immensely important. 

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