Stop the
nuclear renaissance
By K. Sovacool
Japan's nuclear crisis is a nightmare, but
it is not an anomaly.
In fact, it is only the latest in a long
line of nuclear accidents involving meltdowns,
explosions, fires, and loss of coolant
accidents that have occurred during both
normal operation and emergency conditions,
such as droughts and earthquakes.
Nuclear safety demands clarity about terms.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the
United States generally separates unplanned
nuclear "events" into two classes,
"incidents" and "accidents".
Incidents are unforeseen events and
technical failures that occur during normal
plant operation and result in no off-site
releases of radiation or severe damage to
equipment. Accidents refer to either off-site
releases of radiation or severe damage to
plant equipment.
The International Nuclear and Radiological
Event Scale uses a seven-level ranking scheme
to rate the significance of nuclear and
radiological events: levels 1-3 are "incidents",
and 4-7 are "accidents", with a
"Level 7 Major Accident" consisting
of "a major release of radioactive
material with widespread health and
environmental effects requiring
implementation of planned and extended
countermeasures."
Under these classifications, the number of
nuclear accidents, even including the
meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima
Daini, is low. But if one redefines an
accident to include incidents that either
resulted in the loss of human life or more
than $50,000 in property damage, a very
different picture emerges.
At least 99 nuclear accidents meeting this
definition, totaling more than $20.5 billion
in damages, occurred worldwide from 1952 to
2009 or more than one incident and $330
million in damage every year, on average, for
the past three decades. And, of course, this
average does not include the Fukushima
catastrophe.
Indeed, when compared to other energy
sources, nuclear power ranks higher than oil,
coal, and natural gas systems in terms of
fatalities, second only to hydroelectric dams.
There have been 57 accidents since the
Chernobyl disaster in 1986. While only a few
involved fatalities, those that did
collectively killed more people than have
died in commercial US airline accidents since
1982.
Another index of nuclear-power accidents
this one including costs beyond death
and property damage, such as injured or
irradiated workers and malfunctions that did
not result in shutdowns or leaks
documented 956 incidents from 1942 to 2007.
And yet another documented more than 30,000
mishaps at US nuclear-power plants alone,
many with the potential to have caused
serious meltdowns, between the 1979 accident
at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and 2009.
Mistakes are not limited to reactor sites.
Accidents at the Savannah River reprocessing
plant released ten times as much
radioiodine as the accident at Three Mile
Island, and a fire at the Gulf United
facility in New York in 1972 scattered an
undisclosed amount of plutonium, forcing the
plant to shut down permanently.
At the Mayak Industrial Reprocessing
Complex in Russia's southern Urals, a storage
tank holding nitrate acetate salts exploded
in 1957, releasing a massive amount of
radioactive material over 20,000 square
kilometers, forcing the evacuation of 272,000
people. In September 1994, an explosion at
Indonesia's Serpong research reactor was
triggered by the ignition of methane gas that
had seeped from a storage room and exploded
when a worker lit a cigarette.
Accidents have also occurred when nuclear
reactors are shut down for refueling or to
move spent nuclear fuel into storage. In 1999,
operators loading spent fuel into dry-storage
at the Trojan Reactor in Oregon found that
the protective zinc-carbon coating had
started to produce hydrogen, which caused a
small explosion.
Unfortunately, on-site accidents at
nuclear reactors and fuel facilities are not
the only cause of concern. The August 2003
blackout in the northeastern US revealed that
more than a dozen nuclear reactors in the US
and Canada were not properly maintaining
backup diesel generators. In Ontario during
the blackout, reactors designed to unlink
from the grid automatically and remain in
standby mode instead went into full shutdown,
with only two of twelve reactors behaving
as expected.
As environmental lawyers Richard Webster
and Julie LeMense argued in 2008, "the
nuclear industry
is like the financial
industry was prior to the crisis" that
erupted that year. "[T]here are many
risks that are not being properly managed or
regulated."
This state of affairs is worrying, to say
the least, given the severity of harm that a
single serious accident can cause. The
meltdown of a 500-megawatt reactor located 30
miles from a city would cause the immediate
death of an estimated 45,000 people, injure
roughly another 70,000, and cause $17 billion
in property damage.
A successful attack or accident at the
Indian Point power plant near New York City,
apparently part of Al Qaeda's original plan
for September 11, 2001, would have resulted
in 43,700 immediate fatalities and 518,000
cancer deaths, with cleanup costs reaching $2
trillion.
To put a serious accident in context,
according to data from my forthcoming book
Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power,
if 10 million people were exposed to
radiation from a complete nuclear meltdown (the
containment structures fail completely,
exposing the inner reactor core to air),
about 100,000 would die from acute radiation
sickness within six weeks. About 50,000 would
experience acute breathlessness, and 240,000
would develop acute hypothyroidism. About 350,000
males would be temporarily sterile, 100,000
women would stop menstruating, and 100,000
children would be born with cognitive
deficiencies. There would be thousands of
spontaneous abortions and more than 300,000
later cancers.
Advocates of nuclear energy have made
considerable political headway around the
world in recent years, touting it as a safe,
clean, and reliable alternative to fossil
fuels. But the historical record clearly
shows otherwise. Perhaps the unfolding
tragedy in Japan will finally be enough to
stop the nuclear renaissance from
materialising.
Benjamin K. Sovacool, a
professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of
Public Policy, National University of
Singapore, is the author of Contesting
the Future of Nuclear Power
and co-author of the forthcoming The
International Politics of Nuclear Power.
This article was first
published by Project
Syndicate.
Learning
from Disaster? After Sendai
By Richard Falk
March 16, 2011 "Information
Clearing House" --
After atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki there was in the West,
especially the United States, a short
triumphal moment, crediting American science
and military prowess with bringing victory
over Japan and the avoidance of what was
anticipated at the time to be a long and
bloody conquest of the Japanese homeland.
This official narrative of the devastating
attacks on these Japanese cities has been
contested by numerous reputable historians
who argued that Japan had conveyed its
readiness to surrender well before the bombs
had been dropped, that the U.S. Government
needed to launch the attacks to demonstrate
to the Soviet Union that it had this super-weapon
at its disposal, and that the attacks would
help establish American supremacy in the
Pacific without any need to share power with
Moscow. But whatever historical
interpretation is believed, the horror and
indecency of the attacks is beyond
controversy. This use of atomic bombs against
defenseless densely populated cities remains
the greatest single act of state terror in
human history, and had it been committed by
the losers in World War II surely the
perpetrators would have been held criminally
accountable and the weaponry forever
prohibited. But history gives the winners in
big wars considerable latitude to shape the
future according to their own wishes,
sometimes for the better, often for the worse.
Not only were these two cities of little
military significance devastated beyond
recognition, but additionally, inhabitants in
a wide surrounding area were exposed to
lethal doses of radioactivity causing for
decades death, disease, acute anxiety, and
birth defects. Beyond this, it was clear that
such a technology would change the face of
war and power, and would either be eliminated
from the planet or others than the United
States would insist on possession of the
weaponry, and in fact, the five permanent
member of the UN Security Council became the
first five states to develop and possess
nuclear weapons, and in later years, Israel,
India, Pakistan, and North Korea have
developed nuclear warheads of their own. As
well, the technology was constantly improved
at great cost, allowing long-distance
delivery of nuclear warheads by guided
missiles and payloads hundreds times greater
than those primitive bombs used against Japan.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki there were
widespread expressions of concern about the
future issued by political leaders and an
array of moral authority figures. Statesmen
in the West talked about the necessity of
nuclear disarmament as the only alternative
to a future war that would destroy industrial
civilization. Scientists and others in
society spoke in apocalyptic terms about the
future. It was a mood of utopia or else,
a sense that unless a new form of governance
emerged rapidly there would be no way to
avoid a catastrophic future for the human
species and for the earth itself.
But what happened? The bellicose realists
prevailed, warning of the distrust of
the other, insisting that it
would be better to be dead than red,
and that, as in the past, only a balance of
power could prevent war and catastrophe. The
new balance of the nuclear age was called
deterrence, and it evolved into a
dangerous semi-cooperative security posture
known as mutual assured destruction,
or more sanely described by its acronym, MAD.
The main form of learning that took place
after the disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
was to normalize the weaponry, banish the
memories, and hope for the best. The same
realists, perhaps most prominently, John
Mearsheimer, even go so far as to celebrate
nuclear weaponry as keepers of the
peace, for them the best explanation
for why the Soviet Union-United States
rivalry did not result in World War III. Such
nuclear complacency was again in evidence
when in the 1990s after the Soviet Union
collapsed, there was a refusal to propose at
that time the elimination of nuclear weaponry,
and there were reliable reports that the U.S.
Government actually used its diplomatic
leverage to discourage any Russian
disarmament initiatives that might expose the
embarrassing extent of this post-deterrence,
post-Cold War American attachment to
nuclearism. This attachment has persisted, is
bipartisan in character, is shared with the
leadership and citizenry of the other nuclear
weapons states to varying degrees, and is
joined to an anti-proliferation regime that
hypocritically treats most states (Israel was
a notable exception) that aspire to have
nuclear weapons of their own as criminal
outlaws subject to military intervention.
Here is the lesson that applies to present:
the shock of the atomic attacks wears off, is
superseded by a restoration of normalcy,
which means creating the conditions for
repetition at greater magnitudes of death and
destruction. Such a pattern is accentuated,
as here, if the subject-matter of disaster is
clouded by the politics of the day that
obscured the gross immorality and criminality
of the acts, that ignored the fact that there
are governmental forces associated with the
military establishment that seek maximal hard
power, and that these professional
militarists are reinforced by paid cadres of
scientists, defense intellectuals, and
bureaucrats who build careers around the
weaponry, and that this structure is
reinforced in various ways by private sector
profit-making opportunities. These conditions
apply across the board to the business of
arms sales.
And then we must take account of the
incredible Faustian Bargain sold
to the non-nuclear world: give up a nuclear
weapons option and in exchange get an
unlimited pass to the
benefits of nuclear energy, and
besides, the nuclear weapons states, winking
to one another when negotiating the notorious
Nonproliferation Treaty (1963) promised in
good faith to pursue nuclear disarmament, and
indeed general and complete disarmament. Of
course, the bad half of the bargain has been
fulfilled, even in the face of the dire
experiences of Three Mile Island (1979) and
Chernobyl (1986), while the good half of the
bargain (getting rid of the weaponry) never
gave rise to even halfhearted proposals and
negotiations (and instead the world settled
irresponsibly for managerial fixes from time
to time, known as arms control
measures that were designed to stabilize the
nuclear rivalry of the U.S. and Soviet Union
(now Russia). Such a contention is confirmed
by the presidential commitment to devote an
additional $80 billion for the development of
nuclear weapons before the Senate could be
persuaded to ratify the New START Treaty in
late 2010, the latest arms control ruse that
was falsely promoted as a step toward
disarmament and denuclearization. There is
nothing intrinsically wrong with arms control,
it may reduce risks and costs, but it is not
disarmament, and should not presented as if
it is.
It is with this background in mind that the
unfolding Japanese mega-tragedy must be
understood and its effects on future policy
discussed in a preliminary manner. This
extraordinary disaster originated in a
natural event beyond human reckoning and
control. An earthquake of unimaginable fury,
measuring an unprecedented 9.0 on the Richter
Scale, unleashing a deadly tsunami that
reached a height of 30 feet, and swept inland
in the Sendai area of northern Japan to an
incredible distance up to 6 kilometers. It is
still too early to count the dead, the
injured, the property damage, and the overall
human costs, but we know enough by now to
realize that the impact is colossal, that
this is a terrible happening that will be
permanently seared into the collective
imagination of humanity, perhaps the more so,
because it is the most visually recorded epic
occurrence in all of history, with real time
video recordings of its catastrophic
moments of truth.
But this natural disaster that has been
responsible for massive human suffering has
been compounded by its nuclear dimension, the
full measure of which remains uncertain at
this point, although generating a deepening
foreboding that is perhaps magnified by
calming reassurances by the corporate
managers of nuclear power in Japan who have
past blemishes on their safety record, as
well as by political leaders, including the
Naoto Kan who understandably wants to avoid
causing the Japanese public to shift from its
current posture of traumatized witnessing to
one of outright panic. There is also a lack
of credibility based, especially, on a long
record of false reassurances and cover ups by
the Japanese nuclear industry, hiding and
minimizing the effects of a 2007 earthquake
in Japan, and actually lying about the extent
of damage to a reactor at that time and on
other occasions. What we need to understand
is that the vulnerabilities of modern
industrial society accentuate vulnerabilities
that arise from extreme events in nature.
There is no doubt that the huge earthquake/tsunami
constellation of forces was responsible for
great damage and societal distress, but its
overall impact has been geometrically
increased by this buying into the Faustian
Bargain of nuclear energy, whose risks, if
objectively assessed, were widely known for
many years. It is the greedy profit-seekers,
who minimize these risks, whether in the Gulf
of Mexico or Fukushima or on Wall Street, and
then scurry madly at the time of disaster to
shift responsibilities to the victims that
make me tremble as I contemplate the human
future. These predatory forces are made more
formidable because they have cajoled most
politicians into complicity and have many
corporatized allies in the media that
overwhelm the publics of the world with
steady doses of misinformation.
The reality of current nuclear dangers in
Japan are far stronger than these words of
reassurance that claim the risks to health
are minimal because the radioactivity are
being contained to avoid dangerous levels of
contamination. A more trustworthy measure of
the perceived rising dangers can be gathered
from the continual official expansions of the
evacuation zone around the six Fukushima
Daiichi reactors from 3 km to 10 km, and more
recently to 18 km, coupled with the
instructions to everyone caught in the region
to stay indoors indefinitely, with windows
and doors sealed. We can hope and pray that
the four explosions that have so far taken
place in the Fukushima Daiichi complex of
reactors will not lead to further explosions
and a full meltdown in one or more of the
reactors. Even without a meltdown the near
certain venting of highly toxic radioactive
steam to prevent unmanageable pressure from
building up due to the boiling water in the
reactor cores and spent fuel rods is likely
to spread risks and bad effects. It is a
policy dilemma that has assumed the form of a
living nightmare: either allow the heat to
rise and confront the high probability of
reactor meltdowns or vent the steam and
subject large numbers of persons in the
vicinity and beyond to radioactivity,
especially should the wind shift southwards
carrying the steam toward Tokyo or westward
toward northern Japan or Korea. In reactors 1,
2, and 3 are at risk of meltdowns, while with
the shutdown reactors 4,5, and 6 pose the
threat of fire releasing radioactive steam
from the spent fuel rods.
We know that throughout Asia alone some 3,000
new reactors are either being built or have
been planned and approved. We know that
nuclear power has been touted in the last
several years as a major source of energy to
deal with future energy requirements, a way
of overcoming the challenge of peak
oil and of combating global warming by
some decrease in carbon emissions. We know
that the nuclear industry will contend that
it knows how to build safe reactors in the
future that will withstand even such
impossible events that have
wrought such havoc in the Sendai region of
Japan, while at the same time lobbying for
insurance schemes to avoid such risks. Some
critics of nuclear energy facilities in Japan
and elsewhere had warned that these Fukushima
reactors sme built more than 40 years ago had
become accident-prone and should no longer
have been kept operational. And we know that
governments will be under great pressure to
renew the Faustian Bargain despite what
should have been clear from the moment the
bombs fell in 1945: This technology is far
too unforgiving and lethal to be managed
safely over time by human institutions, even
if they were operated responsibly, which they
are not. It is folly to persist, but it is
foolhardy to expect the elites of the world
to change course, despite this dramatic
delivery of vivid reminders of human
fallibility and culpability. We cannot hope
to control the savageries of nature, although
even these are being intensified by our
refusal to take responsible steps to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, but we can, if the
will existed, learn to live within prudent
limits even if this comes to mean a less
materially abundant and an altered life style.
The failure to take seriously the
precautionary principle as a guide to social
planning is a gathering dark cloud menacing
all of our futures.
Let us fervently hope that this Sendai
disaster will not take further turns for the
worse, but that the warnings already embedded
in such happenings, will awaken enough people
to the dangers on this path of hyper-modernity
so that a politics of limits can arise to
challenge the prevailing politics of
limitless growth. Such a challenge must
include the repudiation of a neoliberal
worldview, insisting without compromise on an
economics based on needs and people rather
than on profit margins and capital efficiency.
Advocacy of such a course is admittedly a
long shot, but so is the deadly utopian
realism of staying on the nuclear course,
whether it be with weapons or reactors. This
is what Sendai should teach all of us! But
will it?
Richard Falk is an international law and
international relations scholar who taught at
Princeton University for forty years. Since
2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara,
California, and taught at the local campus of
the University of California in Global and
International Studies and since 2005 chaired
the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
He initiated this blog partly in celebration
of his 80th birthday
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