Prepare for the next nuclear power plant accident

World Needs to Get Ready for Next Nuclear Power Plant Accident Bloomberg business Week, By Yuriy Humber April 03, 2014 Three major atomic accidents in 35 years are forcing the world’s nuclear industry to stop imagining it can prevent more catastrophes and to focus instead on how to contain them.

Of the 176 new reactors planned across the globe, half will be in nations that had no nuclear plants when disaster crippled the U.S. Three Mile Island reactor in 1979 and the Chernobyl reactor blew up in present day Ukraine in 1986.

As countries such as China and India embrace atomic power even after the Fukushima reactor meltdowns in 2011 caused mass evacuations because of radiation fallout, scientists warn the next nuclear accident is waiting to happen and could be in a country with little experience to deal with it.

“The cold truth is that, no matter what you do on the technological improvements side, accidents will occur — somewhere, someplace,” said Joonhong Ahn, a professor at the Department of Nuclear Engineering of University of California, Berkeley. The consequences of radiation release, contamination and evacuation of people is “clear and obvious,” Ahn said. That means governments and citizens should be prepared, not just nuclear utilities, he said……..

Still, the association defends the global safety record of nuclear power, ……

The problem is that the causes of the three events followed no pattern, and the inability to immediately contain them escalated the episodes into global disasters with huge economic, environmental and political consequences. Even if no deaths have yet been officially linked to Fukushima radiation, for example, cleanup costs have soared to an estimated $196 billion and could take more than four decades to complete.

If nuclear is to remain a part of the world’s energy supply, the industry must come up with solutions to make sure contamination — and all other consequences — do not spread beyond station grounds, Gregory Jaczko, ex-chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in an interview in Tokyo.

“We have this accident and people will say, you know, it was caused by this and that,” Jaczko said. “But the next accident is going to be something different. Nobody can tell you where or when or what exactly it is going to be. You really need to do more on the consequence side.”……..

Real Consequences

The usefulness of the math after the world’s three major civilian accidents is academic, according to Jaczko.

“Once you have an accident, a low-probability and high consequence event, you can no longer call it a low probability event,” Jaczko said. “It is an event that’s happened and you cannot ignore the consequences simply because it was never supposed to happen. The consequences are real. Probabilities are always hypothetical.”

It was not until the late 1970s that analysis and large-scale testing began of what could happen in case of an atomic accident, according to the London-based WNA. The WNA says that testing — and the Fukushima disaster in March 2011 — show that “even the worst possible accident in a conventional western nuclear power plant or its fuel would not likely cause dramatic public harm.” http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-04-03/world-needs-to-get-ready-for-next-nuclear-power-plant-accident