nuclear-news

Here’s how the slowly unfolding disaster known as climate change is similar to a nuclear power plant meltdown: Common-cause failure. In nuclear engineering parlance, a common-cause failure occurs when one event triggers breakdowns in multiple systems. At Fukushima Daiichi, for example, a huge earthquake and tsunami not only knocked out power from the grid but also destroyed nearby roads and swamped the plant’s emergency diesel generators, making it impossible to operate pumps that circulate cooling water to the reactors. The probability that any individual system—such as a single diesel generator—would fail at any given time was extremely small, which gave the false impression that there was an even more remote chance that multiple backup systems would fail simultaneously.

Climate change is likewise a matter of risk management and probabilities, as the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change points out. The report urges decision makers to consider the full range of possible scenarios, “including low-probability outcomes with large consequences.”

In a changing climate, a common-cause failure is most likely to begin with an extreme weather event, such as a heat wave, flood, or prolonged drought that would destabilize critical food, water, and energy systems. While the probability of failure in any one system—an electricity blackout, say—is normally quite low, an event such as a severe heat wave would increase the likelihood of everything from agricultural losses to wildfires. Human “backups” for dealing with a heat wave—such as indoor air conditioning and outdoor lawn watering—will not operate properly if water reservoirs are too low and the temperature of nearby water bodies is too high to provide adequate cooling for electricity-generating power plants.

In the bigger picture, a January report from the Government Accountability Office warns that climate change will affect oil and gas platforms, refineries, pipelines, power lines, and a host of other critical energy infrastructure, and that these impacts “may also be amplified by a number of broad, systemic factors, including water scarcity, energy system interdependencies, increased electricity demand, and the compounding effects of multiple climate impacts.”………

Complexity. Like a nuclear power plant, the climate is an inherently complex system. As Charles Perrow explained in his book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, the complexity of tightly coupled, interactive systems, such as nuclear power plants, makes accidents inevitable…………http://thebulletin.org/fukushima-earth7022