nuclear-news

Nuclear industry must face up to chance of freaky disasters

it is definitely time to shut down this industry

Fukushima Study: Think About Unthinkable Disasters, SciTech Today,

July 28, 2014

According to a National Academy of Sciences report, the U.S. nuclear industry must think about earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, solar storms, multiple failures and situations that seem freakishly unusual. The 2011 Japanese Fukushima accident, caused by an earthquake and tsunami, should not have been a surprise, the report says. A U.S. science advisory report says Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident offers a key lesson to the nation’s nuclear industry: Focus more on the highly unlikely but worst case scenarios.

That means thinking about earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, solar storms, multiple failures and situations that seem freakishly unusual, according to Thursday’s National Academy of Sciences report. Those kinds of things triggered the world’s three major nuclear accidents.

“We need to do a soul searching when it comes to the assumptions” of how to deal with worst case events, said University of Southern California engineering professor Najmedin Meshkati, the panel’s technical adviser. Engineers should “think about something that could happen once every, perhaps 1,000 years” but that’s not really part of their training or nature, he said.

You have to totally change your mode of thinking because complacency and hubris is the worst enemy to nuclear safety,” Meshkati said in an interview……..

David Lochbaum of the activist group Union of Concerned Scientists said the problem is that federal law financially protects the U.S. nuclear industry from accidents gives utilities little incentive to spend money on low-probability, high-consequence problems.……

Another issue the report raised was about how far radiation may go in a worst case accident.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission orders plants to have emergency plans for a zone of 10 miles around a nuclear plant. But the academy study said Fukushima showed that “may prove inadequate” if a similar accident happened in the U.S. People nearly 19 miles away in Japan needed protectionfrom radiation. But the committee would not say what would be a good emergency zone. http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=130007CN9W8O

July 30, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA