Editorial: Japan’s nuke meltdown shouldn’t close U.S. plants
There’s never a shortage of things for Americans to worry about — housing foreclosures, the teetering European economy, even bedbugs — so it’s no wonder the Japanese nuclear power plant catastrophe that transfixed the world in March has dropped down the list of things to lose sleep over.
But new reports suggest that the meltdown at one of the ill-fated Japanese reactors was even worse than originally thought, and large areas around the plant could be uninhabitable for decades.
Germany, not known for the types of natural disasters that triggered Japan’s crisis, responded to the Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster by shutting down eight of its 17 reactors and moving to phase out the rest by 2022. Should the United States follow suit?
In a word, no.
For all its drawbacks, nuclear power remains an indispensable part of the U.S. energy mix, reliably providing about 20% of the nation’s electricity with little to none of the greenhouse gas emissions generated by competitors such as coal, oil and natural gas. At a time when wind, solar and other renewable forms of energy are still a long way from being able to carry the 24/7 load for a nation increasingly reliant on computers and appliances, nuclear power makes sense — as long as Americans are confident it’s as safe as possible, which is where the lessons from Japan come in.
The Japanese disaster showed that it’s crucial to try to imagine the unimaginable — Japanese regulators apparently never thought that a tsunami would knock out the plant’s emergency electric supply. Here at home, designers of the North Anna nuclear power plant in central Virginia apparently never envisioned an earthquake as big as the one that struck the area in August and exceeded the plant’s supposed capacity. Luckily, the plant rode it out with no serious damage.
While earthquakes and floods are threats to nuclear plants, the worst threat of all is losing the backup electricity necessary to keep pumps running and water circulating to cool nuclear fuel rods. At first, the Japanese plants survived the earthquake and even the tsunami that followed, but when flooding knocked out the plant’s badly located backup electricity supply, the reactors lost cooling water and began to melt down. Eventually, explosions released radioactive gas, forcing the evacuation of more than 80,000 people and heavily contaminating an area three times the size of New York City.
Reassuringly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been focusing on the electricity problem. Plants now typically have just four hours of backup power (although some have ways to keep electricity going for 14 to 16 hours). The Fukushima plant was without power for several days. The commission is mulling new requirements, but it’s anywhere from two to four years from implementing new rules for U.S. nuclear power plants to forestall a Fukushima-style disaster. That seems unnecessarily leisurely.
Another troubling development: Members of the NRC are at each other’s throats, with Chairman Gregory Jaczko and the other four commissioners trading charges of obstinacy. The five are set to testify before Congress on Wednesday. It can’t be healthy that the people who are supposed to make sure the nation’s nuclear plants operate securely disagree so sharply on regulating the industry.
If history proves anything, it’s that nuclear power is a reliable part of the U.S. energy mix only to the extent that Americans are confident it’s safe. The last serious accident at a U.S. nuclear plant, at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979, set back the industry for decades. No new plant has opened in the U.S. since 1996. The only plant under construction is set to open in 2013.
Another serious accident could take the U.S. nuclear industry down with it. The Fukushima disaster serves as a reminder that, in nuclear power, there’s zero margin for major error.
-David Guttenfelder
