The extensive damage to the world’s largest nuclear power plant during Monday’s earthquake in Japan once again raises serious concerns about the safety of nuclear generation. The seven-tower Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in central Japan suffered more than 50 separate faults as a result of the quake and released more radioactive water and gas into the atmosphere than its owners first admitted.
The argument that nuclear power was a cheap source of energy has long since been discredited. Atomic power may be cheap to produce but the initial capital cost of a nuclear plant is high, the final decommissioning bill immense and the safe and secure storage of nuclear waste material an expensive burden that must be shouldered by our descendants for centuries to come. Nevertheless the strong argument remains that nuclear power is an nonpolluting source of energy — which is surely correct as long as there is no escape of radiation, a long-term and deadly pollutant.
Japan, part of the Pacific Ocean’s so-called Ring of Fire, sits on a meeting point of tectonic plates that make it one of the most earthquake-prone regions in the world, yet it has 55 reactors and is the third-largest generator of nuclear power after the United States and France. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant was designed to withstand quakes of up to 6.5 on the Richter scale. One must question how this benchmark was established. Why not 6.6 points? What cost-benefit analysis led to the conclusion that 6.5 points is adequate? Monday’s temblor was 6.8. Twelve years ago Kobe was shattered in a quake of 6.9 that killed nearly 6,500. The greatest quake Japan has experienced — the Great Kanto in 1923 is estimated to have been between 7.9 and 8.4 on the Richter scale. It must therefore be asked why anybody thought of designing and building, let alone authorizing a massive nuclear plant incapable of withstanding such extreme quakes.
Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said yesterday that Japan should thoroughly investigate the incident to “make sure that we learn the necessary lesson from the earthquake.” That has to be the understatement of the year. The lesson is already quite clear: Unless Japan’s nuclear industry, which already has a long and troubled record, can demonstrate that all its nuclear reactors can withstand the most extreme earthquakes, they should be shut down. It simply does not make sense to build such potentially deadly plants in known areas of seismic activity. Such a constraint applies equally to Iran, which is pressing ahead with its apparently peaceful nuclear generation program despite also being in one of the world’s more active earthquake zones.
If the building and safety technology can be developed to construct atomic plants so they are proof against the very worst seismic events, then it should be used to replace existing plant in earthquake prone areas. Alternatively there are parts of the world where seismic activity is both rare and moderate. Is there not perhaps a long-term argument to site major nuclear power generation complexes in these places and export the electricity to countries where the risk is very much higher? As globalization increases this will surely make sense.
