Nuclear industry expects scrutiny after leaks ! 
An explosion blew the roof off Japan’s earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 nuclear reactor yesterday. The explosion and radiation leaks at an earthquake-damaged nuclear plant in northern Japan will raise fresh questions about the country’s ambitious plans to develop nuclear energy, despite its troubled history there and years of grass-roots objections from a people uniquely sensitive to the ravages of nuclear destruction. The damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could also stir wider doubts in a world that, while long skeptical of nuclear energy’s safety, has increasingly accepted it as a source of clean energy in a time of mounting concerns about the environmental and public health toll of fossil fuels. In France, for example, green parties and environmental groups have called for an end to the dependence on nuclear power. Thousands of people demonstrated yesterday at a reactor near Stuttgart, Germany, against plans to extend the life of that country’s nuclear power stations. A failure of the 40-year-old Fukushima plant’s cooling system apparently caused the explosion, which destroyed a structure surrounding the reactor. The reactor was unaffected, government officials and Tokyo Electric Power said. They described the radiation leak as small and decreasing. Foreign analysts have concurred with their assessment so far, although Japanese plant operators have downplayed past accidents, wary of public reaction. The accident had unquestionably dealt a blow to the nuclear industry. While Japan may close the Daiichi plant, one of its oldest, and point to the safety of its newer facilities, that may not satisfy public concerns in Japan and elsewhere. Decades ago, after the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accidents, the nuclear industry tried to argue that newer reactors incorporated much better safety features. Benjamin Leyre, a utilities industry analyst with Exane BNP Paribas in Paris, said politicians in Europe and elsewhere will almost certainly come under increased pressure to revisit safety measures at existing and planned nuclear power plants and that a pause in development could result. US Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts said yesterday that the nuclear problems in Japan “could very easily occur here,’’ noting that 23 US nuclear power plants — including Pilgrim and Vermont Yankee — have the same type of containment design. Markey, a longtime critic of the nuclear industry, said the United States should place a moratorium on locating new nuclear reactors in seismically active areas until there is a comprehensive analysis of their earthquake and tsunami resiliency, emergency response, and evacuation plans. He also suggested shoring up containment at reactors in earthquake-prone zones and studying whether design flaws were part of the problem in Japan. Markey wants a review to see if backup power and reactor coolant systems are adequate to deal with long power outages that could occur from earthquakes, terrorism or other major disasters. Nuclear advocates argued that Japan’s accident in many ways was singular and might have been mishandled, and that it resulted from a natural disaster on a scale never before experienced in Japan. They said excavating fossil fuels has its own history of catastrophic accidents, including the recent BP oil spill and coal mine collapses. Critics of nuclear energy have long questioned the viability of relying on nuclear power in earthquake-prone regions. |
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