Yes

by B. J. Deming

Created on: March 26, 2011

Japan’s nuclear disaster is indeed a wake-up call for the rest of the world that the risks of nuclear power as an energy source outweigh the benefits. There are limits to how much we can plan for when setting up contingency plans for a new technology. It may turn out, as well, that cleanup after a nuclear accident is impossible. Time will tell, but we need to think about that possibility.

A brief overview of this complex situation will give context for the discussion that follows.

♦ The facts

To maintain its highly developed status as a society, as well as its technological edge, Japan needs all the energy sources it can get.

Japan has a population of over 127 million people; and the Greater Tokyo Area is the world’s largest metropolitan area. The nation’s economy is the third largest in the world, and Japan is among the world’s leaders in scientific research. Its Kayuga space program, which sent a spacecraft to orbit the Moon and study it for 19 months, was the largest lunar mission since Apollo.

Japan is short on energy, though. Domestic energy resources and production meet only 16% of its needs, and so it has become the world’s largest importer of coal and liquefied natural gas, the third largest importer of oil, and the third largest consumer of nuclear power.

In 2008, the country used 964 billion kilowatt hours (KWH) of electricity and generated 1015 billion KWH, with 28% of that electricity coming from coal-powered plants, 26% from liquefied natural gas, 24% from nuclear power, less than 10% from oil, 8% from hydroelectric power, and the rest from wind and solar power. The government plans to boost the contribution of nuclear power in this mix to 40% by 2017 and 50% by 2030. Anyway, that was the plan until March 11, 2011.

♦ The earthquake and its consequences

Volcanoes, hot springs, earthquakes, and even the archipelago itself owe their existence to the geological fact that, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), two crustal tectonic plates meet offshore to the east, in a subduction zone known as the Japan Trench, where the edge of one plate slips underneath the edge of the other one.

Subduction isn’t a smooth process. Sometimes parts of a plate edge will get “stuck” and then suddenly release. That happened at 2:46 P.M. local time on March 11, 2011, about 80 miles off Japan’s northeastern coast. When the fault line in the Japan Trench between the two plates slipped. The USGS says, “the fault moved upwards of 30-40 m, and slipped over an area approximately 300 km long...by 150 km wide....”

The shaking that resulted in northeastern Japan was terrible, but there was surprisingly little damage because the Japanese have lived through many major temblors and are long-time pioneers of the art and science of earthquake-resistant building and system design. Some train and energy systems did automatically shut down during the shaking. This included the three online reactors at Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant (three more had been shut down for maintenance before the earthquake happened).

Had that been the end of it all, it would have been a triumph of humanity over Nature. However, the vertical movement along the fault in the deep trench offshore had displaced a lot of sea water above, and as a result, a number of long-period waves were now spreading out from the epicenter very quickly. When the wave fronts of this big tsunami hit Japan, they were moving extremely fast, and they were high: an estimated 46 feet high at the Fukushima 1 plant.

The terrible destruction that followed all along the coast, as well as the unfolding nuclear crisis, have been reported extensively in the media. As of this writing, there are some 17,000 missing people; damage is still being tallied; and the problem-plagued attempts at control and clean-up continue at Fukushima 1.

However, it’s time now to discuss in more detail why this nuclear accident is a wake-up call for the rest of the world.

♦ Planning has its limits when dealing with high technology

The Japanese were prepared for a tsunami at Fukushima 1, which sits less than 5 miles from sea: by regulation, it was designed to resist a tidal wave almost 19 feet high. That is a huge, very rare wave, but the one that actually did come in was 2-1/2 times as high, and after it hit, a cascade of unexpected problems developed.

Batteries to operate plant equipment only lasted some eight hours, and then for reasons that are still unclear, could not be replaced. No power for instruments meant that it was impossible to know for sure just what was happening as one reactor after another heated up. Spent fuel rods that had been placed in pools not surrounded by containment domes weren’t supposed to heat up, but they did, forcing crews to devise quick emergency measures to fend off a catastrophic explosion into the atmosphere.

Tokyo had to endure rolling 3-hour blackouts immediately after the disaster. This actually can be traced back to the decisions of planners who were faced with a new and powerful technology…back in the late 1800s!

Regions were more isolated then, commercial electricity was a new phenomenon, and no one had any idea that there might one day be serious consequences if the Tokyo region bought generators that ran on an alternating current of 50 Hz, while equipment in western Japan came from another supplier who used an alternating current of 60 Hz. As a national grid developed, the Japanese came up with frequency-changing stations that could handle up to 1 gigawatt.  After March 11, though, eastern Japan lost 9.7 gigawatts of electrical production capacity, and so the blackouts had to happen.

When trying to set up a brand-new technology for practical purposes, it just isn’t possible to foresee all the problems that may come out of it at some point, because we can’t predict the future. The nuclear accident in Japan shows how much more we need to understand the long-term consequences of committing ourselves to an equivalent investment in nuclear power (up to 50% of the energy mix).

♦ Clean-up is everybody’s problem

Soviet experts in 1986 just threw a very thick containment dome over the reactor at Chernobyl after the disaster there and evacuated the surrounding region, ending the immediate dangers from the incident relatively quickly.

Things seem to be much more drawn out and cautious at Fukushima, and that isn’t surprising. Japan really needs all the energy sources it can get. They are trying to clean up the reactor complex at Fukushima 1 and also to preserve as much of the equipment in working order as possible.

However, there is another cascade of problems showing up. The radiation crisis is hindering the search for bodies from the tsunami. Tokyo’s tap water was temporarily contaminated. Sea water and ground water in some areas has shown unsafe levels of radiation at times. The evacuation zone around the plant is quietly being extended. There are warnings not to eat certain agricultural products from the stricken zone. And so it goes on and on.

There are global concerns, too, and not just the worst-case scenario of a radioactive plume. Passengers on international flights have been found with higher levels of radiation than usual. International shipping patterns around Tokyo are changed, and as just one result, Toyota plants in the United States may have to close down for a while if they cannot get replacement parts.

This disaster reminds us all how difficult it is to handle a nuclear accident. While the Japanese may understandably be approaching this clean-up with an eye to the future, it still isn’t established that an accident can ever really be handled completely. The reactor at Chernobyl, after all, is still burning.

As we wonder what will be the final outcome at Fukushima 1, we should also be looking at our own reactors and asking ourselves if we could do any better if it happened here, and whether it is really worth building any more.

More information:

“Country Analysis Briefs:  Japan” (March 2011). United States Department of Energy, Energy Information Agency, at http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/Japan/pdf.pdf (Adobe Acrobat Reader required).

“Japan” (n.d.) Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan

“How a Legacy from the 1800s Is Making Tokyo Dark Today” (March 18, 2011), Dylan Tweney, at http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/03/tech-legacy-tokyo/

“Magnitude 9.0 Near the East Coast of Honshu, Japan: Earthquake Summary” (March 24, 2011).  United States Geological Survey, at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqinthenews/2011/usc0001xgp/#summary

“Tsunami!” (March 29, 2005).  University of Washington Department of Earth and Space Sciences, at http://www.ess.washington.edu/tsunami/index.html

“Fukushima 1 nuclear accidents” (n.d.)  Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents

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