Global Perspectives on Nuclear Safety and Security After 3-11

Peter Hayes

Summary

The earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 did more than just devastate Japan and unleash a local nuclear disaster. They exposed a host of design flaws in current nuclear technology whose solutions are linked to dramatically unsettling security issues.

The nuclear power industry spent decades distancing itself in the public mind from the dangers of radiation released by nuclear weapons. Having largely overcome that psychological obstacle in many countries, it first had to overcome the immense challenges to sustaining public trust posed first by the Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in March 1979 and then the catastrophic failure of the Chernobyl reactor complex in April 1986.

In the last decade, with a self-proclaimed mandate to produce "low-carbon electricity" in the face of global warming, the industry looked set for a renaissance, especially in Asia - the only growth market for nuclear power plants in the last two decades.

Then came 3-11. On March 11, 2011, at 14 minutes before 3 o'clock in the afternoon the massive Tohoku earthquake unleashed a tsunami that killed some 20,000 people and swept over the Fukushima reactor complex, inundating buildings with water that rose up to 15 meters above sea level. In seconds, decades of public relations work was demolished. The global future for nuclear power is now dim although not yet pitch black.

Fukushima once again demonstrated the inherent risks associated with existing reactor technology. In the process it fused the issues of nuclear safety and nuclear security, which the industry and pro-nuclear governments had striven for decades to separate. As Indian physicist M.V. Ramana wrote after 3-11, "Catastrophic nuclear accidents are inevitable, because designers and risk modelers cannot envision all possible ways in which complex systems can fail"-and in the case of nuclear power plants, like some other potentially very high impact technological failures-the consequences of nuclear power plant failure can be truly catastrophic." 1In this regard, a great many post-3-11 issues and options are being considered at the interface of nuclear safety and nuclear security. They include: