The Nuclear Catastrophe of Fukushima will cast its shadow for a decade before its corrected, contained, cleaned up, if ever.

How the world addresses the mistakes, poor design, aging plants and poor locations bears watching.

Entergy operates Vermont Yankee and Pilgrim Nuclear, both the same age and design as Fukushima, yet there are other plants of the same age and design that imperil us.

Evacuees dressed in protective suits during a Fukushima memorial service in 2012. (photo: Kim Kyung-hoon/Reuters)

Nuclear Regulation in a Post-Fukushima World

By Guardian UK

26 November 13

our article on Japan's nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima was right to recognise the need for the UK to learn from such a disaster (Japan's nuclear warning to the UK: be prepared for the worst, 20 November). As regulator for the nuclear industry in the UK we identified some key lessons to take from this devastating incident. They are: the need for a systematic approach to identifying events that could lead to accidents; robust measures to prevent those events progressing this far; and effective periodic review of safety analyses, to make sure they continue to meet high and continuously evolving regulatory standards. Fortunately, the UK acknowledged these requirements over 20 years ago and they were codified by the Office for Nuclear Regulation in its site licence conditions and safety assessment principles. Companies proposing the construction of new nuclear power stations in the UK must show they will meet these requirements and address specific issues identified in the chief nuclear inspector's reports on the Fukushima accident. More information on these publications and the generic design assessment process for new reactor designs is available on our website (www.hse.gov.uk/nuclear/).

Andy Hall
First deputy chief inspector, Office for Nuclear Regulation

• Welcome as Tepco president Naomi Hirose's admission of the seriousness of the Fukushima accident is (Editorial, 21 November), it may be a bit naive to accept that the whole accident was down to a lack of seals on doors. There were reports early on - denied by Tepco, but then so were many things that we now know were true - that at least one of the reactors lost cooling as a result of a pipe fracture caused by the earthquake and not the tsunami. With or without the rubber seals, the lack of nitrogen-purging equipment, which led to the hydrogen explosions, was a major failure in the "in-depth" safety strategy.

A taste of the attitude of "nuclear insiders" at the time comes from a report of a conference in Chicago one month after the accident headed: "Fukushima - a PR problem soon to fade from public attention?" I suppose we must be grateful for the question mark.

 

Nuclear propagandists, including some quoted in this newspaper, insist there will be practically no health consequences from the accident, but they misrepresent the evidence, insisting that at doses below 100 millisieverts [mSv] risk can be neglected. This, as the study of the survivors of the atomic bombings in Japan has shown, is not the case: risk is proportional to dose from a threshold at zero dose to 2 Sv. This misrepresentation permits a policy of indefinite duration, endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that allows children to live with an annual external dose up to 20 mSv and which I calculate would increase the lifetime cancer risk of a child by up to 7% over a decade.

 

Perhaps the question is: is the nuclear industry sufficiently responsible to manage the technology?

Keith Baverstock
Department of environmental sciences, University of Eastern Finland

• Your editorial was a reminder of the sad events associated with Fukushima Daiichi and the undeniable challenges associated with the cleanup programme. Perspective and context are, however, important. In his recent review (8 November) of Robert Stone's film Pandora's Promise, which relays an environmentalist view on the arguments for embracing nuclear power, Damian Carrington observed of the concerns regarding safety: "As it happens, I think these concerns are overblown too. The harm to human health resulting from nuclear power is tiny compared to other energy sources, principally coal. The cancers caused by leaks from nuclear power stations are small in number compared to the deaths resulting from the air pollution caused by fossil fuel burning."

The safety record of the global nuclear industry is undeniably better than that of just about any other energy-generating technology. The seriousness with which governments and regulators internationally took their responsibility post-Fukushima in ensuring the safety of operating power plants is commendable. It is this culture that drives the design of current and future-generation nuclear power stations that will be deployed in the UK; enhanced safety and greater resistance to external environmental influences have been key.

 

The one thing the planet cannot afford is climate change. If current projections are anything like right, it is in a different league from any other environmental problem imaginable. Until it is possible to store electricity on a much greater scale than today, variable renewables are not able to provide the reliable electricity we need day in day out, which never falls below about 20,000MW in the UK. So it's coal, gas or nuclear for this segment of our power demand. Unless carbon capture and storage really takes off - and even then it does not eliminate carbon emissions from fossil fuel use - the choice is simply nuclear power or high greenhouse gas emissions.

Prof Martin Freer Director, Birmingham Centre for Nuclear Education and Research, University of Birmingham, Prof Laurence Harwood University of Reading, Prof Bruce Hanson Professor of nuclear process engineering, University of Leeds, Prof Bill Lee Director, Centre for Nuclear Engineering, Imperial College London, Prof James Marrow University of Oxford, Stephen Tindale Associate fellow, Centre for European Reform

• Naomi Hirose's advice should surely be listened to before work on the nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point is started. And has sufficient consideration been given to a comparison with the cost and benefits of the oft-discussed Severn Barrage, which would use only the power of nature to generate electricity - for ever - and leave no harmful waste products to be stored for generations afterwards?

John Howes
London


• The Fukushima tsunami was a unique event. I hope the tsunami that swept over Hinkley Point and the Somerset levels in 1607 was also a unique event.

James Bruges
Bristol


• Every Friday since August 2012, Kick Nuclear (to which I belong) and Japanese Against Nuclear UK have jointly organised a vigil outside the Japanese embassy in Piccadilly, followed by one outside Tepco's London offices nearby. These vigils are held in solidarity with protests in Japan in sympathy with the many victims of the Fukushima disaster, and to call for the UK government to abandon its plans for a new generation of nuclear power stations in this country, to avoid the possibility of a similar disaster here.

David Polden
London