12 - Nuclear Energy

Summary

Introduction

This chapter of the first edition was written before the meltdown of three of the six reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The failure was caused by the earthquake and tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011. All safety systems survived the earthquake itself and worked as designed until the tsunami came over the seawall protecting the site 40 minutes later and drowned out all the emergency power systems which were located in the basements of the generator buildings. Since Japan is regarded as one of the most technically sophisticated countries of the world, there was concern that if this could happen in Japan, perhaps nuclear energy was too risky to use.

The Japanese Diet set up its own investigations committee which reported in the harshest language that the accident was entirely human-caused, caused by what we would call “regulatory capture” where the regulators come too close to the regulated and do not enforce the rules properly [35]. (This is the same situation which was the root cause of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in April of 2010.)

The resurgence of nuclear power mentioned at the beginning of this chapter in the first edition was briefly paused for rethinking after Fukushima. It is back on track in most of Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and in parts of South America. Of the reactors in the planning stage in the United States before Fukushima, four are under construction, and if they come in on time and on budget, more will be built. In Europe, only Germany and the Netherlands plan to phase out their nuclear power (the third phase-out for Germany; the first being after the Chernobyl disaster, the second being the phase-out of the first phase-out when they rescinded the law requiring the phase-out of nuclear, and the third being the current one).