As you know, Japan was rocked by a massive series of earthquakes, aftershocks, and tsunamis. The Fukushima nuclear power plants are in trouble as a result (I’m not going into the technical details here because the story’s still developing). What I want to talk about is what this means for nuclear power.
Let’s take a look at the industry before this weekend before we look at how it is now. Nuclear power provides about 20% of the USA’s electricity, however we haven’t really built any new nuclear plants in the past couple decades. There are several reasons, including an overly cumbersome approval process, the Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) mentality, and financial concerns, but they all stem from the fact that nuclear power is irrationally feared and hated. The anti-nuclear fear mongers did a (sickeningly) great job turning the public perception against nuclear power following Three Mile Island (TMI) in1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. If anybody wants a case study on how to wage a fear-based campaign, this is the perfect one (we’re also seeing that replayed today in oil due to BP’s disaster).
How can I say the anti-nuclear fear is irrational? It’s very simple. In the 30+ years since TMI, our technology and knowledge bases in many heavy industries, including and especially nuclear power, have had tremendous advancement. The industry has learned from the incidents at TMI and Chernobyl and has evolved. In addition to the high level of redundancy and back-up systems built into nuclear plant designs (triple redundancy is common), they have procedures and contingency plans for just about everything.
The cruel irony is that those who fear the old designs and campaigned against new nuclear plants have actually succeeded in perpetuating the danger posed by those older plants by not allowing the older plants to be replaced by newer plants. They really didn’t think that one through very well.
How do I know all this? Not only has my father spent his entire career in nuclear power (military, then private sector), but I’ve also got an engineering background and I previously worked at a nuclear plant.
Let’s do a simple mathematical exercise to demonstrate the irrationality of the fear. This is the kind of stuff I do for my day job, but in aerospace instead of nuclear power. We have a redundant system, so we need two failures to create an unsafe condition. It’s an AND gate with two inputs. We’ll assume that each of those events has a 1% probability of occurrence. 1% is actually a very high probability in my line of work. We’re almost always required to be several orders of magnitude below that, as high as 0.1% to as low as 0.0000001% depending on severity. I’m using 1% to simplify this example. To figure out the probability of the AND gate, we multiply the two event probabilities together, so we’re doing 1% * 1%, which yields 0.01% (if this was an OR gate, we would add the probabilities, so 1% + 1% yields 2%). If we have a triple redundant system with three events at 1% each, we do 1% * 1% * 1% and we get 0.0001% (3% for an OR system). Nuclear systems are often triple-redundant, so even using a very high number at 1%, we’re looking at a 0.0001% probability. 0.0001% means one in a million, but remember, we used a high number in 1%. If you take that down an order of magnitude to 0.1%, we get 0.0000001% or one in a billion. These are worse odds than winning the lottery.
So what happens now? The anti-nuclear fear mongers are ready to exploit this crisis by declaring this is proof that every nuclear power plant must be shut down because they’re dangerous and all that nonsense. 23/104 US nuclear reactors are similar to Fukushima’s per the Nuclear Energy Institute. The pressure is already mounting to retire these “unsafe” plants. However, we must remember that the Fukushima incidents are only happening because of an epic natural disaster. It took an 8.9 earthquake, a tsunami, and a 6.6 aftershock to cause this. It should not be an attack on all nuclear power. Also, remember that nuclear power plants do not possess the destructive power of nuclear bombs. In brief, the physics don’t allow it.
Don’t let yourself get fooled by the anti-nuclear propaganda. Their fears don’t hold up upon critical review. Let reason prevail over fear. Nuclear power is still safe.
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