The Japan Effect
U.S. Nuclear Reactors Return to the Spotlight after Fukushima
By James Michael Brodie
As Japan continues to recover from the worst nuclear disaster in decades, nuclear regulators in the U.S. are taking a second look at American reactors.
And while Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials and others are confident in the safety of the U.S. reactors, which account for roughly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, they admit that Fukushima has returned the spotlight to an energy source once at the center of controversy.
“U.S. plants have always been designed keeping severe events in mind,” NRC spokesman Scott Burrell told Career Engineer. “The analyses we tend to do focus on individual events. But plants are designed to deal with a wide range of events, and we believe we have the staff and procedures to keep the public safe.”
Concerns over how U.S. plants would withstand the type of double whammy of a major earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit the Fukushima Daichi nuclear reactors in March caused the NRC to order a review of all of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors.
Speaking in May to an NRC panel reviewing the Japanese disaster and the potential for the same in the U.S., the head of the agency’s reactor task force reported that licensees were not required to protect certain equipment from natural phenomena, adding that they were only required to store equipment at a safe distance from a fire or blast. Licensees were also not required to have sufficient resources, staff, or equipment for some aspects of a multiunit event response.
“Current requirements do not cover some elements of the Fukushima scenario, nor were they designed to do so,” said Charles Miller, director of the NRC’s Office of Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management Programs and Chair of the NRC Task Force. “These locations may not be protected from flooding or seismic events.”
Anatomy of a Disaster
The disaster at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power complex was the worst nuclear calamity since the 1986 meltdown of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the Ukraine-Belarus border.
On March 11, a magnitude 9.0 quake shook the complex, located of off the coast of Honshu Island, automatically shutting down three reactors. Another three were undergoing routine maintenance and were not operating, according to published reports. The tremor also knocked the plant off of the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) power grid, although backup diesel generators, intended to run pumps to keep the water in the reactor from boiling, kicked in to continue cooling.
Later that day, a 46-foot-high tsunami, created by the earthquake, overran the plant site, knocked out the generators and washed away fuel tanks. As temperatures inside the reactor rose, another backup system started that used steam-powered pumps and battery-powered valves.
TEPCO tried flooding one of the units with seawater until an aftershock forced them to stop. It was a last-resort step that would have written off the reactor. As the crisis worsened, TEPCO pumped in seawater and boric acid to prevent a meltdown.
Over time, Japan’s health ministry reported that radioactive iodine and cesium exceeding allowable levels of consumption were showing up in milk and leafy vegetables near the plant, and in tap water.
Reginald DesRoches, Ph.D., professor and associate chair with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Career Engineer that recent reports coming out of Japan indicate that the situation is a lot worse than previously reported, with the cores of all three reactors experiencing meltdown. He added that worries over a Fukushima-type accident in the U.S. could make it more difficult for new plants to get approvals, particularly those in areas of high earthquake risk.
“The Fukushima disaster was very rare,” DesRoches said, “but can happen in the U.S. We need to be concerned about all of our nuclear plants and need to make sure that they are designed and maintained to withstand the proper level of seismic hazard.”
Wakeup Call
The Japan disaster has sparked a renewed interest in U.S. nuclear power at a time when the nation grapples with how such power fits the nation’s future energy needs.
“The importance of Fukushima would be that it further improves the safety of reactors, says Farzad Rahnema, Ph.D., chair of the Nuclear and Radiological Engineering/Medical Physics Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “U.S. reactors are very safe. We don’t have any of the issues they had in Japan.”
NSBE member Magali Koyo, an electrical engineer with the Palisades Power Plant, near Kalamazoo, Mich., says it is impossible to predict whether what happened in Japan could also take place in the U.S.
“It is difficult to answer questions until we have a better understanding of the precise problems and conditions that faced the operators at Fukushima Daiichi,” says Koyo. “We do know that Fukushima Daiichi reactors 1–4 lost all AC power. This situation is called ‘station blackout.’ “
“U.S. nuclear power plants are designed to cope with a station blackout event that involves a loss of offsite power and onsite emergency power, and are required to conduct a ‘coping’ assessment and develop a strategy to demonstrate to the NRC that they could maintain the plant in a safe condition during a station blackout scenario,” Koyo says.
Natural disasters notwithstanding, she says, nuclear power plants are designed for safe operation for a number of natural and man-made disasters.
“Containment of radioactive materials is a well-known and well-practiced activity at nuclear facilities. Strict federal regulations direct users of the material to safely store and monitor their radioactive materials onsite,” Koyo says. “Since the general public has no reference point to compare them to, these events appear to be overwhelming.”
Nuclear Debate Continues
Fukushima has given new life to groups on both sides of the nuclear power debate.
In March, shortly after the meltdown, antinuclear activists No Nukes Pennsylvania — who now include Japan on its list of nuclear hot spots — gathered at the gates of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which on March 28, 1979 was the site of the world’s first major nuclear power plant disaster.
“Three Mile Island was not as bad as people make it out to be,” says NSBE member Carles Miller, P.E., business development manager at Burns & McDonnell Engineering in Kansas City, Mo. “Chernobyl was perhaps the worst accident we would ever hope to see. That one melted down to the core and released radiation into the air. And Fukushima still has had less of an impact on public safety than Chernobyl. What has gotten lost in this is that (there) was an earthquake and a tsunami that killed a lot more people.”
Miller says that although Fukushima’s disaster is significant, it still will not be as dire as Chernobyl.
“They had at least eight hours to get backup power to the plant. As an electrical engineer, one big (thought) that came to mind for me was that you need to have a staging of power,” he says. “If this happens in the U.S., and this happened in California, I feel like we could get the resources there.”
In April, antinuclear groups came to Washington to protest construction of a plant on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River site in South Carolina, where plutonium from weapons would be reprocessed into fuel for nuclear power plants. Protestors called the plan expensive and dangerous.
In July, the Iowa State Senate decided not to pass a bill that would pave the way for MidAmerican Energy to charge ratepayers in advance for new nuclear reactor construction. The utility would have been allowed to keep the money even if construction was never completed.
Post-Fukushima concerns about nuclear power doomed the proposal, according to a SurveyUSA poll in April released by the antinuclear group Friends of the Earth. It found that nearly three quarters of Iowans were opposed to the measure and that 70 percent would rather the state invest in renewable energy than nuclear. A Washington Post poll showed 64 percent of Americans are opposed to building new reactors.
This year alone, state legislatures rejected construction of reactors in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Missouri.
“Though many utilities, lawmakers and regulatory commissioners continue to blindly support building new nuclear reactors that put ratepayers at risk, the public is growing ever more skeptical of nuclear power,” says Sara Barczak, program director with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
But another survey, released in June, reached a very different conclusion. That survey, released by the Bisconti Research for the Nuclear Energy Institute, found that a majority of residents living around nuclear facilities in the U.S. continue to support nuclear energy. According to the study, 80 percent of residents living near nuclear facilities said they favored the use of nuclear energy as one way to provide electricity to the U.S. Half “strongly favored” the use of nuclear energy, compared with 11 percent who were “strongly opposed.”
Nuclear Future
Last year, President Barack Obama announced more than $8 billion in federal loan guarantees for the construction of the first nuclear power plant in the U.S. since the 1980s, and called nuclear energy an essential element in his plan to shift the nation from fossil fuels to cleaner nuclear forms of energy.
“Our competitors are racing to create jobs and command growing energy industries. And nuclear energy is no exception,” Obama said in 2010.
“I get what he wants to do,” says NSBE member Tarla TaMia Toomer, an engineer working with nuclear power for the federal government. “We are going to have to diversify. But we also have to educate the public about the benefits.”
The president did acknowledge what he called nuclear energy’s “serious drawbacks” and called for safe storage of nuclear waste and the strictest safety standards for the plants. William Miller praised President Obama’s commitment to nuclear power, noting that it had not changed in the wake of Fukushima.
Obama has said on several occasions that nuclear power is still part of the nation’s energy portfolio and won’t be scaled back. As for the construction of new power plants, observers say there may be some negative effect or slowing of progress, but the U.S. will eventually proceed.
“People who support green technology, like solar and wind, may not want to be associated with nuclear, but the truth is that nuclear energy is clean energy,” Miller says. “Wind and solar combined cannot produce enough power to run our grid today.”
A renewed commitment could open new career opportunities in nuclear engineering at a time when much of that work force is beginning to age. The average nuclear worker age is about 50 years old, and approximately 50 percent of the work force is eligible for retirement within the next five years. And the opportunities may not be limited to nuclear engineers, as professionals will be needed with backgrounds in electrical and mechanical engineering, systems management, biology, health physics and environmental engineering and science.
“I have four different engineering degrees,” Toomer says. “On any given day, I can use all four.”
James Michael Brodie is a writer based in Baltimore, Md., and a former editor of NSBE Magazine.
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