What I Wrote in October 2010 about the Poor Safety Record of Japan’s Nuclear Power Industry

On 28 September 2010 I noticed on LinkedIn that one of my contacts there had commented on a post to a LinkedIn group that we both belong to, and I joined in on the discussion.  The original post was entitled “Thought you might be interested - Philippines acting fast on nuclear energy development”.  The entire thread has since been deleted by the author – and I can imagine why – so I no longer have his original message or the response of Andrew, my contact, in which Andrew replied that building so many GW of nuclear power so quickly would be very difficult.  I also lack the author’s final response.  What I give below are my first response to the thread, the author’s reply, and my second response (slightly edited).

Comment by me, 2010-09-28 15:20

Andrew is right about the time restraints.  In addition, isn't the Philippines a rather seismically active area?  Also, typical nuclear reactors run around 1 GW, so if they are going to be facing an electricity shortage of 3 GW within 2 years then they would need at least 3 reactors right away.  (According to Wikipedia, the reactor at the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant was designed to generate only 0.62 GW.)  Also, don't nuclear reactors have to go offline from time to time for routine refuelling and maintenance?  Unless the grid had sufficient backup capacity, that could make their brownouts much worse than they are now.

Comment by original author, 2010-09-29? 10:54

Hi Mark, actually the head of the National Institute of Geological Sciences has recently finished his (re)study on the potential seismic complications on the site of the BNPP and he concluded that there is little danger.

If you recall, Japan is much, much more seismically active and it has safely been operating over 50 nuclear plants for over 40 years now.

Re maintenance, you may want to look up the difference between base load capacity and overall capacity. You can look up the latest Philippine Energy Plan to see where in the power mix the government's expert team was planning to have nuclear contribute about 10% of capacity.

Would you have any solutions that address seismic issues for power generation such as for geothermal? I believe these would be pertinent particularly for many types of power generation, especially considering some types of power plants need to be built near centres of seismic activity?

Comment by me, 2010-10-06 12:41

____,

You write, “If you recall, Japan is much, much more seismically active and it has safely been operating over 50 nuclear plants for over 40 years now.”

Well, the safety of Japan’s nuclear power plants is subject to debate.  Clearly there have been no Chernobyl events, and apparently no Three-Mile Island events, but there have been any number of other accidents.  You can read the following in an article about a magnitude 6.8 earthquake near Japan’s largest nuclear facility, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, in July 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/16/AR2007071601712.html):

“Though Japanese nuclear plants, like U.S. plants, are built to withstand powerful earthquakes, Bloomberg News reported the unit had two cracks. But Hasegawa said the pool was no longer leaking and there was no hazard to the fuel rods. The cooling pool is 33 feet deep, and about 23 feet of water lies over the spent fuel rods.

Experts were cautious about accepting Tokyo Electric Power's assurances. Japan's nuclear power industry has a history of covering up incidents. In March, Tokyo Electric Power, Asia's biggest utility, said it would delay completion of two nuclear reactors after admitting that it covered up an accident in 1978. In 2002, the company shut all 17 of its reactors after admitting that employees had falsified nuclear safety documents since the late 1980s.

Safety concerns are one reason the company's plants have operated at less than 70 percent of capacity. At the time the quake hit yesterday, three of the seven units at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa were shut down for inspection. The other four units shut down automatically after the quake, the company said.”

At http://www.joewein.de/tokaimura.htm, they say this about the Tokaimura criticality accident in 1999:

“The Tokaimura accident is the third most serious accident in the history of nuclear power, after the 1986 Chernobyl accident and the 1979 Three Miles Island accident.

… Critics pointed out nuclear facilities such as this fuel factory are rarely ever checked once they receive the initial operating license.

Families living near the plant were temporarily evacuated and 300,000 people were asked to stay indoors for more than a day. Later neighbours and employees were tested for radioactive contamination. 63 people were identified as having been exposed, amongst them 14 workers of JCO (who poured boron into the reaction vessel to help put out the nuclear chain reaction) and the two victims who later died.

The Tokaimura accident was the third serious nuclear accident in four years. In 1996 a coolant leak and subsequent fire caused an emergency shutdown of the plutonium-fuelled reactor Monju. The following year a fire and explosion in a nuclear waste processing facility in Tokaimura exposed 35 people to radiation.”

Finally, at http://www.joewein.de/mihama.htm we read this about the 2004 Mihama accident:

“The accident happened when the reactor was about to undergo routine maintenance. The accident was caused by a bursting steam pipe in the non-radioactive part of the reactor. In 27 years of operation that 56 cm diameter pipe had not once been checked for corrosion, let alone replaced. By the time it burst, its walls had worn down from an initial 10 mm of carbon steel to a mere 1.4 mm. Regulations required the pipes to be replaced when the walls were eroded to a thickness of 4.7 mm. Nine months before the accident a subcontractor company had alerted the operators to the need for inspections, but the warning was ignored.”

Most of these accidents are not due to earthquakes, obviously.  But they show that there is a pattern of laxness, not in the initial design and construction – though Wikipedia writes about Bataan that “[f]ollowing the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in the United States, construction on the BNPP was stopped, and a subsequent safety inquiry into the plant revealed over 4,000 defects” – but during the operating phase.

You ask, “Would you have any solutions that address seismic issues for power generation such as for geothermal? I believe these would be pertinent particularly for many types of power generation, especially considering some types of power plants need to be built near centres of seismic activity?”

Well, although some individual plants of various types may need to be built in areas that are seismically active, the only _type_ of power plant that I am aware of that always _needs_ to be built near centres of seismic activity is geothermal.  On the other hand, both geothermal and large-scale hydroelectric can _induce_ seismic activity. (See http://www.probeinternational.org/catalog/content_fullstory.php?contentId=6809&cat_id=7 and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123391567210056475.html.)

I think the engineering expertise and the materials exist to build power plants that can withstand strong earthquakes without releasing damaging materials to the environment.  But there are also economic concerns, and this gives the developers of the project, and the politicians and regulators that they have won over to their side, incentives to streamline the process and to cut costs in order to make energy prices more “competitive”.  In the case of BP’s Macondo Prospect spill in the Gulf of Mexico, there were numerous regulatory roadblocks and physical safety interlocks in place to prevent it from happening, yet it happened.

The particular challenge of nuclear power, to me, is the fact that damaging releases are not immediately evident to the senses – hence the Soviets were able to deny for days that there was any damaging release from Chernobyl until radiation began being detected in Sweden – and often the nuclear industry in a country is so small and specialized that there is the danger of an excessively cozy relationship between power plant operators and the regulators who (ostensibly) should oversee them.

I read in a report of March 2010 evaluating Ireland’s future energy options that one of the major costs to building a first nuclear plant in Ireland would be the need to create an entire corpus of regulations and to create and train an entire regulatory agency (whose entire livelihood would depend, obviously, on the continued operation of that nuclear plant).

The situation would be similar for the construction of a first nuclear power plant in the Philippines.  I recall that when I was visiting Manila in 1986 there had recently been introduced a law banning smoking in public places in Quezon City .  But almost all the men in Quezon City were used to smoking in public.  So everyone concluded that the law had been instituted just so that policemen could go around catching smokers so as to elicit bribes from them so that they would not have to pay fines.  I know that a lot has changed in the Philippines since then, and yet when I think of the [meager] amount of actual control that the central government is able to exercise in places like Diwalwal, well…

In short, it is hard for me to imagine an honest, uncorruptible nuclear industry and nuclear regulatory agency being created from zero anywhere in the world with the potential to operate a nuclear power plant risk-free in a seismically active zone in anything less than 10 years.

Even near here in Italy where a company is building a modest wind farm of 30 MW (€ 45 mln) for a fully respectable firm they are having problems with car bombs, death threats, major arson, and bribery.

In his final response – which is no longer available – the author proclaimed that regardless of safety considerations these nuclear plants would be built, so if I wanted a part of the business I had better be present at their meeting in order to have “a place at the table”.