From BBC News

Japan disaster reopens nuclear debate in Europe and US

By Stephen Evans
BBC News, Berlin


The immediate concern is how to contain the crisis in Japan's nuclear plants. But thoughts are also turning to the future and, in the world's two big industrial blocs, the politics of nuclear power has already changed.

In Germany, there's already been a long debate about what to do with the country's 17 nuclear power stations. Last October, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government decided, with much opposition, to extend their lives by another 12 years so that the last one is now due to be closed in 2035.

That fractious debate has now reopened. The political difficulty for Mrs Merkel is that support for the Greens had already been rising in her heartland just as important elections take place.

In two weeks, the voters of Baden Wuerttemberg go to the polls. This is her natural territory. It has been controlled by the Christian Democrats for decades but Japan's disaster may now change that.

On Saturday, a previously scheduled anti-nuclear demonstration in the region attracted tens of thousands more than expected. That evening, the chancellor met her ministers to discuss the Japanese events and announced that safety standards in Germany would be reviewed.

But her dilemma is how to answer concerns without undoing her policy.


Referendum call

In France, too, the debate has changed.

France gets 75% of its energy from nuclear power, exporting the excess and earning useful currency by so doing.

In addition, some in government want to sell French reactors to emerging economies.

Greenpeace immediately called for a reversal of this nuclear policy which France embraced in the 1970s after the "oil shock" when the price of oil jumped.

The group Sortir du Nucleaire protested by the Eiffel Tower, unfurling banners saying "Nuclear is killing the future".

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who is a member of the European Parliament for the Green Party, told French radio that there should be a national referendum on the country's dependence on nuclear power. "It begs the question of the need for civil nuclear power," he said. "Is it not time to sound the alarm?"

This is difficult for the government because France's dependence is so great.

Three-quarters of its electricity is generated by nuclear power stations. The country has 58 reactors in 19 plants, second only to the United States in its use of nuclear. In addition, France has been eyeing markets in developing countries which might want to buy reactors.

French industry minister Eric Besson pointed out that France did not have the same risk of earthquake as Japan: "All French nuclear plants have been designed with seismic risk and flooding risk factored in."

But he added (in a phrase which may be a template for pro-nuclear politicians): "We don't wait for an accident to happen in Japan to raise the question over here - but this doesn't mean that we can't re-evaluate the situation."

Austrian environment minister Nikolaus Berlakovich said he would ask his fellow ministers in the European Union to approve "a stress test of nuclear plants" - similar to stress tests on banks where extreme situations are imagined by computers.


US debate

In the United States, too, the debate has changed. At the moment, President Obama is in pro-nuclear agreement with Republicans. He believes that nuclear power provides a relatively cheap form of energy, and one which doesn't produce global warming gases like coal, gas and oil-fired power stations do. Even environmental groups in the United States, unlike in Europe, believe that nuclear power has a place because of its light carbon footprint.

But this was a fragile consensus and it is hard to see how it won't now come under pressure. Over the weekend, Senator Joseph Lieberman told CBS programme Face The Nation: "I think it calls on us here in the US, naturally, not to stop building nuclear power plants but to put the brakes on right now until we understand the ramifications of what's happened in Japan."

The New York Times quotes Jason Grumet, an adviser to President Obama, from the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington: "It's not possible to achieve a climate solution based on existing technology without a significant reliance on nuclear power."

The United States has recently witnessed disasters with oil in the Gulf of Mexico and coal with the mining disaster a year ago in West Virginia which claimed 29 lives, and both underlined the cost of alternatives to nuclear.

But Japan may tip back the balance of debate. As Mr Grumet put it: "The accident certainly has diminished what had been a growing impetus in the environmental community to support nuclear power as part of a broad bargain on energy and climate policy."

The problem for pro-nuclear governments is that explosions at nuclear reactors in one of the world's most advanced economies must play strongly in the public mind, whatever the assurances of safety and cool calculations of costs, benefits and risk.

The debate has changed.

Originally Posted by Francois Cellier

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who is a member of the European Parliament for the Green Party, told French radio that there should be a national referendum on the country's dependence on nuclear power. "It begs the question of the need for civil nuclear power," he said. "Is it not time to sound the alarm?"

Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch. This is exactly why I loathe the French left.

Don't like it? Propose something constructive for once it your dismal, hatey little life, fucktard.

__________________
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From SwissInfo

Safety at Swiss nuclear plants under scrutiny

by Urs Geiser
swissinfo.ch
Mar 14, 2011 - 17:07


Energy Minister Doris Leuthard has ordered safety to be re-examined at Swiss nuclear power plants following blasts at a Japanese power station hit by a tsunami.

She has also decided to suspend requests to build new replacement nuclear power stations in Switzerland possibly delaying the timetable for a nationwide vote in 2013.

Leuthard reaffirmed that there was no direct danger to the Swiss population from the nuclear incidents in Japan or from Switzerland’s five nuclear power facilities.

“Safety and the wellbeing of the population has utmost priority,” said the minister on Monday.

The decision came after consultations with experts from the Federal Energy Office and the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate, Leuthard added.

Requests for two new nuclear plants have been submitted and are currently under examination. The government was due to decide on the requests by the middle of 2012.

The national regulatory authorities last November said the nuclear safety and security of the planned facilities was sufficient.


Process suspended

On Monday Leuthard explained that the deadline for a consultation procedure – to run until the middle of this year - had now been suspended until further notice.

“There are too many open questions. But we need more certainty,” Leuthard told the media.

She said confidence in technology had suffered as a result of the disaster in Japa and that “we must review our energy policy”.

However, Leuthard warned against an overreaction, saying too little was known about the exact cause of the nuclear incidents in Japan.

She said she would hold talks with her French counterpart in April to discuss safety at the atomic power plant in Fessenheim, 60 kilometres north of the Swiss border.

Her announcement was welcomed by centre-left parties and the energy directors of Switzerland’s 26 cantons.

The Greens and the Social Democrats have called for a urgent debate in parliament and for the Mühleberg plant outside Bern to be shut down over safety concerns.

However, rightwing and centre-right parties have accused Leuthard of rushing into her decision.

Observers point out that several canton are planning consultative votes this year on sites for new nuclear power plants. In Bern a thin majority in February approved a request for a new atomic facility at Mühleberg.


Safety standards

The Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate has been mandated to analyse the cause of the accident in Japan and to come up with new or stricter safety standards, especially in the areas of earthquake safety and cooling, said the statement by the energy ministry.

The experts’ conclusions would then be applied to existing sites, as well as to the planned sites. No permission for new sites can be granted until the experts have reported back, said the minister.

Inspectorate experts are in contact with other authorities, including the European Union, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Technicians have been battling to cool three reactors at the Fukushima 1 plant since Friday, when the quake and tsunami combined to knock out the cooling system.

Officials said the reactor core was still intact after the latest explosion at the weekend – the second – and that radiation levels were below legal limits. A third reactor is reported to have lost its cooling system.

As the original article pointed out correctly, it's a political problem. This is what the people expect their politicians to do, rightly or wrongly. Thus, if an energy minister doesn't react in this fashion, possibly for good reasons, that minister will be responsible for his or her party losing votes in the next election to the local green party. Thus, the politicians have really no choice but to jump on the band wagon.

From the Oil Drum

Safety of nuclear power and death of the nuclear renaissance

by Euan Mearns
March 15, 2011 - 10:57am


Yesterday, I believe, will go down in history as one of the most significant for mankind. Whilst most citizens of the developed and developing world do not realise this yet, the future course of the human global energy system has just changed course with potentially far reaching consequences for human civilisation.

With a breach of the containment system of the Fukushima #2 reactor and release of significant amounts of radiation, we now have the answer to whether or not nuclear power is safe. In the eyes of the public and politicians the answer will be no, even before the final tally of nuclear casualties is counted. Looking to the future, the question should boil down to whether or not the risks of nuclear accidents are outweighed by the benefits to society of nuclear electricity. But in the current environment, and for years to come the risks are going to dominate government thinking and the benefits, all too readily ignored at present will be forgotten completely until we begin to feel the consequences of growing reliance on expensive fossil fuel imports and intermittent renewable energy.

It often takes a disaster to test our systems and to bring into the public domain certain frailties that may exist. The Fukushima catastrophe has brought into the public eye frailties than most were not concerned about until Saturday 12th March 2011 when news of the reactor problems broke following the earthquake and tsunami of the previous day. Fukushima’s fate was sealed on the day the Japanese government gave approval for the reactors to be built on a coastline where there was a high probability of earthquake and tsunami in the plant’s lifetime. The risks were known and understood and the facility was engineered to a high specification to withstand such events. For three days, the fate of the global nuclear industry has hung in the balance. Had the Japanese engineers managed to contain the incident then it was possible that the nuclear industry could emerge strengthened with proof that well designed and maintained American reactors could withstand the worst that nature can throw. But alas, this is not the case.

In granting consent to build these reactors the Japanese government, with little to no supplies of indigenous primary energy such as coal, oil and natural gas, must have decided that benefits to Japan of providing over 30% of electricity from nuclear sources outweighed the risks of building nuclear plant in one of the seismically most active regions of the world. Not only did they consent to build, but they built 4 reactors in close proximity to each other, right on the coast where they would feel the maximum effect of any tsunami. The coastal location proves beneficial now since this provides ready access to cooling water, much of the radiation released will fall on the sea and not on land, and there is reduced risk of pollution of ground water. But had they been built on higher ground a short way inland then they would not have been hit by the tsunami in the first place. How such risks have been weighed will go under the microscope in the weeks and months ahead. Building a cluster like this is no doubt based on a shared defence system, but it has been surprising to watch hydrogen explosions in one reactor compromise neighbouring reactor buildings. Were these risks properly weighed?

It has also been instructive to learn that steel and concrete containment systems alone are not sufficient to guarantee safety. Maintaining the engineering ability to pump water through the core after emergency shutdown means that pumps, pipes and valves located outside of the armoured core defence systems must also continue to function, and as is the case with many disasters, damage inflicted by the disaster itself may compromise the safety systems and their backup. In the case of Fukushima, the plant survived the initial onslaught of earthquake and tsunami. Damage inflicted at that stage set in motion a sequence of events, starting with the venting of hydrogen gas and the explosions they caused, and further degraded the capability to contain an escalating crisis. In terms of reactor design, it strikes me as odd that hydrogen should be vented into the confines of the reactor building, effectively creating a bomb. Have these eventualities been anticipated by the engineers who designed the plant?

And so what will become of Fukushima and the future of the global nuclear industry? As I write the reactor site is being rendered uninhabitable by the release of radiation and I imagine in the days ahead we will see heroic Japanese engineers risking their lives in an extreme hostile environment as they continue to try and contain the situation. With three out of the four reactors at varying stages of melt down it is difficult to predict the outcome. This is already the worst civil nuclear power accident in recorded history - Chernobyl was a military reactor and the Windscale reactor fire in England in 1957 was never properly recorded. The social and economic costs I believe will already exceed Chernobyl given the location of this event close to the heart of the world’s third largest economy. There is still ample scope for this event to get considerably worse.

It is very telling that the German government acted yesterday to cancel license extensions for aging reactors even before the containment system of the Fukushima #2 reactor was breached. The nuclear renaissance in the west has always been lukewarm. In the UK for example, pro-nuclear Conservatives are in coalition government with Liberal Democrats who are instinctively anti-nuclear and who had to compromise on this long held policy stance to enter government. The Scottish minority government lead by The Scottish National Party (SNP) has adopted a no nuclear policy that is supported by Liberal Democrats and The Greens. The Conservatives alone are pro-nuclear with Scottish Labour hedging their bets on territory between the anti and pro camp. Most democracies will have tenuous alliances such as this and I think it is safe to now say that the nuclear renaissance is stone dead. I would anticipate a mass of safety audits to ensue with accelerated closure of aging nuclear plants and cancellation of plans to build new. A quick look at the stock prices of uranium miners and nuclear plant builders suggests I am not alone in holding this view.

OECD politicians believe their pro-nuclear stance was driven by a need to reduce CO2 emissions and still seem to be sublimely unaware that the real driving force is to replace supplies of cheap natural gas and coal that are likely now to become even more scarce on the international markets as countries scramble to replace lost nuclear capacity. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reported as saying:

"Merkel added that she was not worried about Germany's electricity supply as the country was a net exporter of energy."

Presumably what is meant is a net exporter of electricity. What will become of countries dependent upon these German electricity exports?

It is time for cool heads in the OECD but, unfortunately with the energy debate driven by emotion, this will not happen. Decisions made now in the wake of an emergency in Japan may sow the seed of energy poverty in countries like the UK for decades to come. I have for a long while been pro-nuclear but must admit that my faith in nuclear planners is shaken by this sequence of events. Now is not the time for knee-jerk decisions. Governments must carefully weigh the benefits of stable supplies of nuclear electricity to society against the risks posed by nuclear power plants. This is not an easy task.

From the Guardian

Japan nuclear crisis puts industry revival in doubt

Disaster described as a colossal setback for industry at a time when climate change is sparking a renaissance

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington, Fiona Harvey and John Vidal
guardian.co.uk
Tuesday 15 March 2011 20.43 GMT


Events in Japan could kill the last chances of revival for an American nuclear industry struggling to emerge from the shadow of its own disaster at Three Mile Island, experts have predicted.

Renewed fears about the technology may also snuff out a nuclear renaissance worldwide that had been sparked by fears over climate change and a need for low-carbon energy.

"This is going to be a Three Mile Island moment – maybe not a Chernobyl moment, but a Three Mile Island moment that is going to give people pause for at least several years," said Alan Madian, an energy analyst at the Brattle consulting group. "There is no question that the public is going to be rightfully concerned."

So far, the White House and Republicans are united in saying it would be premature to rethink plans for the first expansion of nuclear power in America since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

In Europe, a meeting of EU energy ministers in Brussels on Tuesday agreed a series of "stress tests" for European nuclear facilities in response to the Japanese alert to check they could withstand a variety of different shocks, from earthquakes to terrorist attacks.

However, even as the crisis in Japan unfolds, investors appear already to be turning away from the technology.

"Shares in renewable energy industries yesterday rose while most other energy stocks fell," said Clare Brook, fund manager of leading green investment group WHEB, in London. "This tragedy comes on top of the oil price rise, the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and unrest in the Middle East, all of which has made renewables more attractive. We would expect investment in renewables, especially solar, to increase. Nuclear has become politically unacceptable."

The revival of nuclear energy had come partly on the back of fears about climate change and a need for reliable low-carbon energy sources. That revival may now be in doubt, but leading environmentalists who have backed the technology as a low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels said the accident should not slow new nuclear investment.

The scientist James Lovelock said: "There is a monstrous myth about nuclear power. I would make a strong guess that of the tens of thousands of people killed in Japan, none of them will be from nuclear power."

He said people were unreasonably prejudiced against nuclear power. "It is very safe," he said.

Mark Lynas, another environmental campaigner who has espoused nuclear power as a way to limit climate change, was pessimistic about how nuclear power would be perceived after the Japanese experience.

"It's too early to make a final diagnosis of what is happening in Japan, but what is obvious is that this will be a colossal setback for the nuclear industry at just the moment at which climate change is sparking a real renaissance," he said.

In Europe a new caution towards nuclear power was led by Germany, which said seven reactors that went into operation before 1980 would be offline for three months while Europe's biggest economy reconsiders its plans to extend the life of its atomic power plants.

The European Union's energy commissioner called for a reassessment of what role nuclear power should have in the future. "We have to ask ourselves: can we in Europe, within time, secure our energy needs without nuclear power plants?" Günther Oettinger told ARD television in Germany.

He invited non-EU countries to join the initiative, including Switzerland, which announced on Monday that it was halting plans for new reactors.

Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, accused other European governments of "rushing to judgments" over the safety of nuclear power and took a public swipe at "continental politicians" hours after the German announcement.

Nevertheless, he insisted he was right to order a UK safety review amid warnings from MPs it could hit investment in a planned new generation of domestic nuclear power stations.

Elsewhere, a commitment to a nuclear future was affirmed by the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said he had no plans to suspend a deal with Russia's Rosatom agency for the construction of Turkey's first nuclear power plant.

Dismissing questions on possible dangers, Erdogan said all investments had high risks.

"In that case, let's not bring gas canisters to our homes, let's not install natural gas, let's not stream crude oil through our country," he said.

Russia also signed a deal with Belarus to build a nuclear power station there. Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin said the facility would be safer than that threatened by meltdown in Japan.

In the US, political proponents of nuclear power also remained steadfast.

Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who has called for building 100 reactors in the next 20 years, called on America to cling fast to the nuclear dream.

"We don't abandon highway systems because bridges and overpasses collapse during earthquakes," he said in a speech to the Senate. "The 1.6 million of us who fly daily would not stop flying after a tragic plane crash. We would find out what happened and do our best to make it safe."

One pro-nuclear congressman, Devin Nunes, a California Republican who has called for 200 new reactors by 2040, went so far as to suggest that the crisis in Japan demonstrated the safety of nuclear power.

"The facts, as we know them today, are not an indictment of nuclear energy safety," he said. "Quite the reverse is true. The survival of the 40-year-old containment systems under such extreme conditions helps to prove the safety and durability of nuclear power." In reality, America's nuclear industry has been in a state of suspended animation since Three Mile Island.

The economics of energy production in the US - which has cheap fossil fuels and has resisted putting a price on carbon - have made it difficult to plot a comeback Now industry's efforts to extend the life of a generation of ageing reactors - once thought a sure thing - could be in doubt. Some of those reactors, such as the Vermont Yankee, have a history of safety lapses and face growing local opposition.

Nuclear regulators gave the plant an additional 20 years to run on Thursday - just a day before the quake. The plant has the same containment design as the failed reactors in Japan. Now Vermont's governor, Peter Shumlin, says he will push to close the plant on schedule in 2012.

"We act as if they can be run beyond their design life, when the engineering is primitive compared to what one would build today,'' he told reporters. "I think the tragedy in Japan should awaken a re-examination of our irrational exuberance about running our aging plants beyond their design life."

The Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the Japanese power company and other industry interests, had also been fighting hard to convince the public that reactors could help get America off imported oil.

According to Opensecrets.org, which examines the influence of money in politics, the NEI has more than 20 lobbyists on staff. It has spent more than $6 million trying to influence Congress in the last three years.

Individual power companies have also expanded their lobbying spending. Southern Company, which has a project to build two new reactors in Georgia, has spent $10 million a year on lobbying since 2004.But - so far at least - the industry has little to show for its efforts. Aside from Southern Company's two reactors - which have yet to get final approval from regulators - there are only two other new nuclear reactors in the works, in South Carolina in 2020.

Another project, in Maryland, is in peril after a French company EDF pulled out.

"A nuclear bubble is what I've been calling it," said Peter Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "It was dead in the water even before the events of the last week and of course it's worse off now."

From the Independent

Four explosions, two fires, and a cloud of nuclear mistrust spreads around the world

After decades of lies, nuclear reassurances now fall on deaf ears

by Michael McCarthy
Wednesday, 16 March 2011


It is unprecedented: four atomic reactors in dire trouble at once, three threatening meltdown from overheating, and a fourth hit by a fire in its storage pond for radioactive spent fuel.

All day yesterday, dire reports continued to circulate about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, faced with disaster after Japan's tsunami knocked out its cooling systems. Some turned out to be false: for example, a rumour, disseminated by text message, that radiation from the plant had been spreading across Asia. Others were true: that radiation at about 20 times normal levels had been detected in Tokyo; that Chinese airlines had cancelled flights to the Japanese capital; that Austria had moved it embassy from Tokyo to Osaka; that a 24-hour general store in Tokyo's Roppongi district had sold out of radios, torches, candles and sleeping bags.

But perhaps the most alarming thing was that although Naoto Kan, Japan's Prime Minister, once again appealed for calm, there are many – in Japan and beyond – who are no longer prepared to be reassured.

The scale of the alarm is the remarkable thing: how it has gone round the world (Angela Merkel has imposed a moratorium on nuclear energy; in France, there are calls for a referendum); how it's even displaced the terrible story of Japan's tsunami itself from the front-page headlines. But then, public alarm about nuclear safety, as the Fukushima emergency proves, is very easy to raise – and, as the Japanese authorities are now discovering, very hard to calm.
The reason is an industry which from its inception, more than half a century ago, has taken secrecy to be its watchword; and once that happens, cover-ups and downright lies often follow close behind. The sense of crisis surrounding Japan's stricken nuclear reactors is exacerbated a hundredfold by the fact that, in an emergency, public trust in the promoters of atomic power is virtually non-existent. On too many occasions in Britain, in America, in Russia, in Japan – pick your country – people have not been told the truth (and have frequently been told nothing at all) about nuclear misadventures.

To understand the mania for secrecy, we have to go back to nuclear power's origins. This was not a technology dreamt up as a replacement for coal-fired power stations; this is a military technology, conceived in a life-or-death struggle, which has been modified for civilian purposes. At its heart is the nuclear chain reaction, the self-sustaining atom-splitting process ("fission") which occurs when enough highly radioactive material is brought together, and which produces other radioactive elements ("fission products"), and a release of energy.

When it was first achieved by the physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, in an atomic "pile" built in a squash court of the University of Chicago in December 1942, it merely produced heat; but all those involved understood that if it could be speeded up, it would produce the biggest explosive power ever known. And so was born the Manhattan Project, the US undertaking to build the atom bomb which was, while it lasted, history's biggest secret.

Secrecy came with nuclear energy, like a birthmark, and, indeed, for 10 years after the first A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, it remained a covert military technology, although first the Russians, and then the British, followed the Americans in developing it. Britain built a pair of atomic reactors at Windscale on the Cumbrian coast, which produced (as a fission product) plutonium, the material used in the first British nuclear weapon. That was exploded off the coast of Australia in 1952. And it was in one of these reactors that the world's first really serious nuclear accident occurred: the Windscale fire of October 1957. The reactor's core, made of graphite, caught light, melted and burned substantial amounts of the uranium fuel, and released large amounts of radioactivity. It was the most serious nuclear calamity until Chernobyl nearly 30 years later, but the British government did all it could to minimise its significance, trying at first to keep it a complete secret (the local fire brigade was not notified for 24 hours) and keeping the official report confidential until 1988.

It was to be the first of many such nuclear alarms and cover-ups at Windscale. In 1976, for example, the secrecy surrounding a major leak of radioactive water infuriated the then Technology Minister, Tony Benn, who supported nuclear power, when he learnt of it. But similar cover-ups were happening all around the world.

At the US atomic weapons plant at Rocky Flats, Colorado, there were numerous mishaps involving radioactive material which were kept secret over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. In Russia, the province of Chelyabinsk, just east of the Urals, housed a major atomic weapons complex, which was the site of three major nuclear disasters: radioactive waste dumping and the explosion of a waste containment unit in the 1950s, and a vast escape of radioactive dust in 1967. It is estimated that about half a million people in the region were irradiated in one or more of the incidents, exposing them to as much as 20 times the radiation suffered by the Chernobyl victims. None of which, of course, was disclosed at the time. Chelyabinsk is sometimes referred to now as "the most polluted place on the planet".

When we turn to Japan, we find an identical culture of nuclear cover-up and lies. Of particular concern has been the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), Asia's biggest utility, which just happens to be the owner and operator of the stricken reactors at Fukushima.

Tepco has a truly rotten record in telling the truth. In 2002, its chairman and a group of senior executives had to resign after the Japanese government disclosed they had covered up a large series of cracks and other damage to reactors, and in 2006 the company admitted it had been falsifying data about coolant materials in its plants over a long period.

Last night it was reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency warned Japan more than two years ago that strong earthquakes would pose "serious problems", according to a Wikileaks US embassy cable published by The Daily Telegraph.

Even Chernobyl, the world's most publicised nuclear accident, was at first hidden from the world by what was then the Soviet Union, and might have remained hidden had its plume of escaping radioactivity not been detected by scientists in Sweden.

So why do they do it? Why does the instinct to hide everything persist, even now, when the major role of nuclear energy has decisively shifted from the military to the civil sector? Perhaps it is because there is an instinctive and indeed understandable fear among the public about nuclear energy itself, about this technology which, once its splits its atoms, releases deadly forces.

The nuclear industry is terrified of losing public support, for the simple reason that it has always needed public money to fund it. It is not, even now, a sector which can stand on its own two feet economically. So when it finds it has a problem, its first reaction is to hide it, and its second reaction is to tell lies about it. But the truth comes out in the end, and then the public trusts the industry even less than it might have done, had it admitted the problem.

It doesn't have to be like this. A quarter of a century ago, Britain's nuclear industry acquired a leader who for a few years transformed its public image: Christopher Harding. He was an open and honest man who thought that the paranoia and secrecy surrounding nuclear power should be swept away.

When he became chairman of British Nuclear Fuels, which ran the Windscale plant, he decided on a new order of things. He renamed it Sellafield, and, to general astonishment, decreed that instead of sullenly turning its back to the public, it should welcome them with open arms. He did the unthinkable: he opened a visitor centre!

Harding died young in 1999, but he was, in his lifetime an exceptional man: not only for his charm and his personal kindness – he was revered by Sellafield employees – but for his vision of a nuclear industry which would be better off dealing with its problems through transparency and honesty, rather than through obfuscation and deceit. But he was, unfortunately, the exception who proved the rule.

The rest of the nuclear industry has been dissembling for so long, and caught out in its lies so often, that the chance for trust may have passed. Even if, as I suspect, the Japanese government is trying to be reasonably up front about the problems at Fukushima, it is by no means certain that anything it says about the nuclear part of their nation's catastrophe will be believed.

I went out for a drink with someone from Stuttgart the other night who was complaining about how the Germans are being a million times more retarded than the French in this, which is unusual - normally they're the staid, virtuous ones. They've got this wierd anti-nuclear paranoia, which just makes no sense at all. I mean, if push came to shove I'd way rather live next to a German nuclear plant than a French one. Especially in August.

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Someone was pointing out that inland US nuclear plants were better protected against flood than japanese ones...

They said that one of the plant had problems because its power supply failed. And its power supply failed because the fuel tanks were open structures by the beach... In the US, they are buried under ground...

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From Reuters

Japan storage pools big worry: U.S. nuclear expert

By Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON
Fri Mar 18, 2011 2:27pm EDT


Peter Bradford, a former commissioner at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said questions have been raised for years about whether spent fuel is being safely stored at U.S. power plants.

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission pretty bluntly shunted those questions aside," Bradford told Reuters Insider TV. Bradford said the commission even tried to prevent the publication of a study of the issue completed by the National Academy of Sciences.

"That kind of complacency, the sense that everything is good enough already, is very unlikely to persist in the wake of these events" in Japan, said Bradford, who is now an adjunct professor at the Vermont Law School.

He served on the NRC during the 1979 partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. "In terms of severity, this accident (in Japan) left Three Mile Island in the rear-view mirror several days ago," Bradford said at the news conference with Alvarez.

Bradford speculated that the disaster in Japan will make efforts to expand nuclear energy in the United States "dead for now."