Japanese nuclear crisis raises safety concerns

Paul Burd
Contributor
For the first time since they became the only victims of atomic warfare at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the last days of the Second World War, the Japanese are faced with the prospect of a large-scale release of radiation in their compact island-nation.
Japan is presently reeling from the worst nuclear power crisis in its history as it struggles to control reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant, which was heavily damaged by the intense earthquake and tsunami of March 11.

The full extent of the damage at the Fukushima plant is still not known with any certainty. Located on the northeast coast of the Japan, the six nuclear reactors at Fukushima were damaged first by an unprecedented 8.9 earthquake and then by the 14-metre tsunami that followed shortly. While the structural damage to the plant caused by the earthquake is not clear, it is known that the tsunami knocked out the backup generators used to power the reactor coolant systems in the event of a disaster.
Supplying a nuclear reactor with enough coolant is essential to keeping its uranium fuel from overheating and producing an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, which could lead to a meltdown. Under normal circumstances, a nuclear power plant harnesses the heat produced when a uranium atom splits, or fissions, after absorbing an extra neutron into its atomic nucleus. Nuclear reactors exploit fission on a scale of trillions of atoms, creating enough energy to boil water and power a steam turbine. The problem with fission is that it produces radioactive energy and particles, which, if released into the environment, can be harmful, even lethal, to humans.
Describing the Fukushima nuclear crisis as “somewhere between Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl” in severity, Mark Winfield, a York University professor and researcher of nuclear power, warns that this situation is still at a critical stage: “You are looking at the potential for a very large-scale release of radiation and radioactive contaminants.”
In a frantic effort to avoid this outcome, Japanese officials and workers have been working to cool the Fukushima reactors with every means possible, including spraying them with fire truck hoses and making helicopter water dump sorties. The radiation has already leaked too much even though this crash cooling effort has succeeded in lowering the temperature of most of the reactors. Crops in the Fukushima region already have signs of radiation contamination, and a temporary ban on infants drinking Tokyo’s tap water was instituted after unsafe contaminant levels were detected. Japan has also called for a 20-km evacuation radius around the Fukushima plant, leading to an exodus of 140,000 people.
While the radiation leakages have been limited to Japan at this point, the scale of this nuclear crisis has prompted many other nations to reflect on their own nuclear power policies.
“This has put the question of major accident risk back on the table,” said Winfield of the various national dialogues on nuclear energy sparked by this crisis. Winfield argues that safety considerations are now reasserting their place in a nuclear power debate that has been traditionally dominated by economic considerations.
However, this debate has produced a mixed international nuclear policy response to the Fukushima crisis.
“Nations responded differently to the crisis, some pushing ahead, some stopping,” said Darrin Durant, a York University lecturer with a focus on science and society. Germany, for example, has announced that they will begin an inquiry into whether they should scrap their nuclear power program altogether. On the other hand, Turkey has announced that they will go forward with the construction of two more nuclear reactors. Many other nations, including Switzerland, have come down the middle by momentarily shelving their nuclear expansion plans pending a review.
Asked to comment on this diverse set of responses to the Fukushima crisis, Durant argues that domestic considerations remain at the forefront of this debate: “The nuclear policy of any particular nation has a lot to do with national factors, rather than international factors.”
Durant notes that despite this crisis, the nuclear policy of a particular nation will still be formulated primarily by factors such as domestic political support for nuclear power and a nation’s current level of nuclear dependency. France, for example, depends on nuclear power for roughly 78 percent of its total electrical capacity, leaving it little choice but to remain a consumer of nuclear energy for the foreseeable future.
It would appear, however, that Canada does have a choice about whether to continue using nuclear power, as it accounts for only 15 percent of our national energy capacity. Any plans to phase out nuclear power, though, will be centered on Ontario, where three of the nation’s five nuclear power plants supply 50 percent of our province’s electricity.
For the moment, nuclear power has strong political support both provincially and federally, and Queen’s Park is even planning on building four more reactors at the Darlington nuclear plant. This proposed expansion of Ontario’s nuclear power infrastructure so close to a major nuclear crisis has energized the anti-nuclear lobby in Ontario, most recently with a Greenpeace protest in Courtice that temporarily halted an environmental assessment hearing on this issue.
It is hard to overstate the risks of relying on nuclear power indefinitely. As the Fukushima crisis, and Chernobyl before it, has demonstrated, our ability to control nuclear reactors and predict their behaviour is not absolute. While the risk of a radiation release or a meltdown is the most commonly cited, there are a whole host of other potential problems with this technology. Spent nuclear fuel rods, for example, are so highly radioactive that they must be buried for millions of years. Nuclear weapons proliferation is also a real risk of nuclear power, as the plutonium produced in a reactor can be fashioned into nuclear weapons. North Korea tested their first nuclear weapon in 2006 by following this route.
Ultimately, Queen’s Park must make a judgement call about the acceptability of these risks. Durant argues that the nuclear crisis in Japan “presents our society with a choice of whether we decide that nuclear reactors are too risky, or whether instead we just normalize the risk and we say things like Fukushima are like our Faustian bargain.”
Ontario appears likely to continue its possibly dangerous pact with the uranium atom in the hope that we will avoid the unenviable list of nuclear disaster sites to which Fukushima has now been added.
Nuclear Statistics
Top three nuclear power countries:
USA, Japan, France
Ontario Nuclear Power Stations
Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, Tiverton
Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, Clarington
Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, Pickering
Major Nuclear Accidents
Three-Mile Island, United States  (1979)
Partial reactor core meltdown
Cernobyl, Ukraine (1986)
Reactor core meltdown
Fukushima, Japan (2011)
Several partial core meltdowns
Reliance on Nuclear Power
France:     78% of power
Canada: 15% of power
Ontario: 50% of power
Japan:     61% of power
U.S:     20% of power