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nature news homenews archivespecialsopinionfeaturesnews blognature journal Published online 30 March 2011 | Nature 471, 549 (2011) | doi:10.1038/471549a Column: World View Concerns over nuclear energy are legitimate 
Reassurances from 'experts' on the safety of nuclear power will not wash, says Colin Macilwain. The Fukushima crisis raises genuine questions. Colin Macilwain The unique and almost existential nature of the risk posed by nuclear power has had ample airing over the past three weeks, since the disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan. Enthusiasm for a global nuclear revival has stalled — and not before time.
The scientific community could yet play a valuable part in the management of this crisis. It could help put events in perspective, and begin the process of drawing out useful regulatory and other lessons. In the United States, this has already begun, with specific suggestions for change coming from former US government science advisers Frank von Hippel and Matthew Bunn. Last week on this page, Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists, did likewise (see C. D. Ferguson Nature 471, 411; 2011).
Less edifying have been the nuclear experts who have popped up in the media to 'inform' the public about the crisis. Individually, their motives may be honourable, but the collective impression has been unconvincing: defensive, selective, condescending towards public fears and, in my view, ultimately counterproductive. Their combined message seems to have been: don't worry, things are under control, and Fukushima is not Chernobyl.
Well, Fukushima is certainly not Chernobyl, but some salient points about what Fukushima actually is, I would argue, deserve wider attention. All are relevant to the future deployment of nuclear power.
“The risk of nuclear power is that active human intervention has to be maintained.”
One is that Fukushima houses six reactors on one site, despite the fact that even the most basic analysis of failure modes and effects would come out resoundingly against such an arrangement. Not only are all the reactors exposed simultaneously to the same dangers — whether flood, earthquake, war or terrorist attack — but radiation release at one reactor or fuel tank could cripple recovery efforts at the others. Everyone in nuclear engineering knows this. Yet such co-siting is the central organizing principle of current nuclear-build plans in Britain, the United States and elsewhere, because the only communities that will accept new nuclear plants are those that already have them.
The second is an inherent problem with light-water reactors, including boiling-water reactors, as at Fukushima, and pressurized-water reactors (PWRs). These designs are compact and relatively inexpensive, but their potential for meltdown was once obvious enough that Britain spent 30 years trying to develop gas-cooled alternatives. But, now that PWRs are the only viable design for new nuclear build, that extensive search for a safer design seems to have been forgotten by many of those who promote a nuclear future.
A third point is the storage of spent fuel rods in pools of water at power plants. The amount of fuel held in this way continues to grow relentlessly, particularly in the United States, where the Obama administration's shelving of the Yucca Mountain waste-storage project in Nevada leaves the fuel with nowhere else to go. As in the United Kingdom, such 'interim' storage is the only likely destination for spent fuel from new reactors, ahead of promised deep disposal in an uncosted, unscheduled and uncertain underground repository.
These legitimate technical criticisms of Fukushima, and of planned nuclear build, have been largely drowned out by the flood of technical reassurance offered by nuclear scientists and engineers in the wake of the disaster. For example, reassuring soundbites offered to journalists by the London-based Science Media Centre (which is funded by a variety of scientific bodies and industries, including Nature Publishing Group) in the days immediately after the earthquake contained barely a cautionary note on how serious the situation at Fukushima was set to become. Instead, the scientific establishment and those whose careers are invested in nuclear power have sought to convince the public that 'science' supports nuclear power. Too many specialists have assured us of the general safety of nuclear power without adequately addressing specific concerns.
Some of this loyalty is deep rooted, I fear, in the development of the atomic bomb, which greatly embellished the standing of the scientific establishment with governments. Not long afterwards, many senior physicists embraced 'atoms for peace'. Having interrogated nature, and established the means to harness some of its terrible powers, they wanted to prove themselves 'useful'. Such a culture influences those who follow — and can take generations to wear off.
Costing and planning of new nuclear power stations will now be carried out in the light of three data points: Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. In each case, excuses are readily made by supporters of nuclear power. For Three Mile Island, they were that radiation releases were minimal, and that a supposedly unsophisticated American public confused the accident with the plot of The China Syndrome. Communist incompetence, we are told, contributed to Chernobyl being as bad as it was. The race is now on to find a narrative that explains away the ugly reality of the Fukushima disaster. The alleged uniqueness of the earthquake and tsunami event is already emerging as the front runner.
Yet the real risk of nuclear power is that active human intervention has to be maintained, come rain, shine, war or political upheaval. That, and the threat of a downside too terrible to contemplate.?
Colin Macilwain is a contributing correspondent with Nature. CommentsIf you find something abusive or inappropriate or which does not otherwise comply with our Terms or Community Guidelines, please select the relevant 'Report this comment' link. Comments on this thread are vetted after posting. #19424The article raises good points, but what is the author's conclusion? Move away from embracing nuclear power, or make it work? The former would certainly complicate dealing with another potential calamity of even larger proportions — climate change. Recent events simply demonstrate we live in a world where we face risks every day. Let's not diminish the enormous human toll of the earthquake and tsunami that also triggered the nuclear disaster. However, at the end of the day, I'm more worried about my kids being careful behind the wheel on our roadways, where they face an significantly higher risk of personnel injury or death..
Report this comment2011-03-30 11:24:25 AMPosted by: Thomas Ewing #19432Yes. I Agree with you Colin Macilwain .&here is worldwide debate on Nuclear Energy .Unless extra safety measures are taken, the future for nuclear energy seems to be bleak.
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore (AP), India
Report this comment2011-03-30 12:03:19 PMPosted by: A Jagadeesh #19440@Colin Macilwain: good balanced article. However, 1) your final paragraph is somewhat unclear purely from a communication perspective, 2) related to one, you do not make clear the core safety risk of nuclear reactors.
By "active human intervention" do you mean during the operation of nuclear reactors, including under worst case scenarios? If so, then you would be correct but what many do not realise is that there are current nuclear designs which are being aggressively pursued, mainly in China, that are passively safe. The most promising of these are thorium fuel cycle molten salt reactor technology such as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). These address most concerns about current nuclear designs, including safety, efficiency, militarization, waste and sustainability. Ironically, these designs were created and built exclusively by the US in the 1950s!
After all, given the immense energy available from nuclear power compared to all other known sources, it is likely that, short of viable fusion technology becoming available from US research (Polywell etc), the US will be reliant on buying Chinese thorium-based nuclear technology within 1-2 decades ...
Report this comment2011-03-30 12:38:31 PMPosted by: tas yoto #19451How come this man crystallized the problem so brilliantly: "Active human intervention has to be maintained"
If science continues to fall out of favor in our schools, who will have the knowledge to maintain these nuclear power plants in the future?
What if a pandemic kills a lot of humans, or an asteroid strikes Earth, killed some of us, and sets off a chain reaction in our nuclear power plants and arsenals.
What if nuclear knowledge proliferated and got used by sick minds?
To err is to be human. When humans are called upon to maintain these complex nuclear power plants with enormous potentials to wreak havoc, disasters like this are bound to repeat itself.
And humans are not immortal. Lessons learned in a generation may be forgotten in the subsequent ones.
Perhaps we should fix ourselves first before moving on to dangerous projects. There is no rush unless we doomed our planet Earth to autodestruct.
Report this comment2011-03-30 01:50:57 PMPosted by: Tommy Tong #19456MacIlwain's categorization of "experts" in quotes is on the money. These so called experts have very deep but narrow knowledge of the safety issues of nuclear power. This leads them to believe that their calculations and assumptions are correct with almost religious fervor. There is no accommodation for the quality of the underlying science in their decisions. It is reminiscent of the Space Shuttle disaster where it took a Feinman to get at the truth. As an expert on nuclear cross sections I can tell you that they are unreliable with unrealistic uncertainties. Still the "experts" consider this data gospel and believe their calculations. The solution to this mess is to bring in people who are not "experts" but just clever.
Report this comment2011-03-30 02:37:44 PMPosted by: Richard Firestone #19465I would be supportive of more use of nuclear power, given the safety issues can be addressed; however, until we figure out what to do with the waste.... I'm not familiar with Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, but we seem to be continuing to move forward with nuclear energy, while we still (nearly 60 years later???)don't know how to deal with the waste, ...for the next "however many" thousand years, much longer than we have been around as a civilized society. Until we figure that out, we shouldn't be in the business of creating more of it.
Report this comment2011-03-30 03:43:52 PMPosted by: Anthony Kerwin #19473To quote Oscar Wilde, "The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius." Yes, I understand pro-fission advocates when they say radiation dangers are exaggerated, and traditional fuel use is killing the planet anyway, but what gives anyone the right to pollute this planet with any amount of ionizing radiation contamination? I care about all the creatures on this planet, not just humans. I am against any short-term or long-term use of fission reactors for the simple reason that Anthony Kerwin stated in his comment above, that we shouldn't be in the business of creating more spent nuclear fuel that we have no place to dispose of and no way to make safe.
History has shown time and time again how foolish we humans are! The only way you will eliminate human error is to eliminate the human!
Nuclear Renaissance?
Might the obvious dangers of nuclear matters lead to new thinking; perhaps led by one country's new leadership role in regards to such nuclear matters? Then perhaps spreading to the sub-continent and also Middle East, and even perhaps to a large country, if internal situations become too disparate?
Report this comment2011-03-30 04:50:32 PMPosted by: TM Zanardm #19478While the radiation levels range from benign to potentially harmful and will in nearby regions create serious problems for quite some time. It will be quite difficult to attribute fatalities to the ?￠a????fallout.?￠a???? Meanwhile, thousands are dead and tens of thousands are homeless just from the direct effects of the tsunami. Fascinating as it is to analyze and discuss the nuclear reactors, it appears that the devastated Japanese cities were provided the same type of sea-wall to protect them from the tsunami as the reactors. Check out the March 28 TIA article titled ?￠a????Nuclear Monomania.?￠a????
Report this comment2011-03-30 05:51:23 PMPosted by: David Sherwood #19481A well-known organic farmer who lives in Ibaraki Prefecture, Mr Jiro Kakei, has said,
Technologies progress through failure, but nuclear power is a technology that does not allow for failure.
(From http://candobetter.net/node/2411)
Report this comment2011-03-30 07:08:26 PMPosted by: Michael Lardelli #19485In my opinion the worst problem is not what has happened but that none of the officials seems to be up to the job. Our government (I am living in Japan) has, as only response, decided to appear in public in workers uniforms. The governor of Tokyo complains hat his fire engines might be damaged at the defective power plant. Nobody decided, from day 1 on, that no vegetables or animals can be brought to the market from the affected areas – plus a safety belt around. The first respone to that problem came after the first (slightly) contaminated vegatables appeared in the supply chain.
Some very intelligent people are talking about when the not that badly damaged reactors can be restarted!!! This is not the time???to even think about this – as long as 4 nuclear reactors are still unsafe.
The bosses of TEPCO do not seem to understand that a container can not hold more water than its capacity – they are very surprised that a lot of (badly contaminated) water is overflowing...
The problem is not the technology – the problem are the people.
Report this comment2011-03-30 07:47:54 PMPosted by: Otto Albrecht #19488Anita is right. Many people care about the other living things that are our brothers/sisters. For a long time, we humans have been behaving as pests. Let's rethink our role in this world and not kill our Mother and her other offsprings. Let's go slow and proceed with extreme caution. Let us not create "clean up" employments for generations of humans to come. Let us consume less so that we don't need to be exterminated.
Report this comment2011-03-30 08:54:02 PMPosted by: Tommy Tong #19501To those who are unwilling to introduce ionizing radiation to the environment: Burning coal does that. Renewables will take decades or longer to ramp up. Saying "no radiation" is unrealistic and impossible to implement.
Fossil fuel pollution kills and sickens far more people than nuclear power has – even including Chernobyl. I'm not saying "Go nukes, yeah, yeah!" but I am saying that we shouldn't support a worse alternative – and coal is worse. By setting completely different standards for nuclear and fossil power, we are effectively supporting coal.
And by the way, coal-ash arsenic is a carcinogen that never decays, and the US government has considered some coal-ash ponds to be such ripe terrorist targets that it wouldn't even publish a list of the most dangerous ones.
While this article was quite informative and well-written, it does not support its opening and closing sentences: "almost existential" risks and downsides "too terrible to contemplate." Nothing in the article explains why the author has taken this position. Perhaps an editor added them, thinking the article needed extra "punch"? Or perhaps the author thought they were self-evident? But there are no facts to back them up. Just fear which somehow manages to ignore the millions of fossil-fuel deaths we're inflicting on ourselves.
Report this comment2011-03-31 04:57:18 AMPosted by: Chris Phoenix #19505What a load of old hippy cr@p! Nuclear power is the only real way forward, the nuclear plants in Japan were built in 1970, modern nuclear plants are safer, better built and produce more CLEAN energy.
What's the alternative? The planet covered in massive wind farms? Coal powered power power stations belching out black clouds of crap?
Modern nuclear plants will automatically shut themselves down and go into dormant safe mode after a day or 2 even if every single person on the planet just vanished.
Report this comment2011-03-31 05:46:16 AMPosted by: Mombasa69 Mombasa69 #19509Regarding Chris Phoenix's point about the risks — which very much gets to the crux of the matter — I did indeed leave them because they seem self-evident.
Everyone knows that Japan can recover from the dreadful human and physical toll of the earthquake and tsunami. It was only when the nuclear implications were thrown into the mix that faith in this was shaken: the Nikkei only started to crash, for example, when the nuclear issue reared its head, and its performance continues to hang on the clean-up.
The nuclear lobby seems to have trouble getting its head round how people perceive these risks; the insurance market, like the stock market, has no such difficulty.
If CP and others nuclear supporters could put themselves, for just one moment, in the shoes of people now living anywhere near this plant — or of anyone who loves Japan and the Japanese, as I do a??a?? perhaps they could see what all the fuss is about, and why the risk is indeed 'existential'.
Report this comment2011-03-31 07:05:54 AMPosted by: Colin Macilwain #19512Colin Macilwain is being very misleading in offering such an empty justification for inflated rhetoric. Does fear justify fear, without any regard to the facts?
Why is it 'self-evident' that a nuclear risk that apparently hasn't killed any member of the public is 'existential', compared to an earthquake and tsunami that have killed thousands – or compared to global warming that in the future may kill millions?
Why is it 'self-evident' that nuclear risks must always be of a different order than any other risks? - like being poisoned by coal dust or by spilled crude oil or by lead from car exhausts, or made homeless by floods, fires, tsunamis or earthquakes? Can you put yourself in the shoes of people suffering from these and tell us why they should count themselves so lucky?
Can you give even one rational justification for this extreme asymmetry in judging risks of death or destruction?
So far you can only point to the fact that people (including in the stock market – or do you mean the insurance industry?) are afraid. This is a strictly circular argument: the media inflates nuclear risks based on memories of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl, the public reads sensational reporting in the media and is afraid, then you in the media point to how afraid the public is as 'proof' of the dangers.
I'm sorry but you should be ashamed to put in print such an intellectually empty argument, based on little more than media exaggeration and misrepresentation. You seem to think that perception is more important than reality and that it's more important for you to report perceptions of danger than actual dangers. This is unscientific and in the end dishonest.
Either tell us why nuclear power is inherently more dangerous – why it kills more people or damages more property than any other power source – or admit that you too are part of a media sensation factory.
For example, if you mention Three Mile Island, give us the facts. Tell us how many diseases or deaths and how much real damage were caused by it.
Report this comment2011-03-31 08:14:46 AMPosted by: Thomas Dent #19518When the puddle has only tadpoles left, they munch on each other.
If we proliferate too much and use up all of the limited resources, and the animals, fish, and plants die off, what do we live on, human flesh?
Why can't we limit our energy consumption and always have to harness more and more? Why lit up the night sky and block out the stars when it is really bedtime?
Our priorities are wrong. We will only spiral further and further down until the end of everything, not just humanity.
We shouldn't just debate the semantics and science of the article. We should get down to the real point, which is to find the correct balance.
Report this comment2011-03-31 09:46:08 AMPosted by: Tommy Tong #19522There was a pro-nuclear comment above, extolling the safety of modern reactors with:
"Modern nuclear plants will automatically shut themselves down and go into dormant safe mode after a day or 2"
It should be pointed out that the Japanese reactors went into a safe mode immediately at the start of the earthquake by automatically inserting control rods to stop the nuclear reactions.
I think of the problem as 'level 1 engineering', which is standard practice: come up with the best estimate of design requirements and build to those assumptions.
Engineers & planners must go beyond those standards (which are fine for building a house) to 'level 2 engineering', and examine what will happen if the assumptions are wrong. If the Fukushima designers had considered what would happen if the tsunami barriers were breached, perhaps they would have taken the relatively simple precaution to site the back up generators on high ground.
We have nuclear power plants here in America situated on faults which are predicted to generate earthquakes stronger than the desing specs, because the fault was discovered after the plant was built.
Colin's right: the nuclear engineering community needs to think of risks in a different way. This is not elementary school where a passing grade is getting 70% of all questions right.
What to do with nuclear waste? So far reprocessing and thorium based fuel cycles are the known methods that can reduce the amount of waste already produced and transform it into a smaller amount of waste that needs storage only for couple of hundreds of years instead of the much longer current requirements.
There are proliferation fears for why we are not doing this, already but we must also face the fact that nuclear power plants are the best known method to neutralize weapon grade materials (see Megawatts for Megatons program) so by analogue we should move past of proliferation concerns related to reprocessing.
Given that with current inefficient use of uranium reserves we will run out of fuel in a hundred years or so, it is obvious that reprocessing has an economical incentive. So basically the question is not if we are going to do reprocessing rather when are we going to do it. Hence the waste should be stored in a retrievable manner. We are going to need it in our future.
The experts: Here society is in a tricky state, you might as well complain about not trusting doctors whilst they are the only ones who provide health care. On a basic level we must reject the mad scientist sociological stereotype. These people care about the future deeply and they certainly don't want to live an apocalyptic legacy to future generations. They do make mistakes and they do learn form it. Certainly they also need to learn to communicate better.
Number of reactors on site the question is would TEPCO / government response be better if they would have had multiple similar reactors spread along a larger area? Probably not. Redundancy is necessary but certain degrees of centralization are likewise. More is to be gained by centralized improvements than geographical distribution of individual reactors. Bear in mind that the Onagawa powerplant with three reactors was twice as close to the epicenter but it survived just fine thanks to superior safety measures (higher tsunami defenses etc).
A bit of historical perspective: in case of Chernobyl there were 4 active reactors in the plant whilst one had suffered a major catastrophe. The state continued to operate the other 3 up until 1991 when after having received compensation payments from neighboring countries they have shut them all down. At Three Mile Island there were two reactors one of them had problems but all both are currently in operation.
Report this comment2011-03-31 12:46:04 PMPosted by: Dee Zsombor #19542Plutonium – the last ironic trace of civilization?
At least 3 million years are required to form a geological strata (of say 7 ft?). What remanents of a culture might survive? Plastic pieces; or nothing at all? Our world has hundreds of tons of plutonium; plus all reactors forming plutonium. The halve life of plutonium is very long; so it would survive on our planet, and in our broader stellar system if for example we diverted an asteroid by nuclear warhead means. Likewise for exploration of terrestrial planets of habitat zone of another stellar system, might the only trace of civilization be that of plutonium? Stars form in multiple; so therefore our Sun has sister stellar systems, very close, and ascertainable via dedicated infrared telescope detection of 'cold' gas giants. In addition to spectroscopic detection of oxygen (sign of photosynthesis) in the atmosphere, might search for plutonium be of interest?
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