Can't Turn It Off

The situation with the nuclear reactors in Japan is causing many in the United States and around the world to reconsider the recent push for nuclear power, which even many environmental activists such as Greenpeace have come to accept.

Predictably, many are saying that liberals are inciting hysteria and exploiting the catastrophe for political ends. Of course, when oil prices were skyrocketing in 2008 that didn't stop those people from pushing for more off-shore drilling (as if accidents like the BP spill never happen), or using the recession and state budget crunch as an excuse to jam through union-busting legislation.

Nuclear power has obvious advantages: unless there's a terrible accident it's pretty clean (though there are problems with radioactive tailings at uranium mines that people always forget about).

But nuclear power has serious problems once the electricity has been generated: there's no place to put the waste. Right now it's sitting in casks, often out in the open in full view of the public, near the nuclear plant that generated it. The possibility that terrorists can gain access to radioactive material scattered in dozens of places around the country is an obvious problem. The waste problem is technically soluble, but no one wants it in their back yard.

We've had three serious accidents in the last 40 years -- Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Japan. There have been hundreds of smaller incidents: minor releases of radioactive gas and employee deaths at power plants. The total number of dead is relatively small, probably numbering in the thousands, mostly due to cancers and other radiation-induced diseases in Ukraine.

Deaths in oil, gas and coal extraction and production number in the tens of thousands every year, and air pollution from fossil fuels kills millions every year. That, and the threat of climate change, is why so many environmentalists have grudgingly accepted the necessity of nuclear power.

The problem isn't with nuclear power, per se. It's with reactor designs that require power and personnel using heroic efforts to prevent a meltdown during catastrophic failures.

With a coal-fired power plant you can just stop shoveling in coal when there's a serious problem. With a natural gas plant you can shut off the valve. Within minutes or hours the fires will all burn out and the plant will be inert. If there's a catastrophic accident these plants will be damaged and will shut down -- their fuel may burn and explode, but it's a problem limited to a relatively small area.

With this nuclear reactor design the fuel is inside and can't be removed -- even the spent fuel, which in the Japanese reactors is starting to burn because the cooling pond is evaporating. In fact, this reactor, Daiichi Number 4, was actually turned off for maintenance during the quake and tsunami. And yet it's still experiencing a reaction that would lead to a melt-down without plant workers taking action to stop it.

This design is seriously flawed. It has the potential to explode, killing thousands of people instantly or within hours, and sickening millions who may struggle for years with cancer.

This is exactly analogous to the Toyota accelerator problem, only much worse. We don't accept cars that accelerate madly. We can't accept nuclear power plants that have the same problem.

There are designs that have a better failure mode, but they use different kinds of fuel, and produce weapons-grade plutonium or other bad things. Instead of plunging ahead with current reactor designs that could have the same problems as the Daichi reactors we should think very carefully.

It's not hysterical to require that future nuclear reactors be able to be shut down completely, safely and passively when there's a catastrophe such as an earthquake or terrorist attack. When we turn something off it should stay off.