Is nuclear energy as safe as the BBC claims?

September 28, 2020 by George Harvey

Photo: wearing safety clothing in Fukushima Daiichi. Voice of America Image – Public Domain.

Recently, a BBC News report appeared titled “Nuclear Power: Are We So Concerned About Radiation Hazards?” It has been republished or reposted in a number of news websites since then. It says 28 people died as a direct result of the Fukushima blast and immediate radiation exposure. He adds that there are 15 deaths in the region due to thyroid cancer. And the conclusion that these numbers are based on is precisely:[A]According to the United Nations in 2005, only 43 deaths can be directly attributed to the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever seen.

really? Only 43 deaths? And this according to the United Nations?

There is a lot of well documented material on the Chernobyl disaster available. One Wikipedia article, “Deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster.” It states, “[T]There is a great debate here about the exact number of deaths expected due to the long-term health effects of the disaster; Estimates of long-term mortality range from 4,000 (according to 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint UN association) for the most vulnerable people in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, to 16,000 in total for all vulnerable people in general. Continental Europe, in numbers as high as 60,000 when relatively minor impacts around the world are included.

The other problem is that the nuclear industry has based much of its analysis on what I think is clearly flawed thinking.

I will classify numbers from the nuclear industry into three types. Some of them are localized as expected. Some are predictably discontinued, with the true value transformed by a factor of two or more. Some are predictable, and sometimes provable, at least on an order of magnitude. The number that falls into which category appears to depend entirely on the purpose for which it should be used.

Spot numbers are scientifically computable. One example of this is the number of electron-volts associated with a nuclear particle emitted from a specific nuclear fission event. Another is the number of megawatts that a given nuclear reactor will deliver at full capacity.

The ones that usually appear to be out of order twice or more are those related to things like projections of costs and the times it will take to build nuclear power plants. If the plant is expected to cost $ 6 billion and take six years to build, its actual cost is likely to exceed $ 12 billion, and it could take twelve years or more to build.

But this is the third type of number related to the nuclear industry that this BBC article covers. And confirms that the United Nations said that 43 people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster, and that the total number will be slightly higher. What you won’t know from reading it, however, is that the UN report actually gives a different figure close to two degrees by volume greater for the total death toll. This number could be 4000.

As you might expect, the United Nations has been reprimanded for filing too low numbers by some anti-nuclear activists. They’d rather say maybe 60,000 people died, or even more. And while the activist numbers may be higher, I think they are more likely to be right that the total is 43, a number that seems deceptive, at least.

Some people may ask who we can trust in such cases, when there are no facts to prove. There may not be a perfect answer to that. Fortunately, there are some undeniable numbers involved, because the numbers are facts that can be proven. They have nothing to do with the safety analysis. They are explained in the Wikipedia article, “Primary Damage Frequency”. I will try a shorter explanation.

Back in the old days, when General Electric was building its second-generation nuclear reactors, a safety analysis showed that the probability that the reactor would suffer “substantial damage” within a year was one in ten thousand. With a thousand such units online, we can reasonably expect one breakdown per decade.

Not many of these reactors had been commissioned online before safety upgrades brought improved numbers for safety analysis. The new figures showed a potential collapse of about one in twenty thousand. Of course, this means we can reasonably expect a breakdown every other decade, if we had 1,000 reactors in operation.

Newer reactors have higher safety analysis numbers. One event in 50,000 years of a reactor is one promise. For some of the new designs, including the upcoming small modular reactors (meaning small about the size of a small house), the promises include the impossibility of any breakdown at all.

However, we do not have nearly 1,000 reactors in service around the world. We have about 440 runs, as well as a little over 180 shutdowns. They worked together during nearly 20,000 reactor years. If they were all old reactors, we might have expected two primary damage events. But the vast majority of them are newer types. Reasonably, we should have expected only one collapse, worldwide, since the first reactor went into operation.

But we haven’t seen a single crash. We’ve had eleven. This only includes reactors that go online to produce electricity to sell to customers. Three of them were in the United States: Three Mile Island, Fermi 1, and the Sodium Reactor experiment, which, despite its name, was selling energy commercially. Three reactors were smelted in the Fukushima disaster, Japan. And two more dissolved, on two separate occasions, in France. One each occurred in the Soviet Union, Scotland and Czechoslovakia. These are the ones we know.

Expecting one, but getting eleven, is not a good result.

In an effort to figure out what went wrong, I realized that because the nuclear safety analysis sees human failure as an uncountable possibility, it is simply not included in the calculations. Of the eleven collapses, I would like to consider that they all resulted in a significant way from human failure.

In other words, the safety analysis simply ignores the larger cause of nuclear meltdowns. This made him completely unreliable.

Advocates for nuclear power might cry about this. After all, what was the relationship between human failure and the 14-meter-high tsunami that melted three reactors at Fukushima? What analysis can see this possibility?

In fact, this event should have been anticipated. Please note that I said “predicted” and not “assumed”. The highest tsunami waves from the 2011 Tohoku earthquake reached 37.5 meters. The Sanriku earthquake of 1933 caused a tsunami, with the highest waves reaching 27.5 meters. The Sanriku earthquake of 1896 was followed by a tsunami, with its highest waves reaching 37.5 meters. All this hit the northeastern coast of Japan, where Fukushima plants are located. The first two must have informed the design of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

This plant should have been prepared, at least, for the largest tsunami to hit the hundred years before it was built. But the seawall at the factory was 5.7 meters high.

I suspect it was the budget, not the safety, that determined the height of the seawall. Regardless of the cause, this determination definitely resulted from human failure with tragic consequences. The sea wall simply should have been much longer. The government appears to agree, as the plant is now required to build a 16-meter seawall to protect the remaining six reactors, three of which were destroyed and three are now permanently closed, according to an article in NHK World.

The point is that there are numbers provided by the nuclear industry and its apologists that are so far from the truth – I am tempted to say “they have nothing to do with the truth” – that they can only be viewed with the greatest suspicion. Unfortunately, the BBC article seems to push these bad numbers without stating that there is a serious question about it. BBC should do better.

I don’t feel much this way about the BBC articles, but my response to that is, “Shame on you!”

Photo: wearing safety clothing in Fukushima Daiichi. Voice of America Image – Public Domain.

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Tags: BBC, health, meltdown, nuclear meltdown, nuclear energy, nuclear safety, risk analysis, safety

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