As the world continues to watch the Fukushima crisis unfold, some are already heralding the end of the industry. Benjamin Sovacool, a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, warns that the tragedy should finally provide enough justification to “stop the nuclear renaissance from materializing,” since the risks clearly outweigh the benefits.
Indeed, the Fukushima incident has sent a wave of panic around the world. Switzerland immediately suspended orders for three new reactors. Germany temporarily shut down 17 of its nuclear power stations, while China announced a freeze on new approvals. France, long recognized as a vanguard for nuclear power, saw fresh opposition emerge from its public.
As much as people do have valid reasons to fear, I get the growing sense that much of this is an overreaction, for two simple reasons. The first is that it is far too premature for any judgments about Fukushima to be taken seriously. Rescue operations are still ongoing, and it is impossible to weigh the extent of the damage for now. The second is far more obvious, though it has sadly been overlooked. Japan just suffered a natural disaster on a scale unlike anything in its modern history, one that overloaded the Fukushima reactor to begin with. Thus, comparisons to Chernobyl and Three Mile Island cannot be used analogously since the causes of the accidents are disparate – one a force of nature, and the other human error.
Yet, despite this strikingly obvious fact, people continue to make such comparisons. The New York Times just ran a piece on the Chernobyl tragedy titled “Lessons From Chernobyl for Japan,”— except there are not many lessons to be learned at all since the circumstances surrounding both incidents are so different. In the introduction to his article, Professor Sovacool writes that the Fukushima crisis is no “anomaly” because it follows a history of other accidents that have occurred due to “droughts and earthquakes,” but fails to list a single example. It is widely accepted that the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island incidents — the two most prominent examples — were caused by a mixture of human error and design flaws, and not natural disaster.
Of course, to completely ignore the human element in the Fukushima incident would be disingenuous as well, since its cooling systems should never have failed in the first place. But the margin of human error is far smaller than any other previous incident, simply due to the relative scale of the disaster: it required both heavy tremors and the tsunami for the reactor’s coolant system to fail. If the earthquake was already considered freakish by Japanese standards, one would hardly expect a repeat of events elsewhere around the world.
Another fact critics ignore is that technology improves in a non-linear fashion. Sovacool notes that 956 incidents in nuclear plants and 30,000 mishaps have been documented from 1942 to 2007, but these figures are misleading. First of all, the figures do not give any notion of whether the frequency of incidents have increased or decreased over time, a far more useful statistic. Secondly, it gives no notion of the types of incident, and whether measures have since been implemented to resolve them. Since the Chernobyl disaster, there has understandably been no repeats because lessons have been learned and technology has improved.
Not that I am defending the nuclear industry for its own sake. If nuclear power could be substituted with another cleaner and economically viable form of renewable energy, then it should certainly be done away with. However, since no such technology exists, it remains our best option for now. Reducing nuclear power would probably mean increasing our dependence on fossil fuels, exacerbating climate change and causing energy prices to become volatile. Now, that would be a more fearful outcome.
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