Nuclear safety and security

Nuclear safety is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as 'The achievement of proper operating conditions, prevention of accidents or mitigation of accident consequences, resulting in protection of workers, the public and the environment from undue radiation hazards'. The IAEA defines nuclear security as 'The prevention and detection of and response to, theft, sabotage, unauthorized access, illegal transfer or other malicious acts involving nuclear material, other radioactive substances or their associated facilities'.'It recommends safety standards, but member states are not required to comply; it promotes nuclear energy, but it also monitors nuclear use; it is the sole global organization overseeing the nuclear energy industry, yet it is also weighed down by checking compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)'.The reactors themselves were enormously complex machines with an incalculable number of things that could go wrong. When that happened at Three Mile Island in 1979, another fault line in the nuclear world was exposed. One malfunction led to another, and then to a series of others, until the core of the reactor itself began to melt, and even the world's most highly trained nuclear engineers did not know how to respond. The accident revealed serious deficiencies in a system that was meant to protect public health and safety. Perrow concluded that the failure at Three Mile Island was a consequence of the system's immense complexity. Such modern high-risk systems, he realized, were prone to failures however well they were managed. It was inevitable that they would eventually suffer what he termed a 'normal accident'. Therefore, he suggested, we might do better to contemplate a radical redesign, or if that was not possible, to abandon such technology entirely. Operating nuclear reactors contain large amounts of radioactive fission products which, if dispersed, can pose a direct radiation hazard, contaminate soil and vegetation, and be ingested by humans and animals. Human exposure at high enough levels can cause both short-term illness and death and longer-term death by cancer and other diseases.The extreme danger of the radioactive material in power plants and of nuclear technology in and of itself is so well known that the US government was prompted (at the industry's urging) to enact provisions that protect the nuclear industry from bearing the full burden of such inherently risky nuclear operations. The Price-Anderson Act limits industry's liability in the case of accidents, and the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act charges the federal government with responsibility for permanently storing nuclear waste.The KANUPP plant in Karachi, Pakistan, has the most people — 8.2 million — living within 30 kilometres of a nuclear plant, although it has just one relatively small reactor with an output of 125 megawatts. Next in the league, however, are much larger plants — Taiwan's 1,933-megawatt Kuosheng plant with 5.5 million people within a 30-kilometre radius and the 1,208-megawatt Chin Shan plant with 4.7 million; both zones include the capital city of Taipei.A rare event – especially one that has never occurred – is difficult to foresee, expensive to plan for and easy to discount with statistics. Just because something is only supposed to happen every 10,000 years does not mean that it will not happen tomorrow. Over the typical 40-year life of a plant, assumptions can also change, as they did on September 11, 2001, in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck, and in March, 2011, after Fukushima.Nuclear reactors and their spent-fuel pools could be targets for terrorists piloting hijacked planes. Reactors may be situated downstream from dams that, should they ever burst, could unleash massive floods. Some reactors are located close to faults or shorelines, a dangerous scenario like that which emerged at Three Mile Island and Fukushima – a catastrophic coolant failure, the overheating and melting of the radioactive fuel rods, and a release of radioactive material.Despite victories like the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission, and later the Nuclear Regular Commission, the secrecy that began with the Manhattan Project has tended to permeate the civilian nuclear program, as well as the military and defense programs.Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that blew out concrete walls around the reactors. Radiation readings spiked around Fukushima as the disaster widened, forcing the evacuation of 200,000 people. There was a rise in radiation levels on the outskirts of Tokyo, with a population of 30 million, 135 miles (210 kilometers) to the south.The 1990 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for safety at the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.The multiple reactor crises at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant reinforce the need for strengthening global instruments to ensure nuclear safety worldwide. The fact that a country that has been operating nuclear power reactors for decades should prove so alarmingly improvisational in its response and so unwilling to reveal the facts even to its own people, much less the International Atomic Energy Agency, is a reminder that nuclear safety is a constant work-in-progress.The accident in the former Soviet Union 25 years ago 'affected one reactor in a totalitarian state with no safety culture,' UBS analysts including Per Lekander and Stephen Oldfield wrote in a report today. 'At Fukushima, four reactors have been out of control for weeks – casting doubt on whether even an advanced economy can master nuclear safety.'Despite the resources poured into analyzing crustal movements and having expert committees determine earthquake risk, for instance, researchers never considered the possibility of a magnitude-9 earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. The failure of multiple safety features on nuclear power plants has raised questions about the nation's engineering prowess. Government flip-flopping on acceptable levels of radiation exposure confused the public, and health professionals provided little guidance. Facing a dearth of reliable information on radiation levels, citizens armed themselves with dosimeters, pooled data, and together produced radiological contamination maps far more detailed than anything the government or official scientific sources ever provided.'You have people in Japan right now that are facing either not returning to their homes forever, or if they do return to their homes, living in a contaminated area for basically ever... It affects millions of people, it affects our land, it affects our atmosphere ... it's affecting future generations ... I don't think any of these great big massive plants that spew pollution into the air are good. But I don't think it's really helpful to make these comparisons just in terms of number of deaths'.'Summarizing all responses to questions related to evacuees' current family status, one-third of all surveyed families live apart from their children, while 50.1 percent live away from other family members (including elderly parents) with whom they lived before the disaster. The survey also showed that 34.7 percent of the evacuees have suffered salary cuts of 50 percent or more since the outbreak of the nuclear disaster. A total of 36.8 percent reported a lack of sleep, while 17.9 percent reported smoking or drinking more than before they evacuated.' Nuclear safety is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as 'The achievement of proper operating conditions, prevention of accidents or mitigation of accident consequences, resulting in protection of workers, the public and the environment from undue radiation hazards'. The IAEA defines nuclear security as 'The prevention and detection of and response to, theft, sabotage, unauthorized access, illegal transfer or other malicious acts involving nuclear material, other radioactive substances or their associated facilities'. This covers nuclear power plants and all other nuclear facilities, the transportation of nuclear materials, and the use and storage of nuclear materials for medical, power, industry, and military uses. The nuclear power industry has improved the safety and performance of reactors, and has proposed new and safer reactor designs. However, a perfect safety cannot be guaranteed. Potential sources of problems include human errors and external events that have a greater impact than anticipated: The designers of reactors at Fukushima in Japan did not anticipate that a tsunami generated by an earthquake would disable the backup systems that were supposed to stabilize the reactor after the earthquake.Catastrophic scenarios involving terrorist attacks, insider sabotage, and cyberattacks are also conceivable. Nuclear weapon safety, as well as the safety of military research involving nuclear materials, is generally handled by agencies different from those that oversee civilian safety, for various reasons, including secrecy. There are ongoing concerns about terrorist groups acquiring nuclear bomb-making material. As of 2011, nuclear safety considerations occur in a number of situations, including: With the exception of thermonuclear weapons and experimental fusion research, all safety issues specific to nuclear power stems from the need to limit the biological uptake of committed dose (ingestion or inhalation of radioactive materials), and external radiation dose due to radioactive contamination.