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Before the Fukushima disaster unfolded in 2011, Japanese government and energy company officials were aware of the warning signs and risks of a potential crisis at the reactor site. They failed to use safety mechanisms or update regulations over time to address the vulnerabilities of the power plants. Because interest groups had led the public to believe the power plants were completely safe, the plants were run with little accountability. Following this disaster, Japan established a new nuclear regulatory commission and nuclear regulatory authority in and implemented new regulatory mechanisms. These efforts have been limited, however, and have shifted the issue from regulation to implementation. The enormous cost of meeting new safety protocols has created new barriers for restarting the power plants under updated regulations, but the energy demands of the country will remain. The tension between managing operational risks and meeting public energy needs will test the public and private sectors' ability to sufficiently revamp the nuclear industry and prevent crises in years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Fukushima disaster, the authors analyzed all past core-melt accidents and estimated a failure rate of 1 per 3704 reactor years. This rate indicates that more than one such accident could occur somewhere in the world within the next decade. The authors also analyzed the role that learning from past accidents can play over time. This analysis showed few or no learning effects occurring, depending on the database used. Because the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has no publicly available list of nuclear accidents, the authors used data compiled by the Guardian newspaper and the energy researcher Benjamin Sovacool. The results suggest that there are likely to be more severe nuclear accidents than have been expected and support Charles Perrow's "normal accidents" theory that nuclear power reactors cannot be operated without major accidents. However, a more detailed analysis of nuclear accident probabilities needs more transparency from the IAEA. Public support for nuclear power cannot currently be based on full knowledge simply because important information is not available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Switzerland has long met a good portion of its energy needs by using nuclear power. But in the wake of the accident at Fukushima, the country will have to turn elsewhere—while still remaining true to its history of self-sufficiency and energy independence. This effort is made more complicated by fears that one of its traditional energy sources, hydropower, may no longer be as reliable as in the past. But with a combination of energy conservation, greater efficiencies, alternative energy sources, the “smart grid,” and the introduction of new technologies currently on the drawing board, the country may readily be able to replace the energy lost by the closing of its existing nuclear power plants. And the loss of the snowpack and glaciers (due to climate change) may not be as dire for Switzerland’s hydropower as first anticipated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments and the nuclear power industry have a strong interest in playing down the harmful effects of radiation from atomic weapons and nuclear power plants. Over the years, some scientists have supported the view that low levels of radiation are not harmful, while other scientists have held that all radiation is harmful. The author examines the radiation effects of nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945; nuclear weapons testing; plutonium plant accidents at Windscale in England and Chelyabinsk in the Soviet Union; nuclear power plant emissions during normal operations; and the power plant accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, and Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. In each case, he finds a pattern of minimizing the damage to humans and attributing evidence of shortened life spans mostly to stress and social dislocation rather than to radiation. While low-level radiation is now generally accepted as harmful, its effects are deemed to be so small that they cannot be distinguished from the much greater effects of stress and social dislocation. Thus, some scientists declare that there is no point in even studying the populations exposed to the radioactive elements released into the atmosphere during the 2011 accident at Fukushima. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is tempting to attribute variations in support for nuclear power to prominent accidents such as Three Mile Island in the United States or Fukushima in Japan. To illuminate how such attribution can be problematic, the authors discuss the historical context of the Three Mile Island accident in the United States. They point out that the US nuclear industry faced major challenges even before the 1979 accident: Forty percent of all US reactor cancellations between 1960 and 2010, they write, occurred before the accident in Pennsylvania. While safety concerns were undoubtedly a driver of public aversion to new nuclear construction in the United States, the nuclear industry already faced substantial economic and competitiveness obstacles, much like the nuclear industry worldwide before Fukushima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nuclear industry has claimed that a Fukushima-type event is unlikely to happen in the United States, because few US nuclear power plants are vulnerable to tsunamis. But to some degree, every nuclear plant is vulnerable to natural disaster or deliberate attack, and no nuclear plant can be assumed to withstand an event more severe than the “design-basis accidents” it was engineered to withstand. Many US nuclear plants appear to be subject to greater risks than they were designed to handle, particularly in regard to earthquakes. The author suggests that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission should expand the universe of events that new and existing nuclear plants must be designed to survive and require reactors to be upgraded accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced that Japan should meet its energy needs without nuclear power plants. But his statement may have little relevance in the next administration. There is a complex power struggle underway over the future of nuclear energy in Japan involving political, governmental, industry, and union groups. Despite the seriousness of the Fukushima crisis, Japan’s historical commitment to nuclear power—and a fuel cycle that includes reprocessing and breeder reactors—still has powerful supporters. Even with a scale-down of nuclear power, there is a possibility that the policy of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel will continue as a matter of political inertia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2010, South Korea’s nuclear power reactors generated 31.4 percent of the country’s total electricity—by 2030 the government plans to have 19 more reactors online, increasing even more the country’s total nuclear generating capacity. But with this increased capacity comes increased spent nuclear fuel. The author writes that as the existing reactor-based storage pools fill up, spent fuel management is becoming a hot political issue. South Korea’s nuclear utility reports that over the next 10 years, the country will face a crisis in terms of on-site storage at all four of its nuclear power plant sites. As revealed in the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plants in March 2011, the vulnerability of spent-fuel storage pools is a matter of serious concern. The author explores ways in which South Korea can move forward. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over a single April day in 1986, a little-known place called Chernobyl became infamous. Twenty-five years later, a similar fate befell Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture. The Fukushima disaster was better contained than Chernobyl, but if an emergency hits another nuclear power facility, it may well do so in an unanticipated way and present unforeseeable challenges. Are nations adequately prepared for an unpredictable “next one?” Here,Sonja Schmidof Austria,Augustin Simoof Cameroon, andManpreet Sethiof India assess improvements over the last 30 years in preparedness for a nuclear power disaster – and debate how preparedness should be further improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]