Nuclear disaster in Japan: does it show a way forward for nuclear power?; COLUMNS
Bailey, Ronald
Reason
July 1, 2011
AS I WRITE THIS, cleanup workers had entered one of the Fukushima nuclear reactor buildings for the first time since explosions rocked the plant, the day after it was inundated by a tsunami generated by adevastating 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March II. In early April, the Japanese government elevated the disaster to Level 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. That is the highest level on the scale, putting it on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion.
The good news is that the Fukushima reactors emitted only about a tenth as much radioactive material as Chernobyl, most of which floated out over uninhabited ocean where it was diluted to background levels in seawater. The plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power, now expects to have the reactors and spent-fuel pools cool and stable in nine months, just shy of a year after the tsunami knocked them out. The cleanup will cost billions of dollars, and the company may end up being nationalized. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that while its monitors have detected traces of radionuclides (unstable atoms that undergo radioactive decay) from Fukushima in America, all of theradiation levels detected "are hundreds of times below levels of concern."
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