One year after Fukushima’s nightmare, the industry’s future is not bright — for reasons of cost as much as safety.
Looking at nuclear power 26 years ago, The Economist [concluded] that the industry was “safe as a chocolate factory” proved something of a hostage to fortune. Less than a month later one of the reactors at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine ran out of control […]
Then, 25 years later, when enough time had passed for some to be talking of a “nuclear renaissance,” it happened again. The bureaucrats, politicians and industrialists of what has been called Japan’s “nuclear village” were not unaccountable apparatchiks in a decaying authoritarian state like those that bore the guilt of Chernobyl; they had responsibilities to voters, to shareholders, to society.
And still they allowed their enthusiasm for nuclear power to shelter weak regulation, safety systems that failed to work and a culpable ignorance of the tectonic risks the reactors faced, all the while blithely promulgating a myth of nuclear safety.
[…] nuclear’s promise of a global transformation is gone.
—
A tsunami crashed through and destroyed the emergency diesel generators at Fukushima, that’s why it melted down, who could have expected that?
Except its not true.
—
TEPCO’s Darkest Secret
by DAVID McNEILL and JAKE ADELSTEIN
While the earthquake that caused the massive tsunami is now estimated to be 9.0 in magnitude the strength of the quake when it hit the Fukushima nuclear reactor hundreds of kilometers away was a relatively weak 6.4 magnitude earthquake.
This weak earthquake caused the caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown – not the Tsunami – which raises red flags about the safety of nuclear reactors around the world.
Nuclear power: A dream that failed
http://www.economist.com/node/21549936
One year after Fukushima’s nightmare, the industry’s future is not bright — for reasons of cost as much as safety.
Looking at nuclear power 26 years ago, The Economist [concluded] that the industry was “safe as a chocolate factory” proved something of a hostage to fortune. Less than a month later one of the reactors at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine ran out of control […]
Then, 25 years later, when enough time had passed for some to be talking of a “nuclear renaissance,” it happened again. The bureaucrats, politicians and industrialists of what has been called Japan’s “nuclear village” were not unaccountable apparatchiks in a decaying authoritarian state like those that bore the guilt of Chernobyl; they had responsibilities to voters, to shareholders, to society.
And still they allowed their enthusiasm for nuclear power to shelter weak regulation, safety systems that failed to work and a culpable ignorance of the tectonic risks the reactors faced, all the while blithely promulgating a myth of nuclear safety.
[…] nuclear’s promise of a global transformation is gone.
—
A tsunami crashed through and destroyed the emergency diesel generators at Fukushima, that’s why it melted down, who could have expected that?
Except its not true.
—
TEPCO’s Darkest Secret
by DAVID McNEILL and JAKE ADELSTEIN
While the earthquake that caused the massive tsunami is now estimated to be 9.0 in magnitude the strength of the quake when it hit the Fukushima nuclear reactor hundreds of kilometers away was a relatively weak 6.4 magnitude earthquake.
This weak earthquake caused the caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown – not the Tsunami – which raises red flags about the safety of nuclear reactors around the world.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/12/tepcos-darkest-secret/