CATALYST

tee

Nuclear lessons
tee goes to press it's been almost a fortnight since Japan was rocked by a massive earthquake and the ensuing tsunami, and the world has spent that time watching events unfold with ever-growing sympathy and concern. While the search for the bodies of the missing continues, and tbe engineers fight to bring the damaged nuclear reactors back under control, the debate about the future of nuclear power and tbe lessons learnt is in full swing. Around the world, the crisis in Japan has reignited deep-rooted fears and unease about nuclear power, wbich, 25 years after the Clhernobyl disaster, had only just been put to one side in the face of a low carbonfuelled nuclear revival. The 'man on the street' largely feels a deep unease about a power source seen as inherently dangerous. There is a deep distrust of the operating companies who have long (and often ver>' rightfully) been accused of being opaque, patronising and economical with the truth. The long-term consequences of Fukusbima vdll take years to unfold. Meanwhile, it falls to engineers of all flavours to address tbosi; fears. Is Fukushima another horror story, illustrating the insidious danger of nuclear power, or an engineering triumph? After till, it demonstrated that a 40-year-old plant could withstand a massive earthquake (and if only the flood defences bad been higher, nobody would be debating the future of nuclear power right now!). Whatever your opinion, we have to face the concerns with much more openness and transparency than the nuclear industry has been hitherto comfortable with. Is it possible to design anything to be totally safe? Obviously not. Are the people near Fukushima right to be worried? Of course they are. Though one has to remind oneself to keep events in perspective. The death toll of the Japanese tsunami will probably top 20,000. The world's worst nuclear accident claimed some 4,000 lives - and Fukushima is nowhere near another Chernobyl. That does not mean that there aren't any safety lessons for us to learn. Indeed, many have already been learnt, and it's not just about the height of the flood defences in an earthquake zone. Forty years of development have brought us huge advances, from passive containment cooling via convection to radiation-proofed control rooms with emergency air and pressure. But there's plenty more to be learnt. Fukushima has shone a big spotlight on one area that appears to have been somewhat neglected until now: fuel-storage ponds. Dramatic pictures of the rubble that now surrounds the pools are meaningless - the buildings were only there to keep the rain off. It's the fact that a pool containing 1,4001 of water managed to boil dry and threaten a massive release of radiation that is cause for concern. Paul Haigh, nuclear consultant and founder chairman of IChemE's Nuclear Technology Subject Group, says that most nuclear operators have significant stores of spent nuclear fuel on site. Cooling ponds have been designed to store some 20 years' worth of spent fuel, and it's not unusual for them to hold fuel for rather longer and in larger quantities than whoever designed the storage pool had anticipated. Nuclear operators have, in recent years, moved towards keeping spent-fuel assemblies in special storage casks rather than pools. The casks don't need to be kept as close to the reactor, and they don't rely on metres of cold water to keep the fuel safe, so Haigh says that they would probably have withstood the tsunami much better than the pools. Taking Trevor Kletz' mantra of inherent safety - the safest chemical is the chemical that isn't there - and applying it to the nuclear industry suggests that the best course of action would be to get the fuel off site and either recycled or sent to a long-term nuclear-waste repository. But that, of course, is the nettle that few governments have dared to grasp. It's understandable that few communities are keen to sign up to having a nuclear-waste store in their backyard. What many don't consider is that failure to plan and implement long-term storage places another community at a much greater risk, as it forces the fuel to remain on the surface in facilities that have only been designed for short-term storage, and are quite possibly being used beyond their original specification. Any government looking at new nuclear power can no longer afford to ignore the elephant in the room. We shouldn't need a disaster like Fukushima to make the point, t c e

nfemente and opinions expressed in tee are the responsibiiity of the tdltor. Unless described as such, they do not represent the views or policies of the institution of Chemical Engineers.

Claudia Flavell-While Editor, fee

apr2011

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