Nuclear security is defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as "Achieving the right operating conditions, preventing accidents or reducing the consequences of accidents, resulting in the protection of workers, communities and the environment from unnecessary radiation hazards". The IAEA defines nuclear security as "Prevention and detection and response to, theft, sabotage, unauthorized access, illegal transfer or other malicious acts involving nuclear material, other radioactive substances or related facilities".
It includes nuclear power plants and all other nuclear facilities, nuclear material transport, as well as the use and storage of nuclear materials for medical, electrical, industrial, and military use.
The nuclear power industry has improved the safety and performance of the reactors, and has proposed a new and safer reactor design. However, perfect security can not be guaranteed. Potential sources of problems include human errors and external events that have greater impact than anticipated: The reactor designers at Fukushima in Japan did not anticipate that the tsunami generated by the earthquake would disable the reserve system that was supposed to stabilize the reactor after the earthquake. Disaster scenarios involving terrorist attacks, insider tampering, and cyber attacks can also be imagined.
The security of nuclear weapons, as well as the security of military research involving nuclear material, is generally handled by different agencies than those overseeing civilian security, for various reasons, including secrecy. There are ongoing concerns about terrorist groups that acquire nuclear bomb-making materials.
Video Nuclear safety and security
Summary of nuclear process and security issues
In 2011, consideration of nuclear security took place in a number of situations, including:
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- Nuclear fission power used in nuclear power plants, and nuclear submarines and ships.
- Nuclear weapons
- Combustible fuels such as uranium and plutonium and extraction, storage, and use
- Radioactive materials used for medical, diagnostics, batteries for several aerospace projects, and research purposes
- Nuclear waste, radioactive waste from nuclear material
- Nuclear fusion power, technology under long-term development
- The inclusion of unplanned nuclear material into the biosphere and the food chain (living plants, animals and humans) if inhaled or ingested.
With the exception of thermonuclear weapons and experimental fusion research, all special security issues for nuclear power stem from the need to limit biological take-up of the doses (consumption or inhalation of radioactive material), and external radiation doses due to radioactive contamination.
Therefore nuclear safety at least includes: -
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- Extraction, transportation, storage, processing, and disposal of purified materials
- Safety of nuclear power plants
- Control and management of safe nuclear weapons, nuclear material that can be used as weapons, and other radioactive materials
- Handling, accountability, and safe use in industry, medical, and research contexts
- Nuclear waste disposal
- Radiation exposure limits
Maps Nuclear safety and security
Responsible agency
International
The International Atomic Energy Agency "works with Member States and partners around the world to promote safe, peaceful and peaceful nuclear technology." Some scientists say that Japan's nuclear accident 2011 has revealed that the nuclear industry lacks sufficient oversight, leading to new calls to redefine the IAEA's mandate so that it can better monitor nuclear power plants around the world.
The IAEA Convention on Nuclear Security was adopted in Vienna on 17 June 1994 and entered into force on October 24, 1996. The objective of the Convention is to achieve and maintain a high level of nuclear safety worldwide, to establish and maintain effective defense of nuclear installations against potential hazards radiology, and to prevent accidents have radiological consequences.
This convention was made after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents in a series of expert-level meetings from 1992 to 1994, and was a considerable result of work by States, including their national regulatory and nuclear safety authorities, and the International Atomic Energy Agency serves as the Secretariat for the Convention.
The obligations of the Parties to the Agreement are based largely on the application of the safety principles for nuclear installations contained in the IAEA Basic Safety Document 'Nuclear Safety Officer' (IAEA Safety Series No. 110 issued 1993). This obligation includes the legislative and regulatory frameworks, regulatory bodies, and technical safety obligations related to, for example, adequate location, design, construction, operation, availability of financial and human resources, safety assessment and verification, quality assurance and emergency preparedness.
The Convention was amended in 2015 by the Vienna Declaration on Nuclear Safety. This results in the following principles:
1. New nuclear power plants shall be designed, located and constructed, consistent with the objective of preventing accidents in commissioning and operation and, in the event of an accident, reducing the possibility of radionuclide releases causing long-term site contamination and avoiding early release of radioactivity or sufficient radioactive release great for long term action and protection measures.
2. A comprehensive and systematic security assessment should be undertaken periodically and regularly for existing installations throughout their lives to identify safety-oriented improvements to meet the above objectives. Accurable or achievable security improvements should be made on time.
3. National requirements and regulations to address this objective during the lifetime of a nuclear power plant are to take into account the relevant IAEA Safety Standards and, as appropriate, other good practices as identified among others in the CNS Review Meeting.
There are some problems with the IAEA, says Najmedin Meshkati of the University of Southern California, writing in 2011:
"It recommends safety standards, but member states are not obliged to comply; it promotes nuclear energy, but also monitors nuclear use, it is the only global organization that oversees the nuclear energy industry, but it also weighs on checking compliance with Nuclear Non -Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ".
National
Many countries that use nuclear power have specialist agencies that oversee and regulate nuclear safety. Civil nuclear security in the US is governed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). However, critics of the nuclear industry complain that regulatory bodies are too intertwined with the industry itself to be effective. The Doomsday Machine , for example, offers a series of examples from national regulators, as they say 'do not set, just wave' (punching on waiving ) to argue that, at Japan, for example, "regulators and regulators have long been friends, working together to balance the doubts of society raised in the horrors of nuclear bombs." Other examples offered include:
The book argues that nuclear safety is compromised by the suspicion that, like Eisaku Sato, formerly a governor of Fukushima province (with its famous nuclear reactor complex), has put it down from the regulator: "They are all birds of feathers".
The safety of US-controlled installations and nuclear materials for research, weapons production, and naval vessels is not regulated by the NRC. In the UK nuclear safety is regulated by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) and the Defense Nuclear Safety Regulator (DNSR). The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) is the Federal Government agency that monitors and identifies solar radiation and nuclear radiation risk in Australia. It is the main body dealing with ionizing and non-ionizing radiation and publishing materials on radiation protection.
Other institutions include:
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- Canada Nuclear Safety Commission
- Irish Radiological Protection Agency
- Federal Atomic Energy Agency in Russia
- Kernfysische dienst, (NL)
- Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority
- Bundesamt fÃÆ'¼r Strahlenschutz, (DE)
- The Atomic Energy Agency (India)
Security and security of nuclear power plants
Complexity
Nuclear power plants are some of the most sophisticated and complex energy systems ever designed. Any complex system, no matter how well designed and engineered, can not be considered a failure-proof. Veteran journalist and author Stephanie Cooke argues:
The reactor itself is a very complicated machine with countless things that can go wrong. When it happened at Three Mile Island in 1979, another fault line in the nuclear world was revealed. One malfunction leads to another, and then to another, until the reactor core itself begins to melt, and even the most trained nuclear engineers in the world do not know how to respond. The accident showed serious shortcomings in systems intended to protect public health and safety.
The Three Three Island 1979 accident inspired the book of Perrow's
Perrow concludes that failure at Three Mile Island is a consequence of the enormous complexity of the system. Such modern high-risk systems, he realized, are vulnerable to failure, no matter how well they are managed. It can not be denied that they will eventually suffer what he called a 'normal crash'. Therefore, he suggests, we may be better to contemplate radical redesign, or if it is not possible, to abandon the technology completely.
The fundamental problem contributing to the complexity of the nuclear power system is its very long life. The period from the start of building a commercial nuclear power plant through the disposal of its last radioactive waste may be 100 to 150 years.
Mode failure of nuclear power plant
There are concerns that the combination of human and mechanical mistakes at nuclear facilities can result in significant harm to people and the environment:
Operation of a nuclear reactor contains a large number of radioactive fission products which, if dispersed, can pose a direct radiation hazard, contaminate the soil and vegetation, and be digested by humans and animals. Human exposure to high levels can cause short-term illness and death and long-term deaths from cancer and other diseases.
It is impossible for a commercial nuclear reactor to explode like a nuclear bomb because fuel is never enriched enough for this to happen.
Nuclear reactors can fail in various ways. If nuclear material instability produces unexpected behavior, this can lead to uncontrolled power travel. Generally, the cooling system in the reactor is designed to handle the excess heat generated; However, if the reactor also suffers from a loss-coolant accident, then the fuel may melt or cause a vessel where it is contained too hot and melted. This event is called a nuclear crisis.
After shutting down, for some time the reactor still needs external energy to drive its cooling system. This energy is usually provided by the power grid from which the plant is connected, or by an emergency diesel generator. Failure to provide electricity for cooling systems, such as those occurring in Fukushima I, can cause serious accidents.
The nuclear safety rules in the United States "do not adequately consider the risk of an event that would cripple electricity from the network and from emergency generators, such as the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan", the Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said in June 2011.
As a safeguard against mechanical failure, many nuclear plants are designed to die automatically after two days of continuous and unattended operation.
Vulnerability of nuclear plants to attack
Nuclear reactors became favored targets during the military conflict and, over the last three decades, have been repeatedly attacked during military air strikes, occupations, invasions and campaigns:
- In September 1980, Iran bombed the Al Tuwaitha nuclear complex in Iraq in Operation Scorch Sword.
- In June 1981, Israeli air strikes completely destroyed the Osirak nuclear research facility at Operation Opera.
- Between 1984 and 1987, Iraq bombed Iran's nuclear plant Bushehr six times.
- On January 8, 1982, Umkhonto we Sizwe, ANC's armed wing, attacked the Koeberg nuclear power plant in South Africa while still under construction.
- In 1991, the US bombed three nuclear reactors and enrichment enrichment facilities in Iraq.
- In 1991, Iraq launched Scud missiles at the Israeli Dimona nuclear power plant
- In September 2007, Israel bombed a Syrian reactor under construction.
In the US, the plant is surrounded by two rows of hedges that are electronically monitored. The plant area is patrolled by a large armed guard troop. In Canada, all reactors have an "armed response force in place" that includes light armored vehicles patrolling the plant every day. The NRC's "Design Basic Design Criteria" criteria for plants are secret, and what measures of attack power that are able to protect plants are unknown. However, to perform a scram (make an emergency blackout), the plant takes less than 5 seconds while the unhurried loop takes hours, severely inhibiting the power of terrorists in the goal of releasing radioactivity.
The attack from the air is a problem that has been highlighted since the September 11 attacks in the US. However, in 1972 when three hijackers took control of domestic passenger flights along the eastern US coast and threatened to crash the plane into the US nuclear arms factory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The plane was as close as 8,000 feet above the scene before the hijackers' demands were met.
The most important barriers to radioactive releases in the event of an aircraft attack on a nuclear power plant are the buildings of detention and missile shields. Former NRC Chairman Dale Klein said "Nuclear power plants are inherently strong structures that our study demonstrates provide adequate protection in a hypothetical attack by aircraft.NRC has also taken action requiring nuclear power plant operators to be able to manage large fires or explosions - no matter what caused them. "
In addition, advocates pointed to a major study conducted by the US Power Power Research Institute that tested the resilience of reactors and storage of waste fuel and found that they should be able to maintain a terrorist attack that is comparable to the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US. The spent fuel is usually stored in the plant's "protected zone" or waste disposal trash; stealing for use in a "dirty bomb" will be very difficult. Intense radiation exposure almost certainly will quickly paralyze or kill anyone who tries to do it.
The threat of a terrorist attack
Nuclear power plants are considered a target of terrorist attacks. Even during the construction of the first nuclear power plant, this problem has been suggested by security agencies. The concrete threat of an attack on a nuclear power plant by terrorists or criminals is documented from several states. While older nuclear power plants are built without special protection against air accidents in Germany, nuclear power plants are then built with large concrete buildings that are partially protected against air accidents. They were designed against the impact of fighter aircraft at a speed of about 800 km/h. This is considered the basis for the assessment of the impact of Phantom II type aircraft with a mass of 20 tons and a speed of 215 m/s.
The dangers arising from a terrorist cause a major aircraft crash at a nuclear power plant is currently being discussed. Such terrorist attacks can have catastrophic consequences. For example, the German government has confirmed that the Biblis A nuclear power plant not against the accident has secured a military aircraft. Following the terrorist attacks in Brussels in 2016 some nuclear power plants have been partially evacuated. At the same time it is known that the terrorists have spied on nuclear power plants. Some employee permissions have been withdrawn.
In addition, even "nuclear terrorism", for example with so-called "Dirty bombs" poses great potential hazards. For their production there will be any radioactive waste or enriched for the uranium nuclear power plant concerned.
Factory location
In many countries, factories are often on the beach, to provide a cooling water source ready for an essential service water system. As a result, the design needs to take into account the risks of flooding and tsunamis. The World Energy Council (WEC) believes disaster risk changes and increases the likelihood of disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, hurricanes, typhoons, floods. High temperatures, low rainfall and severe drought may cause water shortages. Failure to calculate flood risk correctly leads to a Level 2 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale during the 1999 Blayais Nuclear Power Plane flood, while floods caused by the 2011 T-hye earthquake and tsunami caused the Fukushima I nuclear accident.
The design of plants located in the seismic active zone also requires the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis to be taken into account. Japan, India, China and the United States is one country that has plants in areas prone to earthquakes. Damage caused to the Japanese Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant during the Ch? Etsu 2007 underscores the concerns expressed by experts in Japan before the Fukushima accident, which has warned about a Multiple reactors
Fukushima nuclear disaster illustrates the dangers of building several units of nuclear reactors adjacent to each other. Due to proximity of the reactor, Plant Director Masao Yoshida "was placed in a position trying to cope simultaneously with a core leak at three reactors and an open fuel pool on three units".
Nuclear security system
The three main objectives of a nuclear safety system as defined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are to shut down the reactor, keep it in shutdown condition, and prevent the release of radioactive material during events and accidents. This goal is achieved by using various tools, which are part of different systems, each of which performs certain functions.
Regular emissions of radioactive materials
During routine day-to-day operations, radioactive material emissions from nuclear plants are released out of the plant even though they are small. Daily emissions enter the air, water and soil.
The NRC says, "Nuclear power plants sometimes release gas and radioactive liquids into the environment under controlled conditions and are monitored to ensure that they do not pose a hazard to the public or the environment," and "regular emissions during the normal operation of a nuclear power plant never happen." lethal".
According to the UN (UNSCEAR), the operation of regular nuclear power plants includes a nuclear fuel cycle totaling 0.0002 millisieverts (mSv) each year in average public radiation exposure; the legacy of Chernobyl disaster was 0.002 mSv/a as the global average in the 2008 report; and natural radiation exposure averaging 2.4 mSv each year although it often varies depending on the individual location from 1 to 13 mSv.
Japanese public perception of nuclear power security
In March 2012, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said that the Japanese government shares responsibility for the Fukushima disaster, saying that officials have been blinded by the image of technological infallibility in the country and "too immersed in the myth of salvation."
Japan has been accused by writers such as journalist Yoichi Funabashi has "a reluctance to face the potential threat of nuclear emergency." According to him, the national program to develop robots for use in a nuclear emergency is terminated in the middle of the current because "hitting too many underlying dangers." Although Japan is a major force in robotics, it was nothing that was sent to Fukushima during the disaster. He mentioned that Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission stipulates in its security guidelines for light water nuclear facilities that "the potential for large power loss is unnecessary." However, the loss of this old power to the cooling pump caused the Fukushima crisis.
In other countries such as Britain, nuclear plants have not claimed to be completely safe. It instead claims that major accidents have a lower probability of incidence (eg) 0.0001/year.
Incidents like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster can be avoided with more stringent regulations on nuclear power. In 2002, TEPCO, the company that operated the Fukushima plant, admitted to falsifying reports more than 200 times between 1997 and 2002. TEPCO did not face any fines for this. Instead, they fire their top four executives. Three of the four companies then take jobs in companies that do business with TEPCO.
The danger of nuclear material
There are currently a total of 47,000 tons of high level nuclear waste stored in the US. Nuclear waste is about 94% Uranium, 1.3% Plutonium, Other actinides 0.14%, and 5.2% fission products. About 1.0% of this waste consists of long-lived isotope 79 Se, 93 Zr, 99 Te, 107 Pd , 126 Sn, 129 I and 135 Cs. Shorter life isotopes include 89 Sr, 106 Ru, 125 Sn, 134 Cs, 137 Cs, and 147 Pm is 0.9% annually, decreasing to 0.1% at 100 years. The remaining 3.3-4.1% consists of non-radioactive isotopes. There are technical challenges, because it's better to lock long-life fission products, but the challenge should not be overstated. A ton of waste, as described above, has a measurable radioactivity of about 600 TBq equal to the natural radioactivity within a km 3 of the Earth's crust, which, if buried, will add only 25 parts per trillion to total radioactivity.
The difference between short-lived high-level nuclear waste and long-lived low-grade waste can be illustrated by the following example. As stated above, one mole of both 131 I and 129 I released 3x10 23 decays in the same period with one part-time. 131 I decay with the release of 970 keV while 129 I decay by releasing 194 keV energy. 131gm from 131 Therefore I will release 45 Gigajoules for eight days starting at the initial level of 600 EBq which releases 90 Kilowatts with the last radioactive decay that occurs in two years. Instead, 129gm 129 Therefore I will release 9 Gigajoules for 15.7 million years starting at an initial rate of 850 MBq which releases 25 microwatt with radioactivity less than 1% in 100,000 years.
A ton of nuclear waste also reduces CO 2 emissions by 25 million tons.
Radionuclides such as 129 I or 131 I, may be very radioactive, or very long-lived, but both can not be both. One mole 129 I (129 grams) has the same amount of decay (3x10 23 ) in 15.7 million years, as well as one mole 131 I (131 grams) in 8 days. 131 Therefore I am very radioactive, but it disappears very quickly, while 129 I release a very low radiation level for a very long time. Two long-lived fission products, Technetium-99 (half-life of 220,000 years) and Iodine-129 (half-aged 15.7 million years), are of somewhat greater concern because of the greater opportunity to enter the biosphere. The transitional elements in spent fuel are Neptunium-237 (half life two million years) and Plutonium-239 (half-life 24,000 years). will also remain in the environment for long periods of time. A more complete solution to both Actinides problems and low-carbon energy requirements can be an integral fast reactor. A ton of nuclear waste after a complete burn in the IFR reactor will prevent 500 million tons of CO 2 from entering the atmosphere. Otherwise, waste storage usually requires maintenance, followed by a long-term management strategy involving permanent storage, disposal or transformation of waste into non-toxic forms.
Governments around the world are considering various waste management options and disposal, typically involving deep geological placements, although there has been limited progress to implement long-term waste management solutions. This is partly due to the questionable time period when dealing with radioactive waste ranging from 10,000 to millions of years, according to a study based on the effects of radiation dose estimation.
Since the radioisotope atomic fraction decays every time unit is inversely proportional to its half-life, the relative radioactivity of the quantity of human buried human radioactive waste will decrease over time compared to natural radioisotopes (such as decay chains 120Ã, trillion tons of thorium and uranium uranium of 40 trillion whichium are are:............................................................................................................................................................................................................. For example, over a period of thousands of years, after the most active short-lived radioactive decay, burying US nuclear waste will increase radioactivity above 2,000 feet of rock and soil in America States (10 million km) 2 ) by? 1 part in 10 million more than the cumulative number of natural radioisotopes in such volumes, although the area around that place would have substantially higher radioisotope concentrations than such averages.
Safety culture and human error
One relatively common idea in the discussion of nuclear safety is the culture of salvation. The International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group, defines the term as "the dedication and personal accountability of all individuals involved in any activity related to the safety of nuclear power plants". The goal is "to design systems that use human capabilities in a precise way, protecting the system from human weakness, and protecting people from system-related dangers."
At the same time, there is some evidence that operational practices are not easy to change. Operators almost never follow proper written instructions and procedures, and "rule violations seem quite rational, given the actual workload and time constraints on which operators have to do their job". Much effort to improve the culture of nuclear safety "is compensated by people who adapt to change in unexpected ways".
According to the director of Areva Southeast Asia and Oceania, Selena Ng, Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster is "a big call to build a nuclear industry that is not always quite transparent about security issues". He said "There is such a sense of complacency before Fukushima and I do not think we can have satisfaction now".
The assessment by the European Commission of France (CEA) concluded that no amount of technical innovation can eliminate the risk of human-induced errors associated with nuclear power plant operations. Two types of errors are considered the most serious: errors made during field operations, such as maintenance and testing, which can cause accidents; and human mistakes made during small accidents that result in failure.
According to Mycle Schneider, reactor safety depends primarily on 'security culture', including quality of maintenance and training, operator and worker competence, and regulatory oversight. So a new, better designed reactor is not always safer, and older reactors are not always more dangerous than new ones. The 1979 Three Mile Island crash in the United States occurred at a reactor that had started operation just three months earlier, and the Chernobyl disaster occurred after just two years of operation. Serious loss of refrigerant occurred at the French Civaux-1 reactor in 1998, less than five months after start-up.
However safe a factory is designed to be, it is operated by a human being prone to error. Laurent Stricker, a nuclear engineer and chairman of the World Nuclear Entrepreneurs Association, said operators should be alert to complacency and avoid confidence. Experts say that "the single largest internal factor that determines the safety of a factory is the security culture among regulators, operators and labor - and creating such a culture is not easy".
Risk
Routine health risks and greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear fission strength are relatively small compared to those associated with coal, but there are some "disaster risks":
The extreme dangers of radioactive material in power plants and nuclear technology in and of itself is well known that the US government is requested (at the urging of industry) to enact provisions protecting the nuclear industry from taking such full burden inherently. a risky nuclear operation. The Price-Anderson Act limits industrial liability in cases of accidents, and the 1982 Waste Disposal Policy Act imposes a burden on the federal government with the responsibility to permanently store nuclear waste.
Population density is one critical lens that other risks must be under review, says nuclear engineer Laurent Stricker and chairman of the Nuclear Operations World Association:
The KANUPP plant in Karachi, Pakistan, has the largest population - 8.2 million - lives within 30 kilometers of a nuclear plant, although it has only one relatively small reactor with 125 megawatt output. Further in the league, however, it is a much larger plant - Kuosheng Taiwan's 1.933-megawatt plant with 5.5 million people within a 30-kilometer radius and 1,208-megawatt Chin Shan plant with 4.7 million; both zones including the capital city of Taipei.
172,000 people living within a 30-kilometer radius of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, have been forced or advised to evacuate the area. More generally, the 2011 analysis by Nature and Columbia University, New York, shows that about 21 nuclear plants have populations greater than 1 million within a 30 km radius, and six plants have populations larger than 3 million in that radius.
The Black Swan event is a highly unlikely event that has a major impact. Despite the planning, nuclear power will always be vulnerable to black swan events:
Rare events - especially the unheard of - are difficult to forecast, expensive to plan and easy to discount with statistics. Just because something should only happen every 10,000 years does not mean that it will not happen tomorrow. During 40 years of plant life, assumptions can also change, as happened on September 11, 2001, in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck, and in March 2011, after Fukushima.
The list of potential black swan events is "very diverse":
Their nuclear reactors and fuel pools run out could be a target for terrorists driving a hijacked plane. Reactors may be located downstream of a dam that, if they ever explode, can release a major flood. Some of the reactors are located close to the fault or coastline, dangerous scenarios as they appear on Three Mile Island and Fukushima - terrible cooling failures, excessive heat and melting of radioactive fuel rods, and the release of radioactive material.
AP1000 has an estimated core damage frequency of 5.09 x 10 -7 per plant per year. Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) has an estimated damage frequency of 4 x 10 -7 core per plant per year. In 2006 General Electric published a re-estimation of the frequency of core damage per year per plant for the design of its nuclear power plant:
- BWR/4 - 1 x 10 -5
- BWR/6 - 1 x 10 -6
- ABWR - 2 x 10 -7
- ESBWR - 3 x 10 -8
Beyond basic design events
The Fukushima I nuclear accident was caused by "outside the baseline design event", the associated tsunami and earthquake was stronger than planned to be accommodated by the factory, and the accident was directly caused by an overflowing tsunami to the sea level. Since then, unforeseen possibilities beyond basic design events have been a major concern for factory operators.
Transparency and ethics
According to journalist Stephanie Cooke, it's hard to know what's really going on inside a nuclear power plant because the industry is shrouded in secrecy. Corporations and governments control what information is available to the public. Cooke says "when information is available, it is often written in unintelligible jargon and prose".
Kennette Benedict says that nuclear technology and factory operations continue to be less transparent and relatively closed to the public:
Despite such victories as the establishment of the Atomic Energy Commission, and then the Nuclear Permanent Commission, the secrecy that begins with the Manhattan Project tends to absorb civilian nuclear programs, as well as military and defense programs.
In 1986, Soviet officials detained Chernobyl disaster reporting for several days. The operator of Fukushima plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., was also criticized for not immediately disclosing information about the radioactivity release from the factory. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says there needs to be greater transparency in terms of nuclear emergency.
Historically, many scientists and engineers have made decisions on behalf of potentially affected populations on whether certain levels of risk and uncertainty are acceptable to them. Many nuclear engineers and scientists who have made such decisions, even for good reasons with regard to long-term energy availability, now consider that doing so without written consent is wrong, and that nuclear power and nuclear technology must be based on morality, rather than purely on technical, economic and business considerations.
Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy is a 1975 book by Amory B. Lovins and John H. Price. The central theme of this book is that the most important part of the nuclear power debate is not a technical dispute but relates to personal values, and is a legal province of every citizen, whether technically trained or not.
Nuclear accident and radiation
The nuclear industry has an excellent safety record and megawatt hourly mortality is the lowest of all major energy sources. According to Zia Mian and Alexander Glaser, "the last six decades have shown that nuclear technology does not tolerate errors". Nuclear power is probably a prime example of so-called 'high-risk technology' with 'potential disaster', because "no matter how effective a conventional safety device is, there is an unavoidable accident form, and such accidents are '' The normal consequences of the system. ' In short, there is no way out of a system failure.
Whatever position is taken in the nuclear power debate, the possibility of catastrophic accidents and economic costs to be considered should be considered when nuclear policy and regulations are being framed.
Protection of accident liability
Kristin Shrader-Frechette said, "if the reactor is safe, the nuclear industry will not demand government-guaranteed collateral insurance coverage, as a condition for generating their electricity". No private insurance company or even a consortium of insurance companies "will bear the frightening obligations arising from a severe nuclear accident".
Hanford Site
The Hanford site is the most abandoned nuclear production complex on the Columbia River in the US state of Washington, operated by the federal government of the United States. Plutonium produced on the site was used in the first nuclear bomb, tested on the Trinity site, and in Fat Man, a bomb was detonated in Nagasaki, Japan. During the Cold War, the project was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes, which produce plutonium for most of the 60,000 weapons in the US nuclear arsenal. Many initial safety procedures and waste disposal practices are inadequate, and government documents have since affirmed that Hanford operations release large amounts of radioactive material into the air and the Columbia River, which still threatens the health of people and ecosystems. The weapon production reactors were deactivated at the end of the Cold War, but manufacturing decades left 53 million tonnes of high-level radioactive waste (200,000 m 3 ), an additional 25 million cubic feet (710,000 m 3 ) of the solid radioactive waste, 200 square miles (520Ã, km 2 ) of contaminated groundwater below the site and the discovery of undocumented contamination findings that slow the rate and increase the cleaning cost. The Hanford site represents two-thirds of the country's high-level radioactive volume. Today, Hanford is a contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleansing.
Chernobyl Disaster 1986
The Chernobyl disaster is a nuclear accident that occurred on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Explosions and fires release large amounts of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere, which is dispersed in many Western Soviet Union and Europe. This is considered the worst nuclear accident in history, and is one of only two classified as a 7 level event on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the other is the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster). The fighting contained contamination and prevented a larger catastrophe eventually involving more than 500,000 workers and cost about 18 billion rubles, crippling the Soviet economy. The accident raised concerns about the safety of the nuclear power industry, slowing its expansion for several years.
UNSCEAR has conducted 20 years of scientific and epidemiological research on the impact of Chernobyl accident. Apart from 57 direct deaths in the accident itself, UNSCEAR estimated in 2005 that up to 4,000 deaths from accident-related additional cancer would appear "among the 600,000 people who received more significant exposure (liquidators working in 1986-87, refugees, and residents of the most contaminated areas) ". Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have been burdened with the cost of decontamination and sustained and substantial health care of the Chernobyl disaster.
Eleven Russian reactors are of the type RBMK 1000, similar to those in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Some of these RBMK reactors will initially be closed but have been given a life extension and increased in output by about 5%. Critics say that this reactor is "inherently insecure design", which can not be repaired through improvement and modernization, and some parts of the reactor can not be replaced. The Russian environmental group says that lifetime extensions "violate Russian law, since projects have not yet undergone an environmental assessment".
2011 Fukushima I accident
Despite all the guarantees, a major nuclear accident on the scale of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 occurred again in 2011 in Japan, one of the most developed countries in the industrial world. Chairman of the Nuclear Safety Commission Haruki Madarame said a parliamentary inquiry in February 2012 that "Japan's atomic safety rules are lower than global standards and leave the country unprepared for the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March". There are insufficiencies in, and the weak enforcement of security rules governing Japanese nuclear power plants, and this includes inadequate protection against tsunamis.
The 2012 report on The Economist says: "The Fukushima reactors are old designs, the risks they face have not been well analyzed.The operating companies are not well regulated and do not know what is going on The operators make mistakes , the representative of the escape safety inspectorate, some equipment fails, the establishment repeatedly minimizes the risks and suppresses information about the movement of the radioactive plume, so that some people are evacuated from the lighter to the more contaminated.
The designers of the Fukushima I nuclear power plant did not anticipate that the tsunami generated by the earthquake would disable the reserve system that was supposed to stabilize the reactor after the earthquake. Nuclear reactors are "complex and closely-coupled systems that, in rare precarious situations, cascade interactions will be revealed so rapidly that human operators will not be able to predict and master them".
Due to the lack of electricity to pump the water needed to cool the atomic nucleus, the engineers released radioactive vapors into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that destroyed concrete walls around the reactor. Radiation readings soared around Fukushima as a disaster widened, forcing the evacuation of 200,000 people. There is an increase in radiation levels on the outskirts of Tokyo, with a population of 30 million, 135 miles (210 kilometers) to the south.
The backup diesel generator that may be able to prevent disaster is positioned in the basement, where they are quickly overwhelmed by waves. The series of events in Fukushima has been predicted in a report published in the US several decades ago:
The 1990 report by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent body responsible for the safety of the country's power plants, identifies the failure of an earthquake-driven diesel generator and power blackouts that cause a cooling system failure as one of the "probable causes" of a nuclear accident. from external events.
The report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, but it appears that adequate measures to address risks are not taken by TEPCO. Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a professor of seismology at Kobe University, said that Japan's nuclear accident history stems from excessive belief in factory engineering. In 2006, he resigned from the government panel on the safety of a nuclear reactor, as the review process was rigged and "unscientific".
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japan "underestimated the tsunami hazard and failed to prepare an adequate backup system at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant". This repeated widespread criticism in Japan that "the collusive relationship between regulators and industry led to weak supervision and failure to ensure adequate levels of security at the plant". The IAEA also said that the Fukushima disaster exposes the lack of an adequate backup system at the plant. Once the electricity is completely lost, important functions such as the cooling system are closed. Three of the reactors "quickly heat up, causing destruction that eventually causes an explosion, which catapult large amounts of radioactive material into the air".
Louise FrÃÆ'Â © chette and Trevor Findlay have said that more effort is needed to ensure nuclear safety and improve the response to accidents:
The crisis of several reactors at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant reinforces the need to strengthen global instruments to ensure nuclear safety worldwide. The fact that a country that has operated a nuclear power plant for decades must prove to be very worrying in its response and thus unwilling to disclose the facts even to its own people, let alone the International Atomic Energy Agency, is a reminder that nuclear safety is a continuous work in the process.
David Lochbaum, chief nuclear safety officer with the Concerned Concerned Scientists, has repeatedly questioned the safety of the 1st Fukushima I General Electric plant reactor design, which is used in nearly a quarter of the US nuclear fleet.
A report from the Japanese Government to the IAEA said "nuclear fuel in three reactors may melt through deep containment vessels, not just the core". The report says the basic reactor design is "inadequate" - a Mark-1 model developed by General Electric - including "ventilation systems for containment vessels and locations of high fuel refrigeration pools in buildings, resulting in radioactive water leaks that hamper work improvement ".
After the Fukushima emergency, the EU ruled that reactors in all 27 member countries should undergo a security test.
According to UBS AG, the Fukushima I nuclear accident is likely to undermine the credibility of the nuclear power industry more than the Chernobyl disaster in 1986:
The accident in the former Soviet Union 25 years ago 'affects one reactor in a totalitarian state without safety culture,' UBS analysts including Per Lekander and Stephen Oldfield wrote in today's report. 'In Fukushima, four reactors have been out of control for weeks - raising doubts as to whether even advanced economies can master nuclear safety.'
The Fukushima accident revealed some disturbing nuclear security issues:
Although resources are poured into analyzing crustal movements and having expert committees determine earthquake risk, for example, researchers have never considered the possibility of a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. The failure of some safety features in nuclear power plants has raised questions about the nation's engineering skills. Governments that throw themselves at acceptable levels of radiation exposure baffle the public, and health professionals provide little guidance. Facing the scarcity of reliable information about radiation levels, citizens armed themselves with dosimeters, collected data, and together produced a far more detailed radiological contamination map than anything provided by government or official scientific sources.
In January 2012, questions also lingered for the extent of damage to the Fukushima plant caused by an earthquake even before the tsunami struck. Any evidence of serious earthquake damage at the plant will "lead to new doubts about the safety of other reactors in earthquake-prone Japan".
Two government advisers said that "Japan's safety review of the nuclear reactor after the Fukushima disaster is based on wrong criteria and many people involved have a conflict of interest". Hiromitsu Ino, Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University, said "The whole process is exactly the same as that used before the Fukushima Dai-Ichi accident, although the crash shows all these guidelines and this category is not enough."
In March 2012, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda acknowledged that the Japanese government shared the blame for the Fukushima disaster, saying that officials had been blinded by false beliefs in the country's "technological infallibility" and all too deeply "the myth of salvation".
Other accidents
Serious nuclear and radiation accidents include the Chalk River accident (1952, 1958 & amp; 2008), Mayak disaster (1957), Windscale fire (1957), SL-1 crash (1961), Soviet K-19 submarine crash (1961) , Three Mile Island Accidents (1979), Church Rock uranium mill spill (1979), Soviet submarine crash K-431 (1985), GoiÃÆ' ¢ nia accident (1987), Zaragoza radiotherapy accident (1990), Costa Rica radiotherapy accident 1996), Tokaimura nuclear accident (1999), Sellafield THORP leak (2005), and Flerus IRE cobalt-60 spill (2006).
Health impact
Four hundred and thirty seven nuclear power plants currently operate but, unfortunately, five major nuclear accidents have occurred in the past. This accident occurred in Kyshtym (1957), Windscale (1957), Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011). A report in Lancet says that the effects of these accidents on individuals and communities are diverse and enduring:
- "The accumulation of evidence on the effects of radiation health on atomic bomb victims and other exposure to radiation has formed the basis for national and international regulations on radiation protection.However, past experience has shown that common problems are not always physical health problems directly due to radiation exposure, but psychological and social effects.In addition, long-term evacuation and displacement creates severe health care problems for the most vulnerable people, such as hospital and parent in-patient care. "
In spite of these accidents, research has shown that nuclear death is largely in uranium mining and that nuclear energy has resulted in far less death than the high pollution levels resulting from the use of conventional fossil fuels. However, the nuclear power industry relies on uranium mining, which is a dangerous industry, with many accidents and casualties.
Journalist Stephanie Cooke says that it is not useful to make comparisons only in terms of the number of deaths, because the way people live afterwards is also relevant, as in the case of the 2011 Japanese nuclear accident:
"You have people in Japan now who face either do not return to their homes forever, or if they return to their homes, live in contaminated areas to basically... It affects millions of people, it affects our land, it affects our atmosphere... it affects future generations... I do not think any of the big big crops that spew pollution into the air is good, but I do not think it's helpful to make this comparison only in terms of the number of deaths ".
The Fukushima accident forced more than 80,000 residents to evacuate from surrounding neighborhoods.
A survey by Iitate, Fukushima local government obtained responses from some 1,743 people who had been evacuated from the village, located inside an emergency evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Factory. This shows that many residents experience increasing frustration and instability due to the nuclear crisis and the inability to return to the lives they have undergone before the disaster. Sixty percent of respondents stated that the health and health of their families deteriorated after the evacuation, while 39.9 percent reported feeling more irritated than before the disaster.
"Summarizing all responses to questions related to current refugee family status, one-third of all households surveyed live separately from their children, while 50.1 percent live away from other family members (including elderly parents) with whom they lived before the disaster occurred.The survey also showed that 34.7 percent of refugees had suffered a 50 percent or more salary cut since the outbreak of the nuclear disaster. A total of 36.8 percent reported sleep deprivation, while 17.9 percent reported smoking or drinking more than before they were evacuated. "
Chemical components of radioactive waste can cause cancer. For example, Iodine 131 was released along with radioactive waste when the Chernobyl disaster and the Fukushima disaster occurred. It is concentrated in leafy vegetation after absorption in the soil. It also lives in animal milk if animals eat plants. When Iodine 131 enters the human body, it migrates to the thyroid gland in the neck and can cause thyroid cancer.
Other elements of nuclear waste can cause cancer as well. For example, Strontium 90 causes breast cancer and leukemia, Plutonium 239 causes liver cancer.
Improved nuclear fission technology
Newer reactor designs intended to provide improved safety have been developed over time. These designs include those that incorporate passive security and Small Modular Reactors. While the design of this reactor "is intended to inspire confidence, they may have an unwanted effect: creating distrust of older reactors that have no safety features touted".
The next nuclear plant to be built is likely to be a Generation III or III design, and some of which already operate in Japan. The fourth generation reactor will have a greater improvement in safety. The new design is expected to be passively safe or virtually finished, and perhaps even safely inherent (as in the design of PBMR).
Some improvements made (not all in all designs) have three sets of emergency diesel generators and an associated emergency core cooling system rather than just one pair, having a quench tank on top of an open core automatically, having multiple arrests (one containment buildings inside others), etc.
However, security risks are probably the biggest when the nuclear system is the newest, and operators have less experience with them. Nuclear engineer David Lochbaum explains that almost all serious nuclear accidents happen with what at the time was the most up-to-date technology. He argues that "problems with reactors and new accidents are twofold: scenarios emerge that are impossible to plan in simulations, and people make mistakes". As one of the directors of a US research laboratory, "the fabrication, construction, operation and maintenance of a new reactor will face a steep learning curve: advanced technology will have a high risk of accidents and errors.This technology can be proven, but people do not".
Developing country
There are concerns about developing countries "rushing to join the so-called nuclear renaissance without the necessary infrastructure, personnel, regulatory framework and safety culture". Some countries with nuclear aspirations, such as Nigeria, Kenya, Bangladesh, and Venezuela, have no significant industrial experience and will require at least a decade of preparation even before clearing land at the reactor site.
The speed of the nuclear construction program in China has raised security concerns. The challenge for governments and nuclear companies is to "oversee the growth of contractor and subcontracted soldiers who may be tempted to downsize". China has requested international help to train more inspectors of nuclear power plants.
Nuclear security and terrorist attacks
Nuclear power plants, civil research reactors, certain naval fuel facilities, uranium enrichment plants, and fuel plants, are vulnerable to attacks that can cause widespread radioactive contamination. The attack threats are of several common types: command based ground based attacks on equipment that, if disabled, can cause reactor core leakage or wide spread of radioactivity; and external attacks such as planes crashing into reactor complexes, or cyber attacks.
The 9/11 Commission of the United States says that nuclear power plants are potential targets that were originally considered for the September 11, 2001 attacks. If terrorist groups could seriously damage the safety system to cause a nuclear crisis at nuclear power plants, and/or simply damage sources spent fuel, such attacks can cause widespread radioactive contamination. The American Federation of Scientists has said that if the use of nuclear power is significantly expanded, nuclear facilities must be made very safe from attacks that can release large amounts of radioactivity into society. The new reactor design has passive safety features, which can help. In the United States, the NRC conducts "Force on Force" (FOF) training in all nuclear power plants (PLTN) at least once every three years.
Nuclear reactors became favored targets during the military conflict and, over the last three decades, have been repeatedly attacked during military air strikes, occupations, invasions and campaigns. Various acts of civil disobedience since 1980 by the Plowshares peace group have shown how nuclear weapons facilities can be penetrated, and the group's actions constitute a tremendous security breach at a nuclear weapons factory in the United States. The National Nuclear Security Administration has acknowledged the seriousness of the action of Plankshares 2012. Non-proliferation policy experts questioned "the use of private contractors to provide security to facilities that produce and store the most dangerous military materials of government property". The nuclear weapons materials on the black market are a global concern, and there are concerns about the possibility of detonating small nuclear weapons carried out by militant groups in big cities, with significant casualties and property. Stuxnet is a computer worm found in June 2010 that is believed to have been created by the United States and Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.
Nuclear fusion research
Nuclear fusion power is a developing technology that is still under research. It depends on the fusion of the atomic nucleus that divides (splits), using a very different process than the current nuclear power plant. Nuclear fusion reactions have the potential to become safer and produce less radioactive waste than fission. These reactions appear po
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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