The agonizing restatement of Murphy's law at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in northern Japan threatens to delay once again a promising expansion of our own nuclear power generating capacity.
It should prompt a check and recheck of plans and proposals for new nuclear plants in this nation. But we question if anyone can offer well-founded objections to nuclear plants of improved designs in areas that are not seismically active.
Murphy's law alone, "if anything can go wrong, it will," doesn't constitute a well-founded objection.
The two previous high-profile accidents, the catastrophe at Chernobyl and the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, were setbacks for the nuclear power industry.
Chernobyl, for all of the death and destruction it caused in Europe, wasn't the same kind of lesson as was the incident at Three Mile Island. ...
The plant had few of the safeguards in place at nuclear power plants elsewhere in the world at the same time. Chernobyl was a catastrophe waiting to happen.
Three Mile Island, in a pressurized water reactor similar to those at Fukushima, were failures of components, human operators and instrumentation. ... Better design, instrumentation and training have reduced the likelihood of those failures.
Authorities have maintained that there was no significant effect from the leak of radioactive materials from that incident, although some groups maintained that clusters of illness downwind from the site show otherwise.
A new report points out that with a couple of exceptions in California, no nuclear power station is located on or adjacent to a seismic fault.
Japan obtains some 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors, many at seismically active locations.
Nuclear reactors used to generate power do so by generating heat from the fission of radioactive materials. The heat is carried off by one loop of circulating liquid, transferred to another loop and turned into steam to spin turbines.Removing the heat and using it to spin a turbine is the key to generating power. Removing the heat from the reactor is also the key to preventing it from overheating. Failure to circulate coolant led to catastrophes.
Several new designs use passive cooling. Water can circulate naturally, by convection, with heated water rising, cooled water sinking.
Nuclear energy, for all its opposition, has some useful life left. Solar and wind power in the long run can provide the cleanest, safest source of energy. But until they can be put to use on a larger scale, we should use whatever other clean energy is at hand. For the next few decades, at least, nuclear energy fits that requirement.