Radioactive risks

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.

The tragedy in Japan is raising serious concerns about the safety of nuclear power, and that should give some pause to officials in the United States who want to expand the country’s use of nuclear energy.

In Japan, officials are working feverishly to prevent a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was hit last week by the massive earthquake and the resulting tsunami that flooded the plant. Officials say there are problems at four of the plant’s six reactors.

The system that pumps water into the reactors, cooling them, failed. So did the backup systems. Plant operators have been pumping seawater into the reactors in a last-ditch effort to prevent a meltdown. In the days since there have been three explosions, one of which reportedly breached the steel containment vessel that holds the radiation inside the reactor building.

Japanese officials quickly evacuated people from around the plant, and they have acknowledged some severe problems, in addition to what they said were releases of radiation. A fire at one reactor, which was inactive, also led to a radiation release.

Fuel rods have to be contained in water in the reactor chambers to prevent the release of radiation and a meltdown, but officials have had problems doing that. On Monday, they said in one reactor the fuel rods were at least partially exposed for more than two hours, which led to some of the fuel melting. Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant’s owner, pulled all but a small crew of workers from the site because of safety concerns.

Some members of Congress have cited the problems in Japan as a reason to slow the U.S. rush to expand nuclear energy production. Several plants in the United States are along the ocean, including two in California. In addition to the threat of earthquakes and tsunamis, other reactors face the risk of floods and other natural disasters. And the U.S. has several reactors of a similar design of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and that raises serious concerns.

The White House has said that what has happened in Japan will not change its plans to pursue nuclear power as a major source of America’s future power, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it believes that all of the reactors in the United States are safe. The head of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s lobbying group, said U.S. plants are well-engineered and built to withstand significant incidents.

Some nuclear advocates argue that this is a rare incident. Indeed. The 9.0-magnitude earthquake was the largest in Japan’s history, and the tsunami, which brought waves estimated at more than 30 feet, was a monster.

This may be seen as a once-in-a-lifetime event, but who’s to say something like this couldn’t happen here? The nuclear industry has dismissed the possibility of such a catastrophe in the past as being incredibly low. It can tout its safety record, but remember the oil industry boasted of its safety record before the disastrous explosion last year in the Gulf of Mexico.

The sophisticated drilling rig Deepwater Horizon had a series of catastrophic failures that led to the worst accidental oil spill in history. Oil industry officials scoffed that such an incident could happen again, but they were also the ones saying it would never happen in the first place.

The world is seeing systematic failures — things that just shouldn’t happen — occurring at the plant in Japan, and if there is a meltdown, it will have significant consequences. The fact is that nuclear power uses highly radioactive material that poses incredible health risks for generations to come.

The disaster in Japan is, thankfully, rare, but it shouldn’t be dismissed. Instead, it demonstrates the potential for things to go wrong. Unfortunately, there is often a cavalier attitude about nuclear energy that ignores the very real dangers. For example, nuclear industry proponents repeatedly tried to minimize major problems with the plans to dump 77,000 tons of nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain — a porous volcanic ridge in a seismically active area.

The events in Japan should be a wake-up call for America because something similar could happen here. The country should pause in its ambitions to launch a nuclear renaissance and take time to soberly reconsider the serious risks.