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New Public TV Documentary on Fukushima: Meltdown: Cooling Water Crisis

A shocking new 49-minute documentary from Japan’s public television broadcaster NHK titled “MELTDOWN: Cooling Water Crisis,” reveals new information on how corporate policy undermined efforts to keep the three destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi reactors stable one week after the triple reactor meltdown disaster began. See video here. Hear an interview related to the film here.

January 10, 2020 by Nukewatch 2 Comments

Fukushima’s Hot Particles in Japan: Their Meaning for the Olympics and Beyond

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020
By Cindy Folkers

Hundreds of thousands of people—athletes, officials, media, and spectators—will flood into Japan for the 2020 Olympics. But radiation exposure dangers from the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe have not ended since the meltdowns and explosions spread radioactive contamination over large areas reaching down to Tokyo and beyond. Soon after the start of the meltdowns in 2011, experts began warning of exposure to radioactive micro-particles or “hot particles”—a type of particle that poses a danger unaccounted for by regulatory agencies. In order to understand the special danger posed by these particles at the Olympics and beyond, we must first understand the current state of radiation exposure standards.

Hot Particles Don’t Fit Current Exposure Models

For decades, protection from radiation exposure has been based on understanding how doses are delivered to the human body. Are the doses high or low? Inside or outside the body? If a dose is internal, which organ is it impacting? Is the dose given all at one time, or over a longer time? Additional consideration should be given to who is receiving the exposure: men, women, children, fetuses—although protection based on age, gender and pregnancy falls short.

The difficulty with hot particles, which can travel great distances, is that they don’t deliver doses in the way experts expect. Current exposure assumptions hold that radionuclides settling in the body, i.e. through inhalation or ingestion, deliver a low dose to surrounding cells where they lodge. But these models are not truly reflecting the damage that is occurring. For instance, precise distribution of many radionuclides within the body eludes experts. And radiation doses delivered inside cells, which may seem low to an entire body, are large doses when just single cells or groupings of cells receive them. Hot particles deliver a much larger dose than what is considered “low.” And once they are inhaled or ingested, they deliver it specifically to the (often unpredictable) area of the body where they lodge.

Hot Particles Make Already Unpredictable Damage Worse

Not only can hot particle doses be unpredictable—so can the damage. Called “stochastic,” damage from radiation exposure may occur at all doses [no matter how small]. The higher the dose is, the greater the chance is that damage will happen. However, the severity of the damage is independent of the dose; that is even low doses of radiation can result in severe consequences. Sometimes these consequences take decades to manifest, but for times of life when fast growth is occurring—such as pregnancy or childhood—the damage may show up in a much shorter time frame.

Since all parts of the human body develop from single cells during pregnancy, the severity of a “radiation hit” during this development can be devastating for mother and child, yet governments and the nuclear industry never consider these exposures as having an official radiation impact. Therefore, NO safe dose CAN exist. Stochastic risk, coupled with the additional unpredictable and unaccounted-for risk from radioactive micro-particles, can lead to impacts that are more dangerous and difficult to quantify with currently used methods.

Olympics 2020 and Beyond

Clearly, as Japan prepares to host the 2020 Olympics, the danger posed by exposure to radioactive micro-particles should be considered, in addition to known and better understood radio-cesium contamination. While most of the radioactive particle dust has settled, it can be easily re-suspended by activities such as digging or running, and by rain, wind, snow, and flooding. Health officials in Japan continually fail to act and stop ongoing radioactive exposures. This lack of governmental action puts all residents of Japan at risk, and also any athletes, spectators and visitors that participate in the Olympics.

Currently, the torch relay is scheduled to begin with a special display of the “Flame of Recovery,” as the torch passes through still-contaminated areas of Fukushima Prefecture. Then, the “Grand Start,” the Japanese leg of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Torch Relay, will occur at “J. Village,” the former disaster response headquarters used during the initial nuclear meltdowns in 2011. It is 12.4 miles from Fukushima-1 wreckage site, and resides close to acres of radioactive topsoil and other material stored in bags. The bags and the cranes moving them are visible on satellite maps dated 2019. After starting in Fukushima, the torch will travel to all remaining prefectures of Japan. Further, there is indication that J. Village (now called National Training Center) is being retrofitted as a practice area for baseball, softball, and soccer. Games hosted in Fukushima Prefecture aren’t the only exposure concern, as radioisotopes have traveled far from the ruined cores of Fukushima’s reactors. Radionuclides from the meltdowns were found in Tokyo’s metropolitan area as late as 2016 and would increase and decrease, researchers observed, based on rainfall and run-off. One “high activity radioactively-hot dust particle” traveled from Fukushima’s ruined core, to a house in Nagoya, Japan—270 miles away.

In our normal lives, each one of us breathes in a modest amount of dust daily. People are also exposed through contaminated food, ingestion of dusts and soil, or through skin contact. Endurance athletes are at a higher risk, since they often eat much more—and take in more breaths per minute—than an average athlete or a person at rest. And, biologically, due to developing cells, children and pregnant women are at a much higher risk from radiation exposure than men. Many Olympic and Paralympic athletes are of childbearing age or adolescents.

Contamination in Japan has not gone away and neither should our awareness. While most of the athletes, coaches and spectators will leave Japan, the contamination remains, impacting generations of people who will have to contend with this danger for much longer than the eight-plus years they have already been through.

Japan’s government policy of dismissing radiation’s dangers, and normalizing exposure to radioactivity, is part of an attempt to resettle people in areas that would allow an external dose of 2 rem per year. Prior to the Fukushima meltdowns, this level was considered high-risk to the general population. This is not an acceptable level of exposure. The radioactive micro-particles found in areas with even lower background levels indicate a significant risk that Japan and governments around the world who support nuclear technologies are covering up. Merely understanding and quantifying these hot particles is not enough. Governments must protect people from exposure everywhere in the world, not just in Japan. The danger of radioactive micro-particles should be added to a long list of reasons why nuclear technology is not safe and should no longer be used.

Thanks to Arnie and Maggie Gundersen at Fairewinds Energy Education for technical and editorial input.

— Cindy Folkers is on the staff of Beyond Nuclear where she specializes in radiation impacts on health, Congress watch, energy legislation, climate change, and federal subsidies. She handles the group’s administrative operations, and wrote this report for the group’s website.

Filed Under: Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

January 10, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Dr. Janette Sherman, 1930 – 2019

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020

The renowned professor of oncology and medicine Janette Sherman died Nov. 7 at 89 in Alexandria, Virginia. She had a combination of dementia and Addison’s disease, her daughter Connie Bigelow said. A chemist by training, Dr. Sherman took up toxicology and helped pinpoint how hazardous substances, toxic chemicals and nuclear radiation could lead to cancer, birth defects and other diseases. She also studied the continuing health effects of the world’s worst radiation disasters, in 1986 at Chernobyl in Ukraine and in 2011 at the Fukushima-Daiichi site in Japan. Dr. Sherman edited “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” (Boston: New York Academy of Sciences, 2007), which analyzed thousands of articles in the scientific literature and concluded that the Chernobyl disaster had caused an estimated 985,000 premature deaths…. Dr. Sherman studied the effects of radiation early in her career and later worked with Joseph Mangano, executive director of the nonprofit Radiation and Public Health Project. By analyzing the baby teeth of children who lived near nuclear reactors, they suggested in five peer-reviewed journal articles that even small doses of radiation had caused increases in childhood cancer. [Mr. Mangano emailed on Dec. 1, “Janette was an eminent toxicologist, but focused her energies on nuclear power plant emissions and their health consequences since the mid-1990s. …We all can learn from her example.”] —Excerpted from Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, Nov. 29, 2019.

Filed Under: Chernobyl, Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Uncategorized

October 14, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima Waste Water Crisis Raising Alarms

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019

Japan’s environment minister Yoshiaki Harada said Sept. 10 that the operator of the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors will have to dump huge quantities of radiation-laden waste water directly into the Pacific Ocean—a threat that has enraged local fishermen and nearby countries that share Pacific Ocean-front territory.

Over 1 million cubic meters (or tons) of contaminated water has accumulated at the site since it was struck in March 2011 by the strongest earthquake in Japan’s history and the subsequent tsunami that triggered three reactor meltdowns and forced 164,865 residents to flee their homes.

“The only option will be to drain it into the sea and dilute it,” Harada told a Sept. 9 news briefing in Tokyo, the Guardian reported. “There are no other options,” he said. This claim is false, as there are at least four alternatives to ocean dumping including long-term storage.

Reactor owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) has repeatedly claimed that its filter system removes all the radioactivity from the waste water except tritium. But last year Tepco admitted that its enormous filter system had failed, and that water in the tanks still contains highly radioactive contaminants including radioactive cesium, cobalt, antimony, iodine, strontium, and tritium. The level of contamination in the stored water far exceeds legal limits allowing release into the ocean, and Tepco has promised to refilter the water, a process that will take 5-to-6 years.

Moreover, Greenpeace reports* that the water processing failure was known by Tepco from the beginning of its operation. The company kept the information secret for the five years between 2013 and 2018 because public disclosure would have ruined Tepco’s plans “to solve the enormous water crisis by discharge to the Pacific Ocean.”

Held in 1,000 huge tanks at the site, each with 1,000-1,200 tons of radioactive liquid, Tepco has said that it will run out of on-site space for more tanks by the summer of 2022. The amount of processed water increases between 2,000 and 4,000 tons each week. Dr. Gordon Edwards notes that, “In the next 4-5 years, another 750,000 tons will be added to the inventory.”

According to critics, Japan’s government and Tepco repeatedly suggest the idea of dumping the waste water into the Pacific in order to weaken resistance to the plan and to foster its acceptance among skeptics.

Japan’s Neighbors Complain

The governments of South Korea and Taiwan have formally objected to any ocean dumping of Fukushima waste water, warning that currents will bring the contamination to their own shores.

In addition, South Korea’s Olympic committee has raised concerns about the risk to Olympic athletes who will attend the 2020 summer games in Tokyo. With baseball and softball games set to be played in Fukushima City, South Korea’s committee asked in August whether food served in the Athletes’ Village could be contaminated with radioactive fallout that was widely dispersed by the wrecked reactors. Japan’s Olympic Committee replied by down playing the concerns.

South Korea should restrict imports of processed foods from Japan’s Fukushima region as radiation has been found in shipments, an opposition lawmaker said Aug. 19, Korea Times reports. Citing data from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, South Korean Rep. Kim Kwang-soo of the Party for Democracy and Peace has reported that radiation was discovered in almost 17 tons of processed foods imported from the eight prefectures, or 35 shipments, over the past five years. South Korea banned seafood imports from states or prefectures near Fukushima in 2013 over reports of radioactive contamination. But no import restrictions have been put on processed foods from the areas. —JL

—Guardian, Sept. 10; Asia Times, Sept. 25; NHK Japan Public TV, Aug. 21; Korea Times, Aug. 19; Seattle Times, Sept. 28, 2018.

* “Tepco Water Crises,” Greenpeace Germany, Jan. 22, 2019.

Filed Under: Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

July 6, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima Disaster Response and Recovery a Vexing Radiation Colossus

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019
By John LaForge
Art by Mark L. Taylor for Nukewatch

Eight years into Fukushima’s 3-reactor catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami and meltdowns, and after the industry’s and government’s multiple recovery schemes, an overview is in order.*

The three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi caused the worst dump of radioactivity to the Pacific Ocean in history. “This event is unprecedented in its total release of radioactive contamination into the ocean” wrote Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for PBS News Hour in March 2016. Buesseler has been recording Fukushima’s Pacific Ocean contamination since it started on 3/11/11. While Fukushima is often called the “2nd worst” radiation accident behind Chernobyl, Buesseler said, “More than 80% of the radioactivity from the damaged reactors ended up in the Pacific—far more than reached the ocean from Chernobyl.” Buesseler reported that this radiation gusher continues. “It is incorrect to say that Fukushima is under control when levels of radioactivity in the ocean indicate ongoing leaks, caused by groundwater flowing through the site and enhanced after storms,” he wrote.

  • “The worst airborne radiation spill in 25 years.”: Like the 1986 Chernobyl disaster that spread radiation across the Northern Hemisphere, Forbes reported March 28, 2011 that the US EPA recorded Fukushima’s radioactive iodine-131 in rainwater in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts at levels above what the agency allows in drinking water. The EPA’s air monitoring also found Fukushima’s radioactive iodine-131 in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Washington, and Nevada. Nothing close to this immense, hemisphere-wide radiation dispersal has happened since Chernobyl.
  • Japanese foods were tainted widely. Traces of radioactive cesium were found in a popular baby formula according to Japan Today, Dec. 7, 2011. Hundreds of thousands of babies may have eaten it before it was pulled from store shelves. The Japan Times reported April 22, 2011 that Fukushima’s iodine-131 was detected in the breast milk of women living near Tokyo, 150 miles from the meltdowns. The public demanded an investigation into the impact on mothers and babies. In April 2013, Japan’s Ministry of Health reported that levels of cesium-137 and cesium-134 found in produce and rice crackers 225 miles away from Fukushima “are high enough to cause residents to exceed the annual radiation exposure limit in just a few months, or even weeks.”
  • Fukushima is the world’s worst reactor disaster by volume of fuel melted and waste in cooling pools. Major reactor meltdowns at Santa Susanna in California (1959), Windscale in England (1957), Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania (1979), and Chernobyl in Ukraine (1986), involved a single reactor fuel inventory. Fukushima’s meltdowns involve three reactors full of melted and mangled fuel rods, and an additional 1,573 waste fuel rods in damaged condition in damaged pools of cooling water. The three masses of melted reactor fuel may never be recovered or containerized.
  • Fukushima caused the largest evacuation in the history of nuclear power: 160,000 evacuated from the zone first set at 12, and later expanded to 19 miles. (116,000 were forced to leave Chernobyl’s dead zone.) Two weeks after the start of the meltdowns, people from between 12 to 19 miles away were encouraged to “voluntarily evacuate.” The US government recommended that US citizens stay 50 miles away.
  • Of the colossal volumes of radioactive debris produced by the catastrophe, the New York Times provided this list in March 2017: 400 tons of contaminated cooling water produced every day since March 2011; 3,519 containers holding 60,000 tons of radioactive mud or sludge; 64,700 cubic meters of discarded protective clothing; branches and logs from 220 acres of deforested land; 200,400 cubic meters of radioactive rubble; and 3.5 billion gallons [17 million cubic yards] of radioactive soil. According to Greenpeace, 11 million tons of this radioactive soil is to be incinerated, which spreads airborne radioactive contamination in fly ash from smoke stacks, and leaves behind radioactively contaminated bottom ash in need of containment. (Will the consequently contaminated soil again be collected for re-incineration?)
  • The vexing problems of disaster response have seen ever-changing estimates of the amount of radiation released. The amount released to the air was “twice as large as previous estimates by research institutions both in Japan and overseas,” according to a Feb. 2012 report by the Meteorological Research Institute. The volume and variety of contaminated materials that have been collected for disposal is astounding. Greenpeace reported in December 2017 that while towns like Iitate and Namie had contaminated topsoil scraped off from populated areas, the problem remained because the soil removal left “islands … which are surrounded by forested mountains, for which there is no possible decontamination.” Consequently, cleaned-up areas “are subject to recontamination through weathering processes and the natural water and lifecycle of trees and rivers.” Because of how long cesium-137 persists in the environment, “this will be an on-going source of significant recontamination for … 300 years.”
  • The failure of the “ice wall,” designed to divert groundwater away from the three reactor foundations which were cracked open by the record 9.0 earthquake, means that hundreds of tons of water keep pouring every day into the wreckage of the reactor chambers. There the water is contaminated by contact with the masses of melted uranium fuel and either rushes out to sea or is collected for filtration in the failed Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS).
  • The notorious failure of the ALPS, which was intended to partially clean up highly contaminated cooling water and groundwater, means that possibly 1-million tons of waste water now held in 1,000 giant tanks near the coastline is not cleaned up at all, and must be filtered again by an as-yet-unknown method that needs to be designed and engineered from scratch. Meanwhile the tanks are vulnerable to another earthquake that could happen any time. One Japan Times headline on March 29, 2018 warned, “Seven years on, radioactive water at Fukushima plant still flowing into ocean, study finds”.

Detailed and well-documented reports by Greenpeace provide some of the best background and investigative information. See:

* Reflections in Fukushima: The Fukushima Daiichi Accident, Seven Years On, March 2018

* Nuclear Scars: The Lasting Legacies of Chernobyl and Fukushima, March 2016

* Fukushima Fallout: Nuclear business makes people pay and suffer, February 2013

* Lessons from Fukushima, February 2012

Filed Under: Environment, Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste

July 6, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“I oversaw the US nuclear power industry. Now I think it should be banned.”

The Dangers of Climate Chaos No Longer Outweigh the Risks of Nuclear Reactor Accidents
US Dept. of State Geographer. Data NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO. Image (c) 2012 Terrametrics
Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019
Gregory Jaczko, Washington Post, May 17, 2019

Editor’s note: Mr. Jaczko’s use of the phrase “nuclear plant” has been replaced with the word “reactor” when applicable.

Nuclear power was supposed to save the planet. The reactors that used this technology could produce enormous amounts of electricity without the pollution caused by burning coal, oil or natural gas, which would help slow the catastrophic changes humans have forced on the Earth’s climate. As a physicist who studied esoteric properties of subatomic particles, I admired the science and the technological innovation behind the industry. And by the time I started working on nuclear issues on Capitol Hill in 1999 as an aide to Democratic lawmakers, the risks from human-caused global warming seemed to outweigh the dangers of nuclear power, which hadn’t had an accident since Chernobyl, 13 years earlier.

By 2005, my views had begun to shift.

I’d spent almost four years working on nuclear policy and witnessed the influence of the industry on the political process. Now I was serving on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where I saw that nuclear power was more complicated than I knew; it was a powerful business as well as an impressive feat of science. In 2009, President Barack Obama named me the agency’s chairman.

Two years into my term, an earthquake and tsunami destroyed four nuclear reactors in Japan. I spent months reassuring the American public that nuclear energy, and the US nuclear industry in particular, was safe. But by then, I was starting to doubt those claims myself.

Before the accident, it was easier to accept the industry’s potential risks, because nuclear power [reactors] had kept many coal and gas plants from spewing air pollutants and greenhouse gases into the air.

Afterward, the falling cost of renewable power changed the calculus. Despite working in the industry for more than a decade, I now believe that nuclear power’s benefits are no longer enough to risk the welfare of people living near these [reactors]. I became so convinced years after departing office that I’ve now made alternative-energy development my new career, leaving nuclear power behind. The current and potential costs—personal and economic—are just too high.

Nuclear reactors generate power through fission, the separation of one large atom into two or more smaller ones. This atomic engine yields none of the air pollutants produced by the combustion of carbon-based fuels. Over the decades since its inception in the 1950s, nuclear power has prevented hundreds of fossil-fuel plants from being built, meaning fewer people have suffered or died from diseases caused by their emissions.

But fission reactors have a dark side too. If the energy they produce is not closely controlled, they can fail in catastrophic ways that kill people and render large tracts of land uninhabitable. Nuclear power is also the path to nuclear weapons, themselves an existential threat.

As the certainty of climate change grew clearer, nuclear power presented a dilemma for environmentalists: Was the risk of accidents or further spread of nuclear weapons greater than the hazard of climate change? In the late 2000s, the arguments in support of nuclear power were gaining traction with Congress, academia and even some environmentalists, as the Chernobyl accident faded into the past and the effects of climate change became harder to ignore. No new [reactors] had been proposed in decades, because of the industry’s dismal record of construction oversight and cost controls, but now utilities were beginning to pitch new reactors—as many as 30 around the country.

But the Fukushima Daiichi crisis reversed that momentum.  A massive release of radiation from that reactor complex, as its four failed reactors, lasted for months. The world watched as hydrogen explosions sent huge chunks of concrete into the air—a reminder that radiation was streaming, unseen, from the reactor core. More than 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes and their communities.

Most have not returned, because only select areas have been remediated, making the surrounding region seem like a giant chessboard with hazardous areas next to safer ones. The crisis hobbled the Japanese economy for years. The government estimated that the accident would cost at least $180 billion. Independent estimates suggest that the cost could be three times more.

There were obvious ramifications for the entire industry. Could what happened in Japan happen elsewhere? This accident consumed my work at the NRC for the next six months. I assured the public of the safety of US reactors, because I did not have enough information or a legal basis at that point to say otherwise. But I also promised to thoroughly review the safety measures we had in place and to swiftly implement any necessary reforms the agency identified. Agency staffers soon produced a reasonable set of reactor improvements that would reduce the chance of a similar accident here. The staff found weaknesses in the programs for dealing with fires, earthquakes and flooding—the kinds of natural disasters that could trigger a catastrophe like Fukushima.

Yet after the disaster, my fellow commissioners, as well as many in Congress and the nuclear industry, fretted that the proposed new US reactors might never be built, because Fukushima would focus too much attention on the potential downsides. Westinghouse and the new [reactor] owners worried that acknowledging the need for reforms would raise even more concern about the safety of reactors. The industry wanted the NRC to say that everything was fine and nothing needed to change. So my colleagues on the commission and supporters of the industry pushed to license the first of these projects without delay and stonewalled implementation of the safety reforms. My colleagues objected to making the staff report public. I ultimately prevailed, but then the lobbying intensified: The industry almost immediately started pushing back on the staff report. They lobbied the commission and enlisted allies in Congress to disapprove, water-down or defer many of the recommendations.

Within a year of the accident at Fukushima—and over my objections—the NRC implemented just a few of the modest safety reforms that the agency’s employees had proposed, and then approved the first four new reactor licenses in decades, in Georgia and in South Carolina.

But there was a problem. After Fukushima, people all over the world demanded a different approach to nuclear safety. Germany closed several older reactors and required the rest to shut down by 2022. Japan closed most of its reactors. Last year, even France, which gets about 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, proposed reducing that figure to 50 percent by 2035, because safety could not be guaranteed. Trying to make accidents unlikely wasn’t enough.

And here in the United States, those four new reactors—the vanguards of the “nuclear renaissance”—still haven’t opened. The South Carolina companies building two of the reactors canceled the project in 2017, after spending $9 billion of their customers’ money without producing a single electron of power. The construction company behind the utilities, Westinghouse, went bankrupt, almost destroying its parent company, the global conglomerate Toshiba. The other two reactors licensed while I chaired the NRC are still under construction in Georgia and years behind schedule. Their cost has ballooned from $14 billion to $28 billion and continues to grow.

History shows that the expense involved in nuclear power will never change. Past construction in the United States exhibited similar cost increases throughout the design, engineering and construction process. The technology and the safety needs are just too complex and demanding to translate into a facility that is simple to design and build. No matter your views on nuclear power in principle, no one can afford to pay this much for two [reactors]. New nuclear is simply off the table in the United States.

After I left the NRC in 2012, I argued that we needed new ways to make accidents impossible. When a reactor incident occurs, the reactor should not release any harmful radiation outside the reactor itself. I was not yet antinuclear, just pro-public-safety. But nuclear proponents still see this as “antinuclear.” They knew, as I did, that most reactors operating today do not meet the “no off-site release” test. I think a reasonable standard for any source of electricity should be that it doesn’t contaminate your community for decades.

Coal and natural gas do not create this kind of acute accident hazard, though they do present a different kind of danger. Large dams for hydroelectric power could require evacuation of nearby communities if they failed—but without the lasting contamination effect of radiation. And solar, wind and geothermal energy pose no safety threat at all.

For years, my concerns about nuclear energy’s cost and safety were always tempered by a growing fear of climate catastrophe. But Fukushima provided a good test of just how important nuclear power was to slowing climate change. In the months after the accident, all nuclear reactors in Japan were shuttered indefinitely, eliminating production of almost all of the country’s carbon-free electricity and about 30 percent of its total electricity production. Naturally, carbon emissions rose, and future emissions-reduction targets were slashed.

Would shutting down reactors all over the world lead to similar results? Eight years after Fukushima, that question has been answered. Fewer than 10 of Japan’s 50 reactors have resumed operations, yet the country’s carbon emissions have dropped below their levels before the accident. How? Japan has made significant gains in energy efficiency and solar power. It turns out that relying on nuclear energy is actually a bad strategy for combating climate change. One accident wiped out Japan’s carbon gains. Only a turn to renewables and conservation brought the country back on target.

What about the United States? Nuclear accounts for about 19 percent of US electricity production and most of our carbon-free electricity. Could reactors be phased out here without increasing carbon emissions? If it were completely up to the free market, the answer would be yes, because nuclear is more expensive than almost any other source of electricity today. Renewables such as solar, wind and hydroelectric power generate electricity for less than the nuclear reactors under construction in Georgia, and in most places, they produce cheaper electricity than existing nuclear reactors that have paid off all their construction costs.

In 2016, observing these trends, I launched a company devoted to building offshore wind turbines. My journey, from admiring nuclear power to fearing it, was complete. This tech is no longer a viable strategy for dealing with climate change, nor is it a competitive source of power. It is hazardous, expensive and unreliable, and abandoning it wouldn’t bring on climate doom.

The real choice now is between saving the planet and saving the dying nuclear industry. I vote for the planet.

—Jaczko served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2005 to 2009, and as its chairman from 2009 to 2012. The author of Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator, he teaches at Georgetown University and Princeton University.

Filed Under: Chernobyl, Fukushima, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Power, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

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