Three notable nuclear accidents are discussed: Chernobyl (1986) where safety systems were disabled causing an explosion and thousands of deaths; Fukushima (2011) where an earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling systems causing explosions and radiation release; and Three Mile Island (1979) where a loss of cooling damaged the reactor core but no radiation was released, though it influenced public perception of nuclear power. Risk assessments found a 1.3% chance of a major accident occurring over a 30-year period across US reactors and less than a 1 in 1 million chance per year of a single fatality at any given reactor. Nuclear energy has significantly fewer deaths per unit of energy than fossil fuel alternatives like coal and oil.
Three notable nuclear accidents are discussed: Chernobyl (1986) where safety systems were disabled causing an explosion and thousands of deaths; Fukushima (2011) where an earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling systems causing explosions and radiation release; and Three Mile Island (1979) where a loss of cooling damaged the reactor core but no radiation was released, though it influenced public perception of nuclear power. Risk assessments found a 1.3% chance of a major accident occurring over a 30-year period across US reactors and less than a 1 in 1 million chance per year of a single fatality at any given reactor. Nuclear energy has significantly fewer deaths per unit of energy than fossil fuel alternatives like coal and oil.
Three notable nuclear accidents are discussed: Chernobyl (1986) where safety systems were disabled causing an explosion and thousands of deaths; Fukushima (2011) where an earthquake and tsunami disabled cooling systems causing explosions and radiation release; and Three Mile Island (1979) where a loss of cooling damaged the reactor core but no radiation was released, though it influenced public perception of nuclear power. Risk assessments found a 1.3% chance of a major accident occurring over a 30-year period across US reactors and less than a 1 in 1 million chance per year of a single fatality at any given reactor. Nuclear energy has significantly fewer deaths per unit of energy than fossil fuel alternatives like coal and oil.
So, in most discussions of the pros and cons of nuclear energy, the idea of accidents at nuclear reactors comes up a lot. We’re going to discuss this a little bit, we’re going to look at some specific examples and look at a bit of the risk assessment associated with this. So, first it should be noted that there’s no way a nuclear reactor can explode like a nuclear weapon, these are totally different things with totally different fuel. So, a nuclear reactor, the uranium is only enriched to about 5% and it needs to be much, much higher percentage in order to make a nuclear weapon, so these are not similar things when we’re talking about accidents. However, there have been accidents, which involve release of radioactive material, explosions, and contamination of surrounding areas, water, and things like that, but these are very different things than when you think about a nuclear weapon. We’re going to discuss here three of the most notable incidents in nuclear reactor history. So, the first one is Chernobyl, which was in the Ukraine in 1986. This is the worst accident in the history of nuclear reactors. So, what happened here was, people wanted to perform tests and then although it was against regulation, I guess in order to make these tests easier or faster to do, the safety systems were disabled, and while this happened, the reactor went out of control, it overheated, and then eventually exploded. And when it exploded, there was a huge release of radiation and highly radioactive material. So, immediately, there were between 50 and 100 deaths, however, longer term over the next 50 years or so it’s estimated that the numbers aren’t exactly clear, but that 1000s or even 10s of 1000s of people died due to cancers and long-term problems associated with this radiation. So this is, although the exact numbers aren’t known, obviously a huge disaster where 1000s of people were killed. It should be noted, though, that this is not the same type of reactor that’s found in the US, Canada, and France, and the same thing wouldn’t be able to happen in those types of reactors. So, this is from recent memory, this is the Fukushima disaster in Japan and so this was in 2011. There was an earthquake 175 kilometers off the coast that registered 9.0, which is a huge earthquake. So, electrical power was lost due to toppled power lines from the earthquake, diesel-powered generators supplying power for water cooling pumps kicked in, which was fine. However, a 40-foot tsunami came over the protective seawall. So, it was a wall designed to stop waves of up to about 20 feet, but the tsunami was 40 feet high and so the water came over the protective seawall. These generators, these diesel generators, which are running the cooling pumps, they were swamped, and then they failed, and so things started heating up. The next day radiation levels rose and one reactor core melted down. This resulted in a massive explosion of hydrogen that blew off the containment roof of this reactor core and so a lot of radiation escaped, as well as at this point, there’s radioactive seawater,
without the permission of the owner. 1 and this also escaped from the planet. So, it was a huge breach and radiation and radioactive seawater were both released. There were no immediate deaths, unlike Chernobyl, however, as of today and as of 2013, there are no health effects seen in the workers. However, it’s estimated that there could be as many as around 180 additional cancer deaths worldwide, due to this, but that’s not clear yet exactly how that’s going to pan out. But regardless of this, this was a serious disaster. The last one I want to talk about is Three Mile Island. So, this was in Pennsylvania in 1979, and this one is important perhaps because it’s possible that had an effect on public perception and policy, more than the effects of the actual accident itself. So, it was a loss of cooling accident it’s called, and there was severe damage to the reactor core. There was actually no major release of radioactive material. However, around the same time, there’s a film called The China Syndrome that was released and this was a fictional story about a reactor meltdown that was similar to this one, and so it’s a massive radiation release and dangerous to society. So, in this fictitious movie, there was an accident, which was actually a big deal and it was released around the same time as this loss of cooling accident, even though in real life there was no actual release of radioactive material, but due to the timing of these two things, there was an influence toward nuclear power and the public attitude toward that, certainly in North America, in the US especially, and so the Three Mile Island accident, although it didn’t have any long-term effects in terms of radiation or harming people, it had long-term effects or perhaps had long-term effects in terms of people’s attitudes towards nuclear power. So, there’s no question that these accidents at nuclear reactors are very serious things and need to be considered and now let’s take a look at the probability of an accident. So, this study was done looking at some of the major nuclear reactor facilities in the United States. So, I want to look at the studied probability of accidents of these. So, up here, these are just the names of the reactors I’m not going to look at the whole thing, but what I’m interested in is down here where it says large release probability. This is the probability of having a large accident, so a large release of radiation or radioactive matter, or a large explosion releasing radioactive matter and so that’s these numbers down here, 4, 6, 7, 2, and 1 different for each reactor. Another important thing is I want to look here at the units, so this is 10 to the -6, which is 1 millionth per reactor year. So what that means is, if I have a four, so this one here, that’s four over a million accidents per reactor year, it means that if this reactor runs for 1 million years, you would expect in that million years to have 4 large release accidents, so 4 per million years, so let’s do a calculation of what that means. Looking at the numbers, we had on the previous slide, we had if I take the average of those, then I have the average probability is what I mentioned four times 10 to the -6, that’s the average of all those numbers I circled, per reactor year. So, now let’s ask ourselves, what is the probability that there will be a release during a 30-year operating lifetime, looking at the 104 power reactors now offering the US, so we look at 104 reactors, assuming the probability is four times 10 to
without the permission of the owner. 2 the minus six per reactor year, and they operate for 30 years. If you do that, what you come up with is you need to multiply by the number of years, then you need to multiply by the number of reactors and then times that probability, and what you get is you’d have about a 1.3% chance of having an accident. The study also calculates the health effects of reactor accidents, both for early fatalities and long-term latent effects like cancer and they found that for each of the reactors, there’s less than one chance in a million per reactor year. So per each reactor running for a year for a single, early fatality due to accident. So these are the numbers, this is the first one is the probability with all the reactors of having a major incident in 30 years, it’s 1.3%, and the second thing is a chance of about one in a million for a single fatality at each reactor. We can decide whether we think those numbers are big or small, but this is what they are. A useful thing to do when we’re looking at the safety of some sort of technology or resource for producing energy is to make a comparison. So, here we’re going to look at a comparison between different ways that we get energy and here we’re looking at death rates. What we see is we’re looking at per amount of energy, so per terawatt hour of energy, how many deaths are expected. So, nuclear is down at the bottom at 0:07, so that’s 0.07 deaths per terawatt hour. Wherever you look up at the top, you have things like coal, depending on the type of coal between 20 and 30 deaths per terawatt hour, oil, probably a little more than half that, and so on. So, what we see is nuclear is way at the bottom. People do have varying opinions regarding these figures and there are different ways to calculate them. These are taken from the source there but what I want to be clear about is regardless of the measurement method, nuclear is never seen, as a leader in energy deaths per amount of energy. It’s always much lower, regardless of which of these numbers you’re looking at things like coal and oil are much higher per amount of energy. So, that’s something to keep in mind when thinking about nuclear energy.