Nuclear Accidents

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 li9le 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 radioacDve material, explosions, and contaminaDon 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 regulaDon, 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 radiaDon
and highly radioacDve material. So, immediately, there were between 50 and 100
deaths, however, longer term over the next 50 years or so it’s esDmated 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 radiaDon. 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 protecDve 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 protecDve
seawall. These generators, these diesel generators, which are running the cooling
pumps, they were swamped, and then they failed, and so things started heaDng up. The
next day radiaDon 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 radiaDon escaped, as well as at this point, there’s radioacDve seawater,

and this also escaped from the planet. So, it was a huge breach and radiaDon and
radioacDve 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 esDmated that there could be as many as around 180 addiDonal
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 percepDon 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 radioacDve material. However, around the same Dme,
there’s a film called The China Syndrome that was released and this was a ficDonal
story about a reactor meltdown that was similar to this one, and so it’s a massive
radiaDon release and dangerous to society. So, in this ficDDous movie, there was an
accident, which was actually a big deal and it was released around the same Dme as
this loss of cooling accident, even though in real life there was no actual release of
radioacDve material, but due to the Dming of these two things, there was an influence
toward nuclear power and the public a\tude 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 radiaDon or harming people, it had long-term effects or
perhaps had long-term effects in terms of people’s a\tudes towards nuclear power. So,
there’s no quesDon 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 faciliDes 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 radiaDon or radioacDve
ma9er, or a large explosion releasing radioacDve ma9er 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 calculaDon 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
menDoned four Dmes 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 operaDng lifeDme, looking at the 104 power reactors now
offering the US, so we look at 104 reactors, assuming the probability is four Dmes 10 to

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 mulDply by the number of years, then you need to mulDply
by the number of reactors and then Dmes 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 fataliDes 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 terawa9 hour of
energy, how many deaths are expected. So, nuclear is down at the bo9om at 0:07, so
that’s 0.07 deaths per terawa9 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 terawa9 hour,
oil, probably a li9le more than half that, and so on. So, what we see is nuclear is way at
the bo9om. 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.