When the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission released its task force’s recommendations for enhancing reactor safety in response to the Fukushima Daiichi accident, an editorial in the Washington Post summarized the findings this way: “America’s plants are safe. But they could be safer.”
Month: August 2011
For months, and perhaps years, lessons will be learned from the events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, which will serve as both a laboratory and a classroom. As the sequence of events leading to the accident continued through the accident response, at least one concept was made clear: When operating reactors, defense-in-depth — the technical concept of multiple layers of safety backup systems — must incorporate a series of active backup systems (meaning that they require human intervention) that must be operable to forestall single-point catastrophic failures.
The plot just kept getting thicker. First, the culprit was cucumbers and tomatoes from Spain. Then it was bean sprouts from northern Germany. Then it wasn’t.
When North Korea conducted its second known nuclear bomb test on May 25, 2009, the country’s leaders took extreme care to conceal the details of the event. They detonated the bomb a kilometer or so beneath the earth, so no radiation could escape; radiation clues could have enabled member countries of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization to more accurately determine the type and size of the bomb tested.
Who could have imagined a year ago that the ceremonies of the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be so poignant? Who could have imagined that Japan would have to endure another disaster derived from the energy source used to kill hundreds of thousands of people in 1945?
When dreadful events occur, reporters, readers, and interested citizens contact the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asking whether we will move the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock. The alarming nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Station on March 11 prompted e-mails and calls to our office seeking the Bulletin’s reaction as well as accurate information about what was happening in Japan.
The implementation of President Obama's Nuclear Posture Review is now occurring, out of public view but with potentially enormous implications, depending on the outcome. The Nuclear Posture Review was mandated by Congress to establish US nuclear policy, strategy, capabilities and forces for the next five to 10 years. In theory, it was intended to further President Obama's Prague agenda of reducing nuclear dangers and to work toward a world without nuclear weapons, but with global security.
“If you’ve been in a war, you cannot but have your views altered. The devastation, the terrible devastation, is not something one ever forgets.” – Mark Hatfield, 1986
Last year, Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors discovered design problems at the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant in Nebraska and the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York. In the former case, the NRC applied the most serious sanction levied against any reactor in 2010 and required the plant’s owner to correct the problem. But at Indian Point, the NRC essentially shrugged and allowed the safety problem to go unsanctioned and uncorrected.
The Islamic Republic of Iran stands at the threshold to the bomb. In 2010 it had more than enough low-enriched uranium (some 2,152 kilograms) to make its first bomb's worth of weapons-grade uranium. The LEU would have become highly enriched uranium in roughly 10 weeks had it been fed into the 4,186 centrifuges then operating. Thousands of other centrifuges are also known to be operating at the Natanz secret nuclear facility.
Jonathan Tucker, one of the world’s most eminent experts in chemical and biological weapons, arms control and disarmament, and nonproliferation, died recently at his home in Washington, DC. He was 56 years old.
Jonathan B. Tucker, member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board and leading biosecurity expert, died recently at his home in Washington, DC. His passing leaves an enormous void in the global community of experts on biotechnology, biological weapons, chemical weapons, nonproliferation, arms control, and disease.
On April 10 of this year, nearly a month after a disastrous earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tokyo, calling for an end to nuclear power. In the city’s Koenji neighborhood, a large group of mostly younger protesters, many in costume, chanted and banged drums. In Shiba Park, an older and more sober group demanded the closure of the Hamaoka nuclear power plant, located near a fault line about 200 kilometers (125 miles) southwest of Tokyo.
The announcement sent ripples throughout the international health community: On April 23, 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that seven children suffering from paralysis in the poor former Soviet country of Tajikistan were victims of poliomyelitis. Genetic sequencing showed that the virus had probably arrived with a traveler from India. It was the first importation of polio into Europe since 2002, when the region was certified as polio-free.
Although the Fukushima disaster has stalled the ambitions of some developing countries to deploy new power reactors, the Japanese crisis has not seriously affected the expansion of Iran’s nuclear energy program. Among the 45 countries that are actively considering plans to build their first power reactors, Iran is farthest along in the process and claims it will connect its Bushehr nuclear power plant to the national grid and begin producing electricity in August.
Even in the best case, nonproliferation initiatives can take years to bear fruit. They also tend to yield something other than complete success. Few things illustrate this point as well as the case of missiles. The effort to stop their spread is usually dated to November 1982, when President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 70.
Last month three terror attacks once again struck Mumbai, killing approximately 25 people. The attacks turned out to be the doing of an India-based Islamist outfit, the Indian Mujahedeen, and did not involve Pakistan-based Islamist militants.
In the media coverage since, terrorism experts on South Asia have posited that this attack was not a decisive shift in Islamist terrorism in India — their argument, instead, was that Pakistan-based militants, increasingly autonomous in their operations, still remain the most likely source of a large-scale attack on Indian soil.