Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant

Introduction

The nuclear accident in Fukushima in Japan is one of the tsunami generated by the earthquake of March 11, 2011, magnitude 9, which devastated the Pacific coast of Tohoku. The nuclear accident on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, including three of the six reactors were subjected to partial melting of the heart, causing significant radioactive releases, and that all storage pools for spent nuclear elements have been a lack of cooling. Long before the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station on March 11, the fabric of the so-called nuclear renaissance in the United States began to fray. The original goal of bringing two new reactors online by 2010 was missed; of more than two dozen projects that were considered, only two showed signs of progress and even this progress were uncertain. In 2008, the Energy Information Administration projected almost 17 gigawatts of new nuclear power reactors by 2030; in its 2011 projections, it scaled back the 2030 projection to just five (Adams, p41).

Before the Fukushima disaster, a combination of economic factors had derailed the renaissance in the United States: First, the projected cost of a new reactor had tripled in less than a decade (quadrupled, if Wall Street estimates of cost are correct). Second, the great recession had slowed demand growth so dramatically that the need for new reactors had been pushed off by a half decade or more. Third, energy alternatives like efficiency, renewable, and natural gas were increasingly more attractive and offered more power in small increments at stable or declining prices, proving to be better suited for a slow-growth economy. The failure of the United States to adopt climate change legislation meant that the cost of fossil fuels was not hit as harshly as the nuclear industry had hoped, thereby hurting the chance of making nuclear energy more attractive (Cooper, p8).

Fig. 1

Problems

The accident at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture (northern Japan) is already the worst it has experienced since the Chernobyl disaster (Ukraine) in 1986 and the problems are worse. The emergency cooling system of the reactor 3 has stopped working, as reported by an official of the Nuclear Safety Agency of Japan. This failure, unexpected, adds to the problems already suffered in the reactor 1 after the earthquake and tsunami that ravaged the country , listed by authorities as a Category . This amounts to an "accident consequences at the local," according to the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), which sets forth the maximum category. Only twice have been worst recorded accidents: it is the explosion in Chernobyl (category 7, "major accident") and the merger in 1979 of a reactor in the central U.S. Three Mile Island (Category 5 “accident with far-reaching consequences"). Agency Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety have reported that the number of people exposed to radiation after the explosion could have reached 160(Cooper, p8).

Fig. 2

After trying various means to try to cool the core, the government has said it will try to fill ...