Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
are either unqualifi ed for their jobs or badly trained. In Tokaimura, for
example, the workers who inadvertently caused the uranium they were
handling to ignite in a blue fl ash did not know what criticality is. Accord-
ing to a scholar at Tsuda College in Tokyo, 90 percent of the workers
in the nuclear power industry are “temporary employees who work at
plants for one to three months at a time. These people are mostly
farmers, fi sherman, or day laborers seeking to supplement their incomes.
Some of them are homeless.”
18
Chernobyl
The Chernobyl event spread radioactivity from northern Ukraine over
nearly all of Europe in 1986, an expanse that is about 5 percent of the
world's land area. Heavy doses of radiation spread from 200 miles east
of Moscow westward to Scotland, and from northern Norway and
Sweden in the north to Greece in the south. Greenpeace has estimated
that 270,000 cases of cancer will eventually be attributable to Chernobyl
radiation and that 93,000 of them are likely to be fatal. Other investiga-
tors have estimated deaths at only a few thousand. There have been
unusually high numbers of physical abnormalities and birth defects in
people living in the vicinity of Chernobyl. The true cost of the disaster
will not be known for many decades, if ever. That disaster was a clear
illustration that a nuclear accident anywhere can be a nuclear accident
everywhere, unlike accidents with other forms of alternative energy. The
collapse of a wind turbine, the fracture of solar panels, or the corrosion
of a wave energy apparatus does not endanger humanity's survival.
Statistical Safety
Clearly safety is a major concern in the operation of a nuclear power
plant. Major malfunctions or accidents are rare, but how rare is “rare”?
In the United States, there have been no immediate radiological injuries
or deaths among the public attributable to accidents involving nuclear
power reactors, although there may be injuries or deaths from latent
cancers in people who live near operating reactors. A team of experts
concluded in their 2007 report, “A severe accident at a nuclear power
plant is both physically and statistically possible for existing plants, for
plant designs under consideration in the near term, and for advanced
designs.”
19
How does one evaluate the probability of a rare but possible event?
High-probability events such as automobile accidents or cancer occur-
rences can be analyzed using actuarial data, as insurance companies do.
