Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Nuclear Energy
u
Introduction
.
This chapter of the
first edition was written before the
meltdown of three of the six reactors at the Fukushima
Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The failure was
caused by the earthquake and tsunami that occurred on
March
. All safety systems survived the earth-
quake itself and worked as designed until the tsunami
came over the seawall protecting the site
,
minutes later
and drowned out all the emergency power systems which
were located in the basements of the generator buildings.
Since Japan is regarded as one of the most technically
sophisticated countries of the world, there was concern
that if this could happen in Japan, perhaps nuclear energy
was too risky to use.
The Japanese Diet set up its own investigations com-
mittee which reported in the harshest language that
the accident was entirely human-caused, caused by what
we would call
where the regulators
come too close to the regulated and do not enforce the
rules properly [
“
regulatory capture
”
]. (This is the same situation which was
A disclosure
I am a member of the DOE Nuclear Energy Advisory
Committee and until mid-
-
chaired one of its subcommittees on
advanced systems. Until early
I was on the Board of Directors of
the US subsidiary of the French nuclear reactor builder, AREVA. I am
no longer af
liated with any nuclear energy company.
