Keeping fingers crossed since Friday hasn't helped avoid nuclear troubles in Japan. After Friday's 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake and the following tsunami, a few nuclear reactors lost power, and the cooling systems failed. The facts here are elusive, but we know that pumping sea water into the reactors to cool them as is happening is a sign that normal fail-safe mechanisms have failed (this renders the reactor useless in future).
In risk management terms, we are looking at a low probability, high impact event. That is, this event was not very likely. Indeed, the earthquake was the worst since Japan started keeping records 140 years ago. Earthquakes in Japan are common, but one of this magnitude is exceedingly rare.
At the same time, when the laws of probability kick in and an event like this does occur, the impact is immense – as we have seen on our TVs all week-end. And this is what we need to consider when as more than 300 new nuclear plants are due to be built around the world in the next decade or so.
Two factors enter into these calculations: the requirements for the plant's construction and maintenance, and enforcement of those requirements. Japan has been lax in both of these.
In yesterday's Times (Mr. Murdoch's from London, not the Manhattan paper), David Leppard wrote about this (unfortunately, it's behind Rupert's pay wall, so I can't link to it for you). Mr. Leppard reports that Professor Ishibashi Katsuhiko of Kobe University said three years ago that the seismic guidelines for Japan's power plants were “still seriously flawed.”
For instance, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant (about 200 miles away from where things are currently in partial meltdown) experienced a quake with ground motion of 993 gal (a measurement of ground movement named after Galileo). It was designed for only 450 gal.
Honest mistakes like that happen, but Japan's nuclear industry has been deceptive over the years. Reuters says, “Revelations from 2007 that the utilities had regularly doctored safety records were a repeat of a 2002 scandal that brought public apologies from Tokyo Electric, the resignation of its chairman and president, and a government shutdown of all 17 of the company’s reactors. The utility said in that year it had falsified reports on power plant repairs for two decades.”
This incident is going to make building new plants more difficult politically. Proponents of nuclear power need to get out ahead of the curve here to do address plant guidelines and enforcement. No doubt, we'll be talking about this for some years to come.