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[20210306_LDD002_0]

The lessons of Fukushima
Nuclear power must be well regulated, not ditched

It is an essential weapon in the fight against climate change

LeadersMar 6th 2021 edition
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Mar 6th 2021

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IT HAS BEEN ten years since a tsunami laid waste the Pacific coast of
northern Honshu, Japan's most populous island. The tsunami and the
undersea earthquake which triggered it, the largest ever recorded in
the region, killed nearly 20,000 people, destroyed over 100,000 homes
and threw the lives of tens of millions into turmoil. The direct
economic cost, estimated at over $200bn, was larger than that of any
other natural disaster the world has seen. And yet for many around
the world the event is remembered for just one thing: the ensuing
crisis at the Fuku-shima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant (see article).

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The earthquake cut the plant off from outside sources of electricity.
The tsunami easily topped the plant's sea walls, flooding the
underground bunkers containing its emergency generators--a foreseeable
risk Japan's neutered regulators had failed to foresee. Because there
was no way to cool the reactor cores, the nuclear fuel within them
began to melt; amid fire, explosion and alarming amounts of
radiation, a puddle from hell began eating into the plant's concrete
foundations.

The world looked on aghast. In Shanghai and San Francisco iodine
tablets and iodised salt jumped off the shelves as people looked for
prophylaxis of which they had no need. In Germany the chancellor,
Angela Merkel, who had long stood with business leaders against the
country's powerful anti-nuclear movement, ordered its reactors phased
out. In China the world's largest new nuclear-plant programme was put
on hold. Talk of a "nuclear renaissance" to fight climate change fell
silent.

The reaction, though understandable, was wrong. Nuclear power has a
lot of drawbacks. Its large, slowly built plants are expensive both
in absolute terms and in terms of the electricity they produce. Its
very small but real risk of catastrophic failure requires a high
level of regulation, and it has a disturbing history of regulatory
capture, amply demonstrated in Japan. It produces extremely
long-lived and toxic waste. And it is associated with the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. Most of the countries outside
Europe that use nuclear power have some history of attempting to
develop a bomb. All these factors contribute to an unease with the
technology felt, to greater or lesser extent, by people all around
the world.

Against all that, though, two things must be remembered. One is that
well-regulated nuclear power is safe. With the terrible Soviet-era
exception of Chernobyl, nuclear disasters come without large death
tolls. It was the tsunami, not radiation, that claimed nearly all
those lives in Fukushima. The other is that the climate is in crisis,
and nuclear plants can supply some of the vast amounts of
emissions-free electricity the world needs if it is to cope. Solar
and wind power are now much cheaper, but they are intermittent.
Providing a reliable grid is a lot easier if some of its generating
capacity can be assumed to be available all the time. Nuclear
provides such capacity with no ongoing emissions, and it is doing so
safely and at scale around the world.

Despite this, safe and productive nuclear plants are being closed
across the rich world. Those closures and the retirement of older
sites mean that advanced economies could lose two-thirds of their
nuclear capacity by 2040, according to the International Energy
Agency. If new fossil-fuel infrastructure fills the gap, it will last
for decades. If renewables do so, the opportunity cost will be
measured in gigatonnes of carbon. Renewables replacing nuclear
capacity would almost always be better deployed to replace
fossil-fuel capacity.

Sometimes the closure of nuclear plants is largely a matter of
economics. In places where emitting carbon dioxide comes with no
price, such as America, the benefits of being emissions-free are
hidden from the market. That hurts nuclear, and it should be
rectified. When closure is political, the onus is on Green
politicians, in particular, to change their tune. To hasten the
decline of nuclear power is wilfully to hobble the world in the
greatest environmental struggle of all.

The argument for keeping existing nuclear plants open has been
strengthened, in some places, by one of the responses to Fukushima:
greater independence for nuclear regulators. Britain granted new
freedom to its regulator after 2011. So did Japan. Though grander
hopes for reform after the tsunami bore little fruit, Japan did
largely take the regulators' hand from the power companies' glove.
Its new supervisor has made reopening mothballed nuclear power plants
harder than the government would like, but that is as it should be.
In Japan more than anywhere, nuclear needs to earn back trust to be
useful.

This points to nuclear's greatest weakness. In democracies it is
expensive, owing to regulation and public antipathy, which makes new
nuclear power a hard sell. The technology is thus increasingly the
preserve of autocracies--precisely the systems where good regulation
is least likely. Having paused after Fukushima, China's nuclear plans
accelerated as part of an effort to reduce reliance on coal. China
produced four times as much nuclear energy in 2019 as it did in 2011;
it has 16 reactors under construction and another 39 planned.
Countries wanting new nuclear plants now look to China and Russia as
suppliers.

There is a strong case for democracies seeking to replace ageing
nuclear plants with non-intermittent equivalents to join the
importers. If Chinese reactors are designed in the knowledge that
they will have to meet with the approval of independent regulators
the world will be a safer place. At the same time, in boosting energy
R&D to tackle the climate crisis, Western governments should be sure
to give nuclear its fair share. There are real attractions to some
new approaches, notably smaller reactors with lower unit costs: in
platoons they can replace old plants; singly they can add incremental
capacity where needed. They might perhaps be used to retrofit old
fossil-fuel plants.

It's critical

Nuclear power has drawbacks the size of a tsunami. But with Chinese
plants being built today that will not be decommissioned until the
22nd century, it cannot simply be wished away. What is more, it has a
vital role to play in the fight for a stable climate. The lesson of
Fukushima is not to eschew nuclear power, it is to use it wisely. #

Dig deeper

The Fukushima disaster was not the turning point many had hoped (Mar
2021)
1843: After the tsunami: what happened to the girl from Fukushima?
(Mar 2021)

For more coverage of climate change, register for The Climate Issue,
our fortnightly newsletter, or visit our climate-change hub

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition
under the headline "The lessons of Fukushima"

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