Source: Jane's Intelligence Review
After the Shock - Implications of the Japanese NucThe effects of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Japan on 11 March will continue to be felt for many years, not least in the country's nuclear industry. The earthquake sparked a tsunami, with 14 m-high waves crashing into the country's northeast coast. Directly in the line of the waves were several of the country's nuclear power stations, including those at Fukushima, Onagawa and Tokai, with the impact being felt most strongly at Fukushima.
Although the plants had been designed to withstand earthquakes, it was the impact of the tsunami that led to the disaster. At Fukushima, the waves overwhelmed protective seawalls and destroyed the plant's back-up power systems, at the same time that the main electricity grid was knocked out, leading the crucial cooling system to fail as the plant's nuclear reactors began to overheat.
Three of the plant's six nuclear reactors began suffering severe fuel damage, while fires broke out at a fourth and a 20 km evacuation zone was established around the plant following the release of radiation. The radiation leak was first assessed at level four out of seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale, before being raised to level five on 18 March and then level seven on 12 April.
The crisis, which began on 11 March at Fukushima Daiichi, is the third severe nuclear power plant accident since the world began generating electricity by fissioning uranium a half-century ago. The first two - at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979 and at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986 - resulted from errors in judgment committed by operating personnel. However, the accident in Japan was caused by extreme natural forces. That difference will loom large in how safety regulators, government decision makers, investors and populations assess the events at Fukushima and then take decisions about the future of their domestic nuclear industries.
IAEA baseline
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is scheduled to convene a ministerial-level conference from 20-24 June to begin the work of co-ordinating the global response to the Fukushima nuclear crisis. Although at the time of going to press the agenda of the meeting had not yet been finalised, in all likelihood its most important item will be to set forth an account of events in the aftermath of the earthquake, the first step towards establishing a technical baseline to enable safety experts to draw conclusions and make any recommendations.
The degree to which global nuclear development may be set back by the incident will largely depend on the information revealed during the IAEA ministerial meeting and succeeding investigations. If it is demonstrated that the reactor owner, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), had fully co-operated with Japanese regulators in anticipating a severe accident at the plant, and that both parties battled as effectively as possible to mitigate the accident under the extreme conditions of the earthquake aftermath, then governments and the nuclear industry worldwide will be more likely to limit the scope of post-Fukushima consequences to protecting installations against station blackouts caused by tsunamis and other such natural disasters. Whether investigators conclude that, in contrast to the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents, the Fukushima crisis is of limited relevance to most of the world's nuclear power plants may depend on whether they identify hitherto unknown threats, which could result in the loss of a nuclear power plant's electricity supply. It will take months and perhaps even several years before the Fukushima accident is completely understood and the implications fully assessed.
If investigations reveal that TEPCO failed to heed safety authorities' warnings in anticipating a severe accident, or that industry and regulators did not effectively respond to the 11 March earthquake and tsunami, or that safety was not the highest priority, the political damage to the international nuclear industry will be considerable. Should it be shown that flawed human judgments at Fukushima - as in the two previous serious nuclear accidents - significantly magnified the risk of a radiological catastrophe, some electorates and decision-makers may conclude, as they did in 1979 and 1986, that the greatest nuclear power risks are not posed by the engineering systems themselves but by the people who are responsible for operating and managing them, making the risk of nuclear power potentially too great to accept.
At this point, such a conclusion appears far from inevitable. The accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl galvanised the world's attention largely because they were dramatic events that unfolded over the period of just a few hours. At Fukushima, by contrast, it appears that three reactor cores suffered serious damage and radiation was released into the environment over a period of several weeks. While the longer horizon has given Japan more time to mitigate the disaster, a protracted crisis will result in greater loss of public confidence in the world's nuclear power industry.
With these events still in the balance, government responses in most nuclear power-generating countries have been relatively measured. Governments regulating most of the world's nuclear power plants - including Canada, China, India, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, the US and all 14 nuclear power-generating countries in the EU - have announced that the plants on their territories will be re-evaluated for any vulnerabilities that emerge from the forthcoming analysis of the Fukushima crisis. In a few cases - China, Italy and Switzerland - approvals for construction of new reactors have been put on hold.
Chinese hiatus
Prior to the Fukushima crisis, approximately half of the world's new nuclear reactor construction was taking place in China. Over the last two decades, China has brought about 11 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear capacity into operation and about 30 GW is currently under construction.
Shortly after the Fukushima crisis began, China's State Council of Ministers announced that it would continue its new nuclear building programme but would suspend any new approvals for additional reactors. In light of the Japanese disaster, officials in China's electricity planning sector said that Beijing's expectations that installed nuclear capacity would reach 90 GW in 2020 would be reduced by about 10 GW.
These decisions may prompt China to shift its nuclear construction from older to newer designs; a change which could benefit Westinghouse Electric Company, a US reactor vendor now majority owned by Toshiba in Japan.
The Fukushima accident was triggered by the tsunami, which knocked out emergency power supplies needed to drive pumps injecting cooling water into the cores of three ageing reactors. According to Westinghouse, its new AP1000 pressurised water reactor (PWR) is designed to cope with such an emergency without such power-driven systems, as it features a large tank filled with three days' supply of cooling water located above the reactor's steel containment vessel, which uses gravity to feed cooling water to the reactor. Additional back-up sources have been designed to provide an additional seven days' supply of cooling water.
In 2006, China selected the AP1000 as the template for its future nuclear power development in preference to French energy giant Areva's European pressurised reactor (EPR) design and a Russian model. However, China has since modified this plan, having realised it cannot build the untried AP1000 fast enough to meet the country's surging demand for electricity. Instead, China has been largely filling the gap by replicating an older 1,000 megawatt (MW) French-designed reactor that China first set up in the early 1990s and now calls the CPR-1000.
As a result of the Fukushima crisis, China may change its tack again and halt plans, now under consideration, to build eight additional CPR-1000 reactors. China may also revise plans to build some of the 18 CPR-1000s that Chinese planners have approved for construction since 2006.
If China shifts towards the AP1000, or perhaps also decides to add Areva's EPR to its future plans, doing so will significantly slow down its nuclear drive. China is in the early stages of setting up manufacturing infrastructure for the AP1000. So far, China plans on building only two EPRs. Furthermore, the momentary hiatus in China's nuclear development planning triggered by the Fukushima crisis may be prolonged beyond 2011, because the first AP1000s will not be finished until 2014.
Beijing might proceed with caution in accelerating construction of more modern reactors given that Areva's maiden EPR, under construction in Finland, has suffered a four-year delay and cost overruns, according to a statement by Areva in June 2010.
The Fukushima crisis has given China pause for thought about its aggressive nuclear expansion plans. However, if the central government is serious about shrinking its carbon footprint - China is the world's greatest emitter of atmospheric CO 2 from electricity production - Beijing is unlikely to dramatically change course, especially as the country's demand for electricity continues to grow.
Asia's dilemma
Developed countries in Asia face a similar challenge to that of China. South Korea's current national electricity plan to 2024 calls for an additional 13 reactors, representing about 18 GW in capacity. Such an expansion would push the nuclear share of South Korea's power generation from its present 30% to about 50%. As in China, the drivers in South Korea are energy demand and climate change.
For the same reasons, Japan's decision makers and wider population have not responded to the nuclear crisis unfolding in their country by pressing for a radical reorientation of the country's energy policy. Japan's 55 reactors - a number exceeded only by the US and France - generate about one quarter of its electricity, and the Japanese population since the beginning of the last decade has been coping with power shortages owing to unplanned reactor outages, including at TEPCO's seven-unit Kashiwazaki-Kariwa site, which was knocked out by a severe earthquake in 2007.
Before the Fukushima crisis, Japan had made ambitious plans to add nuclear capacity, with eight reactors scheduled for completion by around 2022 and 14 to be set up by 2030. At least some of these will be built, although TEPCO is not likely to expand the stricken Fukushima Daiichi site. As a greater percentage of the population is now critical of the country's nuclear power programme than before the accident, Japan's utility companies - particularly TEPCO - can expect significant local resistance to new reactor construction.
Japan's utility companies may be tempted to limit local resistance by squeezing more reactors onto existing sites. However, such a strategy would be contrary to one of the lessons TEPCO learned from the shutdown at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in 2007 and at Fukushima in March: if a serious event happens at a site containing a number of reactors, all of them may be crippled.
TEPCO's risk
Political uncertainty surrounding the future of Japan's nuclear programme will increase if it is found that the actions and judgments of decision makers in industry and government contributed to the crisis at Fukushima. That would certainly rekindle public and political opposition to TEPCO's and Japan's nuclear power initiatives, including plans to relicense older reactors and build new ones. TEPCO has plans to build three new reactors with construction beginning as early as 2012. Beyond the six reactors at the beleaguered Fukushima Daiichi site, the next TEPCO reactor will face relicensing in 2022. Four reactors owned by other utility companies will also come up for relicensing decisions between 2012 and 2015. Japan's nuclear history has been punctuated by a series of comparatively minor mishaps and events that suggested deficiencies in oversight independence and a reluctance to assign personal accountability or acknowledge personal failure. In 2002, TEPCO top management, followed by that at other Japanese utilities, acknowledged to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency that personnel had systematically falsified data reported to regulators at its nuclear power plants. In most cases, the falsifications did not involve matters that were safety-significant, but were committed by personnel seeking to avoid what they deemed to be excessively bureaucratic regulatory procedures.
Changes will almost certainly be forthcoming in Japan's regulatory environment as the result of the Fukushima crisis, with state-led investigations potentially revealing problems in the relationship between overseers and industry. In the run-up to the IAEA conference, some of the participating diplomats have warned that if the IAEA is too eager to establish a global response to the accident, it may deter Japan from making necessary changes to its nuclear strategy and regulations.
Nuclear newcomers reconsider
In the vicinity of the 'ring of fire' - the seismically active and tsunami-prone Pacific coasts of Asia and the Americas - a number of states have been considering plans to build their first power reactors, including Bangladesh, Chile, Ecuador, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. All told, the events at Fukushima will probably set back the fledgling nuclear ambitions of perhaps two dozen states but not only because seismic safety has re-emerged as a critical issue for political and public acceptance of nuclear power generation.
After wrestling with the accident for four weeks, TEPCO announced in late April that it may require another nine months before the site is brought fully under control. Without Japan's extensive experience in operating and managing nuclear reactors, and its logistical and emergency preparedness capabilities, the accident sequence at Fukushima might have reached a worst-case outcome within just a few days.
In some cases, foreign governments and vendor firms solicited by nuclear newcomers will make sure that these lessons are imparted to countries that lack expertise, infrastructure and experience in managing complex and risk-laden industrial engineering projects. Many of these countries are likely to give up or defer their near-term nuclear power ambitions. Peru announced after the accident that it would not develop nuclear power; Thailand that it would make contingency plans should it drop its nuclear energy project; and Egypt asked the IAEA to review steps it has taken. However, so far most countries have said little or nothing publicly so as not to close off a future nuclear energy option. A few, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, have vowed to keep their planned nuclear deployments on track.
Policy implications
Among advanced, industrialised countries that currently generate nuclear power, the Fukushima crisis has not yet significantly affected national nuclear programmes. The one exception is Germany, where the pro-nuclear government reversed its policy and decided to quickly phase out its 17 nuclear power reactors only a few months after having agreed to extend the operating life of its seven oldest units.
Germany has become a deeply anti-nuclear country but its example is unlikely to be followed by its nuclear power-generating neighbours in Europe for the same reasons that have encouraged the technology in Asia: rising energy demand, concern about energy security and the mitigation of climate change.
The Netherlands, which operates a single 38-year-old power reactor, announced amid the Fukushima crisis that it will construct two new reactors; a decision which would have been politically unthinkable after the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disasters. Even in Germany, anti-nuclear Social Democrats are uncertain about the conservative government's resolve to shut down the reactors, which currently generate about half of the country's base load electricity. The chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, told a German newspaper on 19 April that it cannot proceed unless Germany constructs eight to 10 new coal-burning power stations. Yet building still more coal-fired plants would not be possible, he said, because emission certificates in Europe's carbon trading regime would then be too expensive.
Also in response to the Fukushima crisis, in March Germany ordered its seven oldest reactors shut down for a three-month moratorium. Any decision to restart the reactors will lead to renewed debate about the safety of the ageing units which, like Fukushima's, were originally designed in the 1960s.
It is not clear whether the post-Fukushima discussion of external threats to nuclear installations will be extended beyond tsunamis and earthquakes to include analysis of other extreme events such as terrorist attacks. Should that happen, some older reactors in Western countries may not be relicensed and could even be shut down.
In the US, the Fukushima crisis may reinforce Wall Street's reluctance to assume the risk of nuclear power plant investment but it is unlikely to have a dramatic impact on new building, which has already been curtailed by an unfavourable economic climate. The regulatory environment in the US will probably become more difficult for owners of existing plants, as reactor relicensing and plans to increase the power ratings of select reactors may be reconsidered.
At the onset of the Fukushima crisis, 20 reactors in the US were under consideration for licence renewal and power rating increases above 10% were foreseen for 12 units. Attention can be expected to be focused on 23 boiling water reactors (BWRs) in the US, which have a so-called Mark-I containment system, the design featured at all three Fukushima Daiichi BWRs. It is likely that at least some Mark-I reactors will come under political pressure to be shut down. This may also be the case for nine BWRs with Mark-I containments currently operating outside the US, including two in India where regulators between 2000 and 2005 reassessed the ageing risks of the plants and then permitted the BWRs to keep operating.
Technological debates
The Fukushima crisis will also focus attention on the dangers posed by the storage of spent nuclear fuel in pools at reactor sites worldwide. When the damage at the Fukushima reactors spread to spent-fuel pools at the site in mid-March, Chinese utility top management immediately considered setting up dry cask storage to remove spent fuel from wet pools and away from the reactors. However, China's official policy is to reprocess spent fuel and recycle the plutonium separated from it. Debate over how best to mitigate spent fuel risks is likely to be revived not only in China but also in Japan, South Korea and the US.
Both before and after the accident, the nuclear industry asserted that the safety record of existing light water reactors (LWRs) - both PWRs and BWRs - has withstood the test of time. Nevertheless, because the damaged Fukushima reactors, after 40 years of operation, were well understood and considered safe, some regulators and investors might more seriously consider other reactor concepts on the basis of their safety features.
Some observers have advocated a shift from the LWR to the high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor (HTR), a design originally built in Germany, which uses pebble-type fuel and can include passive safety features to obviate emergency power supply systems in the case of an accident. Yet all the HTRs ever built - in China, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US -were comparatively small reactors. Only two of these, in China and Japan, are still operating, and the operating and decommissioning experience over several decades has shown that the HTR is not without its own unique technology and safety challenges. China 10 years ago built a tiny pilot HTR north of Beijing but when Chinese design engineers were tasked to greatly increase the reactor size to make future HTRs commercially attractive for power generation, they sacrificed some passive safety features to accommodate the larger reactor core.
The Fukushima crisis will generate commercially motivated debates about the comparative safety of PWR versus BWR reactor types. However, it is exceedingly unlikely that LWRs - the most common technological family of nuclear reactors in operation worldwide - will be abandoned as a consequence of the accident.
Conclusion
Unlike the two serious accidents that occurred at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the accident at Fukushima was caused by an extreme natural event beyond the plant's design basis. There will be questions as to whether that design basis was miscalculated and if so, why. If it is demonstrated that human factors did not significantly contribute to the accident, governments and industry may succeed in limiting the negative impact from the accident on nuclear programmes worldwide.
The political fallout from the accident in Japan and other countries that heed public opinion will be magnified if it is revealed that actions by Japanese industry and authorities increased the risk of a catastrophic radiological accident at Fukushima.
After Fukushima, most countries that already generate nuclear power will continue with their nuclear programmes. Their regulators will probably make adjustments in emergency preparedness and accident management to better protect against tsunamis, earthquakes and perhaps other external events, including terrorist attacks. Some older reactors will be shut down and some others may not be permitted to be relicensed for extended operation. A number of developing countries that had made plans to deploy power reactors before the accident will probably defer these ambitions.
The measured response by nearly all governments to the accident so far might imply no major shifts in the global use of nuclear power, in light of the goals of climate change mitigation and meeting energy demand, which were not in sharp focus at the time of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. However, while investigations may find no major design flaw or human error, it will be harder to convince electorates than industry and government officials. With the images of Japan's nuclear disaster fresh in the memory, it may become politically more difficult for governments to convince their electorates that the benefits of nuclear power are worth the perceived risk.