'Our Most Dangerous Illusion Is that We Can Control Nuclear Energy'

[marmar]

from Der Spiegel:




In a SPIEGEL interview, peace activist and author Jonathan Schell discusses the lessons of the Fukushima disaster, mankind's false impression that it can somehow safely produce electricity from the atom, and why he thinks the partial meltdown in Japan could mark a turning point for the world.


SPIEGEL: Mr. Schell, what unsettled you the most about the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe?

Schell: Clearly this whole accident just went completely off the charts of what had been prepared for. If you look at the manuals for dealing with nuclear safety accidents, you're not going to find a section that says muster your military helicopters, dip buckets into the sea and then try as best you can to splash water onto the reactor and see if you can hit a spent fuel pool. There's going to be no instruction saying, go and get your riot control trucks to spray the reactor, only to find that you're driven back by radiation. The potential for total disaster was clearly demonstrated.

SPIEGEL: But supporters of nuclear energy are already preparing a different narrative. They say that an old, outdated nuclear power plant was hit by a monster tsunami and an earthquake at the same time -- and, yet, so far only a handful of people have been exposed to radioactive energy. Not a single person has died.

Schell: Clearly it's better than if you had had a massive Chernobyl-type release of energy. But I think that any reasonable analysis will show that this was not a power plant that was under control. The operators were thrown back on wild improvisation. The worst sort of disaster was a desperate mistake or two away. Through a bunch of workarounds and frantic fixes, technicians at Fukushima headed that off, but that was no sure thing. No one will be able honestly to portray this event as a model of nuclear safety. It would be like saying that the Cuban missile crisis showed the safety of nuclear arsenals. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,753777,00.html

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. We lost this one due to the business spin.

If you look at things purely on an economic basis...etc.

[Wilms]

2. I wonder if the "it was an old reactor" line will withstand scrutiny.

The tsunami swamped the back-up generators. Would a newer design have withstood that?

[Demeter]

3. What if it did?

there is no fool-proof nuclear reactor possible. Human error accounted for most of the accidents to date.

And we don't have a good way to repair the damage of even the smallest "accident".

A nuclear disaster is forever, contaminating for longer than the human genome can survive.

[Wilms]

4. I couldn't agree with you more.

And I think the disastrous decision with regard to back-up generator placement, a seemingly simple matter, underscores your assessment that, "...we don't have a good way to repair the damage of even the smallest "accident"".

Your last sentence points out the most chilling issue. It further leads to the question of whether or not a future civilization would be able to deal with long-abandoned sites. Given that the current civilization that foisted this folly on the planet can't deal with it, the idea that future science will fix it is just this side of hallucination.

As you say..."human error". Who could have foreseen that?!