Japan Scrambles to Avert Nuclear Catastrophe

A day after Japan was hit by a double blow a monster earthquake followed by a killer tsunami the full extent of death and destruction is still unclear. By 8 a.m. Tokyo time on Sunday, the official toll was 686 people dead, 1,128 injured and 784 missing, but those figures are expected to rise dramatically in coming days. One town, Minamisanriku, had about 10,000 people unaccounted for. Meanwhile, a crippled nuclear reactor was being flooded with sea water mixed with boron, an emergency replacement for regular coolant. One concerned U.S. expert called the effort "a Hail Mary pass." The sea water appears to have been brought in as a substitute for the regular water used as coolant for the uranium fuel rods at the heart of the reactor. The combination of earthquake and tsunami appears to have knocked out both the on-site electrical generators and off-site ones used to pump in the water hence the move to flood the reactor with sea water, which is in plentiful supply from the relatively close-by coast. The failure of both generators is technically called a "station blackout" scenario, says physicist Ken Bergeron at a teleconference of nuclear safety experts in Washington D.C. The scenario, he says, was low probability and highly unlikely. The reported presence of Cesium 127 was disturbing, experts agreed, because it was evidence that the core had overheated, if only for a portion of time. The radioactive debris is produced when the core is exposed above the coolant water level and overheats. One of the other potential by-products of such overheating is hydrogen. Hydrogen is believed to be the cause of the blast at Fukushima. How bad might it get? According to Bergeron, the physicist, if the core does melt, you could have containment failure in less than a day, exposing the core to the external environment. In this scenario, the only thing that could be done would be to entomb the melted core in sand and cement, much as was done in Chernobyl. Said Bergeron, "A lot of first responders will die." Chernobyl rendered an area half-the-size of New Jersey uninhabitable. Meanwhile, much of northeastern Japan, which was hardest-hit, is still under water, and entire neighborhoods have been buried by mud and debris. Damage in the biggest city in the region, Sendai, which has a population of about 1 million, has yet to be properly assessed. Four trains plying coastal routes have disappeared. Search and rescue efforts have been hampered by collapsed and blocked highways and roads. Food and water are scarce, and countless numbers of people are stranded and without heat and power. Tokyo's airports are still closed. On-the-ground reports from the badly affected areas are few and incomplete. U.S. President Barack Obama called the quake a 'potentially catastrophic disaster' and pledged military and other assistance. U.S. military units based in Japan offered to participate in rescue operations and other humanitarian missions should the Japanese government ask for help. The U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet is based near Tokyo. Some 50 other nations said they were standing by to help if needed. It will take time for Japan to weigh the full economic implications of the disaster. Earthquakes tend to have less impact on

major economies than first expected. The areas badly hit on Friday are less economically important than the coastal industrial zones that suffered greatly after the 1995 Kobe earthquake. But the disaster could create even more uncertainty about Japan's recovery from its worst postwar recession. Says Richard Jerram, chief Asia economist of the Macquarie Group: "The fragile economic cycle is not in a position to withstand significant disruption." Koichi and Yukiko Fujii, an elderly couple now living in Tokyo, were residents of Kobe when the quake hit there. "Kobe was terrifying but this one in Tokyo was a lot worse," says Yukiko. Koichi turned 85 on Friday. "This is quite a birthday present ... I have lived through World War II, and two of the worst earthquakes in Japan's history. I sure hope this is it for a while." Sadly, for Japan and its people, the suffering is far from over.

THE NEWS WEEK

The Prospect for Safe Nuclear Power
Fukushima has cast a pall over the industry, just as new designs are showing promise of making reactors far safer. Will fear bring progress to a halt or stimulate demand for smarter solutions?
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. First the accident, then the predictable allegations in the postmortem: The design was flawed. Inspections were inadequate. Lines of defense crumbled, and reliable backups proved unreliable. Planners lacked the imagination or willpower to prepare for the very worst There's a way to break out of this pattern. Nuclear power plants will never be completely safe, but they can be made far safer than they are today. The key is humility. The next generation of plants must be built to work with natureand human naturerather than against them. They must be safe by design, so that even if every possible thing goes wrong, the outcome will stop short of disaster. In the language of the nuclear industry, they must be "walkaway safe," meaning that even if all power is lost and the coolant leaks and the operators flee the scene, there will be no meltdown of the core, no fire in the spent fuel rods, and no bursts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere. For inspiration, consider the manhole. If manholes were square, a cover that got jounced around by a passing vehicle could fall diagonally through the open hole. That's why manholes aren't squarethey're round, because no matter how you rotate a round cover, it can never fall through a round hole. The solution is brilliant in its simplicity, and cheaper than hiring armies of inspectors to go around making sure square covers are correctly aligned on square holes.

The beginnings of manhole wisdom are incorporated into new nuclear power plants now under construction in China, India, and probably soon in the U.S. The plants use "passive" safety features, a label that sounds underwhelming until you consider its implications. Passive means that the reactor's safety doesn't depend on active interventions, such as operators flipping the correct switches or sensors and actuators working properly. The safety depends, rather, on physics. The new Westinghouse AP1000 (the AP stands for Advanced Passive), for example, has a huge emergency water reservoir above the reactor vessel that's held back by valves. If the cooling system fails, the valves open and a highly reliable force takes over: gravity. Water pours down to cool the outside of the containment vessel. Then another highly reliable force, convection, kicks in. As the water turns to steam, it rises. Then it cools under the roof, turns back into a liquid, and pours down again. Westinghouse estimates that the pool contains enough water to last three days, after which pumps operated by diesel generators are supposed to kick in and add water from an on-site lake. This isn't an idea on the drawing board. Westinghouse, which is majority owned by Japan's Toshiba, is about halfway to completion of one of the plants at Sanmen in China's Zhejiang province. It's supposed to go online in 2013. In Vogtle, Ga., excavation and non-safety-related construction has begun for two AP1000 reactors. Southern Co. (SO), the largest utility in the U.S. by market capitalization, has 1,400 workers on the site and is expecting a combined construction and operating license for them later this year. France's Areva, a General Electric (GE)-Hitachi (HIT) venture, and others are lined up behind Westinghouse in getting Nuclear Regulatory Commission certification for their own new, safer designs. Critics continue to argue that there will never be a truly safe nuclear power plant, and it's true: Any time you split atoms, there's risk. But nuclear plants have one thing going for them that hasn't changed since the leak at Fukushima. They generate badly needed electricity without creating greenhouse gases that cause global warming. As long as nukes are going to be part of the world's energy mix, it makes sense to have the safest ones possible.