Chapter Seven
Nuclear Nations

THE CATASTROPHE AT Fukushima generated immediate environmental concern. Japan was offered technical advice about containing the situation from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Meteorological Organisation, and the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation, whose radiation-detection equipment is deployed around the world. Many countries that sent emergency aid, including pharmaceuticals to counter radiation, simultaneously advised their nationals to leave Tokyo. Some governments temporarily relocated their Tokyo embassies to southern Japan. Authorities in Moscow said they were ready to evacuate Russian inhabitants from the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin (adjacent to northern Japan) if need be. Stock prices of energy companies that were reliant on nuclear power dropped, and in some countries demand for renewable-energy systems soared.

Non-government organisations quickly expressed their own environmental anxieties. On 29 March 2011, the independent World Future Council, based in Hamburg, called on the global community to exercise much more care in dealing with technologies capable of causing mass annihilation, and to phase out, abolish, and replace them with alternatives that would not threaten present and future generations. Environmental activists at a United Nations conference in April 2011 ‘urged bolder steps to tap renewable energy so the world doesn’t have to choose between the dangers of nuclear power and the ravages of climate change.’

How much weight do such sentiments carry with the international nuclear industry, or among communities that support it? Before answering this question, it is important to run a reality check on the state of the industry.

Before Fukushima, the international nuclear lobby was predicting a sudden surge in demand for nuclear power in response to global warming. This ‘nuclear renaissance’ would involve increasingly sophisticated nuclear reactors replacing fossil-fuelled power plants to satisfy an ever-increasing demand for electricity. What the lobby usually avoided acknowledging, however, was that for several years nuclear power had been slowly contracting as a percentage of global electricity generation — a contraction that the nuclear industry had been unable to arrest. One of the most authoritative accounts of this trend is Nuclear Power in a Post-Fukushima World: 25 years after the Chernobyl accident. Written by three scientific researchers (Mycle Schneider, Antony Froggat, and Steve Thomas), Nuclear Power was commissioned by the independent Washington-based Worldwatch Institute and published in Paris, Berlin, and Washington in April 2011.

The report found that the global ‘fleet’ of power reactors was ageing rapidly, and that not enough new ones would come online to replace them as they were decommissioned. As of 1 April 2011, 437 reactors operated around the world, seven fewer than in 2002. Of these, 143 were operating in the European Union, down from a maximum of 177 units in 1989. The failure to construct replacement reactors was linked to grid suitability, high capital costs, long start-up times, scarcity of expertise and specialised materials, lack of public support because of safety concerns, and, increasingly, technical problems with reactor fleets, especially in some of the larger nuclear countries. Between 2008 and 2009, electricity generation by nuclear means declined in four of the ‘big six’ countries — France, Germany, Japan, and the United States. World nuclear electricity production fell for the third straight year in a row, generating 103 terawatt hours (nearly 4 per cent) less power than in 2006.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is chartered to support the growth of peaceful nuclear power. Part of its brief is to list the number of nuclear reactors under construction worldwide — currently a total of 64 in 14 countries. But this is a puny number compared to the peak of the industry’s growth in 1979, when 233 reactors were being built concurrently. In 2008, for the first time since the beginning of the nuclear age, no new units were started up, while only two were added in 2009, five in 2010, and two in 2011. Moreover, considerable ambiguity exists about what ‘under construction’ means: 12 of the 64 have been ‘under construction’ for more than 20 years; 35 do not have an official (IAEA) start-up date; many have encountered significant construction delays; and nearly three-quarters of the units (47) are located in just four countries: China, India, Russia, and South Korea.

Schneider, Froggat, and Thomas show that it is not a downhill slide everywhere, and that some countries are indeed increasing nuclear electricity generation — the most active being South Korea, China, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Russia. Some countries have also shown remarkable efficiency in nuclear-power production. Those with the most consistent nuclear-power load factors, at least before Fukushima, were South Korea (90.3 per cent), Russia (78.3 per cent), France (70.6 per cent), Japan (66.2 per cent), and Germany (69.5 per cent). In contrast, other countries such as Italy, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Armenia, Switzerland, and — after Fukushima — Germany are phasing out nuclear power.

The overall decline of nuclear power seems certain to accelerate. The average age of the world’s operating nuclear plants is 26 years. Some nuclear utilities envisage extended reactor lifetimes of 40 years or more, which is optimistic given that — of the 130 units which have already closed — the average age of a reactor is 22 years. But assuming that the average extended lifetime per remaining reactor is 40 years, 18 new reactors would have to be built and commissioned in the next decade to replace them, in addition to units presently under construction. This corresponds to one grid connection every three months, with an additional 191 units in the following decade — one every 19 days. The inescapable conclusion is that it will be impossible to maintain, let alone increase, the number of operating nuclear plants in the next 20 years. A recent example of the difficulties involved was with the third Olkiluoto reactor in Finland, still under construction many years after its planned completion date. Construction of the unit is being managed by the French company Areva, one of the largest and most-experienced reactor-construction companies in the world. Even with such expertise behind it, the project has become a financial fiasco — four years behind schedule and at least 90 per cent over budget, reaching an estimated total cost of €5.7 billion (AU$8.2 billion), or close to AU$5000 per kilowatt. Nobody knows what the final cost will be.

Schneider, Froggat, and Thomas observe that, in contrast, electricity generated by renewable technology has been outpacing nuclear start-ups for 15 years. In 2010, for the first time, the worldwide installed capacity of wind turbines (193 gigawatts), biomass and waste-to-energy plants (65 gigawatts), and solar power (43 gigawatts) reached 301 GW, not much short of the total installed nuclear capacity of 375 GW prior to the Fukushima disaster.

How has the catastrophe at Fukushima Dai-ichi affected other countries’ attitudes to nuclear power?

The Chinese leadership acknowledges the heavy interdependence between China and Japan, including how events in Japan can spark public reaction among the Chinese. Consequently, although Premier Wen Jiabao offered assistance to victims of the tsunami and nuclear accident, and visited Fukushima in late May 2011, the Chinese leadership was quick to play down any danger of fallout from Fukushima, or the possibility that an earthquake could cause a similar nuclear accident in China: it claimed that its 11 existing reactors only began to come online in 1991, and that they and another 20 under construction (40 per cent of total reactors under construction worldwide) were of a much more advanced design than the 1970s-era reactors at Fukushima.

Such reassurances did not calm the nerves of the Chinese public. In several major cities in late-March 2011, people rushed to buy iodised salt in the hope of counteracting the harmful effects of radiation. Meanwhile, the leadership held an emergency State Council meeting in Beijing at which it made three decisions: to halt plans to build any more reactors over and above the 20 under construction; to re-examine the safety of those 20 and stop work on them if they had design weaknesses; and to enhance safety measures applying to the existing fleet of 11 operating reactors. Chinese newspapers were also for the first time permitted to publish a map outlining the names and locations of all existing nuclear power plants throughout the country, as well as plants under construction, and those proposed.

Even with such new regulations and transparency, worries continued about the quality and location of nuclear reactors in China. Investigations in early 2011 of structural concrete crumbling in the immense Number Three Qiantang Bridge in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, found the same shoddy ‘tofu construction’ that had weakened the integrity of other major building projects across the country. Substandard construction of school classrooms (too much sand, and too little cement) caused enormous loss of life in earthquakes in 2008 in western China. Could China’s nuclear reactors be subject to similar blight? And in the rush to build them, have some reactors been constructed in dangerous places? For example, was the Hongyanhe reactor complex, in Dalian’s Wafangdian area of Liaoning Peninsula, built too close to an earthquake fault line? The area has a crowded population in a polluted environment, and is close to nuclear plants in Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Its location would make any large-scale evacuation in the event of a serious nuclear accident very difficult. And do Chinese reactors built on inland river systems have adequate emergency cooling water if prolonged drought lowers river levels? The Wangjiang district government in Anhui province was one of the first to challenge the construction of a reactor on safety grounds. According to Agence France-Presse, the challenge was made in February 2012. Others may follow.

Despite growing concerns of municipal governments and private citizens, the consensus of informed observers, including environmentalist Wen Bo, is that the Chinese leadership is unlikely to halt the construction program for new nuclear reactors for long, although it might be more circumspect about where it builds them.

South Korea has one of the most proactive nuclear programs in the world. With 21 power reactors clustered in four centres around the crowded peninsula — one on the south-west coast, and three along the east coast — it has plans to construct a further 11 reactors by 2021, bringing the proportion of electricity generated by nuclear means to 56 per cent. The nation’s ambitious research program includes nuclear-waste disposal and fast-breeder technology, backed up by various experimental reactors. Its export program aims to win construction contracts for 80 reactors by 2030. By 2010, South Korea had already secured a contract to build a research reactor in Jordan. It also beat the French company Areva in securing a contract for four advanced pressurised-water reactors in the United Arab Emirates. It was simultaneously pursuing sales prospects in Turkey, Indonesia, India, China, and Malaysia.

Given intense industrial rivalry between Japan and Korea, and Korea’s memories of the hated Japanese colonial period, a degree of schadenfreude may have coloured Korean responses to the disaster at Fukushima. Nonetheless, the government sent Japan fire-retarding boron additives for emergency cooling water, and gave other assistance. An outsider with no access to current diplomatic cable traffic can only speculate about whether Korean authorities debated their own nuclear vulnerability. My guess is that legislators are more concerned about a possible North Korean attack on South Korean reactors than about damage from earthquakes. Nevertheless, some recent tension was detected in the Korean legislature as opposition members drew attention to the fact that Korean reactors were only designed to withstand an earthquake of 6.5 on the Richter scale, and called for reconsideration of the national reactor-building plan. Adding urgency to opposition arguments was the disclosure of a power blackout in February 2012 at the Gori power plant in northern Busan. It emerged that the power station had operated for nearly ten days without any operating backup cooling systems. This could have led to a catastrophe similar to Fukushima. But as this book goes to press, the Korean debate continues to be without much heat, and no motions have been seriously debated in parliament to halt the operations of existing reactors by the Korea Electric Power Corporation, or to stop the construction of new ones.

In July 2011, the South Korean government hosted an IAEA-sponsored conference of 16 nuclear safety experts from 14 other countries with nuclear power: Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Mexico, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. Delegates inspected a Korean nuclear-power complex and heard about Korean plans to establish an independent nuclear-safety commission. Before departing Seoul, the group pronounced the Korean nuclear industry clean, efficient, disciplined, and highly safety conscious. This conference was in fact only a dress rehearsal for a 50-nation nuclear-security conference held in Seoul in 2012, a follow-up conference to the one initiated by President Obama in Washington in 2010.

Nothing concrete emerged about reactions in North Korea to the Fukushima catastrophe. Pyongyang has a plan to build light-water reactors for electricity generation, and if they can afford to go ahead with the program, the leaders may be encouraged to solicit international cooperation on reactor design and safety. Certainly, Japan and South Korea are likely to be very sensitive about Pyongyang proceeding to complete and bring online a small light-water reactor that is upwind of both countries, of dubious quality, and due for completion in 2012.

The other major nuclear player in North-East Asia is Taiwan. With six light-water reactors — set in three clusters around the island — providing 17 per cent of its electric power, it is the world’s 15th-largest nuclear country. Two advanced boiling-water reactors, each of 1300 MW, are planned for construction at a fourth site, Lungmen. Events at Fukushima Dai-ichi raised some public anxiety about nuclear-safety issues, manifested in two substantial demonstrations in 2011 — one in March, the other on World Environment Day in June. An economist at National Taipei University, Professor To-Far Wang, also publicly asserted that a magnitude 7 earthquake ‘would destroy the nation’. So far, however, the Taiwanese government has shown little inclination to close existing reactors or halt construction at Lungmen. Indeed, on his re-election in January 2012, President Ying-jeou Ma undertook to continue Taiwan’s nuclear-energy program, with the caveat that each of the six operating reactors would be decommissioned after 40 years. The two new ones would presumably be decommissioned at the 40-year cut-off, too.

In mid-January 2012, an anti-nuclear conference was held in Yokohama. Called the Global Conference for a Nuclear-Power-Free World, it brought together nearly 400 delegates from Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan, and resolved to develop a network of activists for a ‘nuclear-free East Asia’. A decidedly marginal organisation in the political scheme of things in the region, it was nevertheless one of the most determined and coherent anti-nuclear bodies to be established so far in North-East Asia. It will be interesting to track its progress.

The nuclear giants of Europe are France, Russia, Britain, and Germany. Following the Fukushima accident, Germany is the only one of these formally to renounce nuclear power. The groundwork for this was laid in an observation made by the German Association of Energy and Water Industries that renewable-energy input into Germany’s national grid had crossed the 20 per cent mark for the first time in January 2011. On 30 May 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that her government’s goal was to draw 35 per cent of electricity production from renewables such as wind, biomass, hydro-electric, solar, and waste incineration by 2022, and 80 per cent by 2050. Seven nuclear reactors temporarily offline for testing (of a fleet of 17 reactors, supplying 23 per cent of Germany’s electricity demands) would permanently close, followed by an eighth, already offline for technical reasons. The remaining nine would close between 2011 and 2022. In August, the Bundestag passed a resolution confirming the decision.

Some German industrialists immediately criticised the announcement as short-sighted, warning of impending power shortages and blackouts across the country. But Siemens, a prominent designer and builder of nuclear power plants throughout West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, did not. On 18 September 2011, its CEO, Peter Löscher, announced that the firm would no longer build or finance nuclear power plants in Germany or elsewhere. He said the decision was in large part due to the accident at Fukushima Dai-ichi and the German government’s decision to shut down its existing power plants by 2022. Another reason may have been the firm’s experience in building two third-generation versions of the much-vaunted 1600 MW European Pressurised Reactor in partnership with the French giant Areva in the 1990s. The largest nuclear-power reactors in Europe, one of these is the Olkiluoto plant in Finland, mentioned earlier in this chapter; the other is the Flamanville Number Three reactor in France. Both have been plagued by delays and cost overruns.

With Germany’s distinguished history of leadership in nuclear research, and pride in its mastery of the technology, including the launch of one of the world’s first nuclear-powered freighters, the Otto Hahn, in 1964, why should the German government precipitately abandon nuclear energy, especially when Merkel herself had until 2010 been a nuclear advocate?

A central reason is unrelenting popular opposition that has dogged nuclear power across the country since Germany embarked on a full-scale nuclear-power program in 1975. A plant at Wyhl am Kaiserstuhl, on the French border, was abandoned after local protests that year. A plant at Brokdorf, on the North Sea, west of Hamburg, generated a large protest in 1981. Plans for a reprocessing plant at the Bavarian town of Wackersdorf were abandoned after vehement protests in the early 1980s. Spontaneous protests frequently stopped trains carrying casks of high-level nuclear-waste products across the country. External factors, such as the accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, galvanised Germans into more obdurate protest. Legislation was introduced into parliament in 2002 calling for the shutdown of all German reactors by 2021. Chancellor Merkel and economics minister Michael Glos questioned the wisdom of this during the interruption of Russian gas supplies to Belarus and other European consumers in 2007, but subsequent accidents at nuclear plants at Krümmel and Brunsbüttel, near Hamburg, rekindled opposition. This grew when evidence emerged in 2009 that chancellor Helmut Kohl had under-represented the risks associated with a planned nuclear-waste repository at Gorleben in the 1980s. Fukushima, with all its attendant radiation leaks and the creation of nuclear refugees, tipped the German scales to make its decision against the continuation of nuclear energy.

It may well be an inspired decision. During her 30 May announcement, Merkel gave what may with time prove to be a far-sighted reason for abandoning nuclear power: ‘As the first big industrialised nation [to abandon nuclear power], we can achieve such a transformation towards efficient and renewable energies, with all the opportunities that brings for exports, developing new technologies and jobs.’

France has been as obsessed as Japan with developing a nuclear-power industry of such capacity that dependence on imported energy would become a thing of the past. Unlike the Japanese, however, France’s first priority was an atom-bomb program, which it pursued in great secrecy, culminating in the detonation of their first device in the Algerian Sahara Desert during the Algerian War on 13 February 1960.

The French civil nuclear program was introduced by Électricité de France (EDF), a state-owned monopoly; its director, Marcel Boiteux, a determined economic rationalist, was obsessed with proving the cost-effectiveness of nuclear power over oil and coal. Boiteux was assisted by Michel Hug, a highly authoritarian technocrat who dismissed nuclear sceptics as traitors. Both men steered the modest French nuclear program from ten small reactors producing less than 3000 MW in 1975 to 30 reactors producing 30,000 MW by 1984, and in the course of doing so switched from an indigenous gas–graphite technology to American light-water technology. French consumers were encouraged to install electric heaters in their homes to increase demand, and thereby to justify a substantial increase in nuclear-generated electric capacity throughout metropolitan France to meet it.

By 2004, French nuclear technology was triumphant — a symbol of the country’s industrial power and technological mastery. Fifty-nine nuclear reactors supplied 425.8 terawatts of electricity, which represented 78.8 per cent of the country’s total stationary power production — the highest in the world. France was also exporting 18 per cent of its electricity (to Italy, the Netherlands, Britain, Belgium, and Germany) at among the cheapest prices in Europe.

The impression given to any visitor who asks about the industry is that French nuclear power is safe, economical, and efficient — and widely supported by the public. Dig beneath the propaganda, however, and the picture is not so rosy. A former French minister for the environment, Corinne Lepage, exposed the industry in her book La Vérité sur le Nucléaire: le choix interdit (The Truth about Nuclear: the forbidden choice), published by Albin Michel in 2011.

In France, Lepage claims, complacency about the dangers of nuclear technology is widespread and officially encouraged, and accidents are rarely revealed to public. She gives many examples. News about serious accidents at reactors in Chooz in Champagne-Ardenne, in 1968, and Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux, in 1969, was suppressed by the authorities. French officials showed little concern about environmental safety when casks of high-level radioactive waste were quietly discarded into the English Channel over several years from the Areva reprocessing plant at Le Havre. Other significant nuclear accidents barely raised public concern, including at Saint-Laurent-des-Eaux in 1980, when a level-four accident (‘accident with local consequences’) involving the fusion of combustible fuel elements in a reactor rendered it inoperable for two years; at Cruas in Ardeche in 2009, where vegetation from the Rhone blocked cooling-water pipes in a reactor for six hours; at Blayais in 1999, when local flooding endangered reactor operation; at Fessenheim on the German border in 2004, 2009, and 2011, variously involving operator errors and overheating; and at Tricastin in 2008, where a level-four accident was caused by leaking effluent containing 74 kilograms of uranium, which contaminated ground drinking water and a river outside the plant. Citing the French Institute of Radio Protection and Nuclear Safety, Lepage claims that 713 ‘significant safety events’ occurred in 2009 — a rise of 14 per cent over 2008. Around 85 per cent of the accidents were due to human error.

Since Lepage’s book was published, at least two other significant incidents have occurred: an explosion and fire at a nuclear-waste treatment plant at Codolet in the Rhone Valley near Nimes on 12 September 2011, and cooling problems at twin reactors owned by EDF at Cattenom in January 2012. EDF reported one worker dead and another seriously injured at Codolet. The environment minister, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, visited the site the next day and claimed there had been no leakage of radiation. Maybe not, but Codolet is adjacent to another nuclear plant, Marcoule, which conducts the potentially hazardous extraction of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel and its fabrication into mixed-oxide fuel for recycling in reactors.

Lepage asserts that in the event of really serious reactor accidents in France, evacuation of people living near them would be impossible. She cites reactor complexes at Gravelines, less than 20 kilometres from Calais; at Penly, 15 kilometres from Dieppe; at Saint-Laurent, 30 kilometres from Orléans; at Le Buget, 35 kilometres from Lyon; at Cattenom, 10 kilometres from Thionville and 40 from Metz; and at Fessenheim, 23 kilometres from Mulhouse and 100 from Strasbourg on the German border.

Yet French presidents have strongly supported the French nuclear establishment. President Sarkozy paid lip service to the seriousness of the Fukushima catastrophe by ordering a safety review of all nuclear plants in France. He may have assumed that the Nuclear Safety Authority (NSA) would routinely find that all reasonable safety measures were in place, with no need for substantial modification. Not so. In December 2011, the NSA said that although it would not order any immediate shutdown of reactors, continuing operations required ‘existing safety margins to be strengthened as swiftly as possible’. This involved measures which were basic but costly: ensuring sufficient backup power capacity, building ‘bunkerised’ crisis-control centres, ensuring sufficient cooling capacity to prevent a Fukushima-type meltdown, and generally tightening all means of preventing or mitigating damage from earthquakes, floods, or fires.

In fact, French complacency about nuclear power was beginning to erode. By November 2011, only 33 per cent of the populace remained in favour, with 40 per cent ‘hesitant’, and 17 per cent against. Anti-nuclear associations were becoming more vocal, as were French courts. On 30 September 2011, the appeals court of Nimes found that Socatri, a subsidiary of Areva, was guilty of pollution and gross negligence for leaking radioactive effluent at Tricastin in 2008 (discussed earlier). The company was fined €300,000, and reprimanded for delays in communicating the leaks to the NSA. Meanwhile, the vaunted 1650 MW European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) — a new-generation ‘mega-reactor’ being constructed at Flamanville, at an escalating cost of €7 billion and counting — was running into criticism from the NSA for poor concrete work on its cooling pool and for outsourcing contract work to inexperienced companies, who were hiring underpaid and underqualified labourers from former Soviet satellite countries.

The public debate intensified as France moved towards its presidential elections beginning on 22 April 2012. The Socialist nominee who had contested the last election against Nicolas Sarkozy, Ségolène Royal, said she would close the EPR down if she were elected. The Socialists and Greens pledged to close down 24 French reactors by 2025, beginning with the county’s oldest at Fessenheim, Alsace, one of the most densely populated areas in France. The Socialist leader, François Hollande, said his party would move progressively away from all-oil for transport, and all-nuclear for electricity. President Sarkozy responded by saying that this would lead to hundreds of thousands of job losses, higher electricity bills, and the exodus of heavy industry from France. Not given to understatement, he said that France ‘should not return to an era of candlelight.’ On the campaign trail, Green candidate Eva Joly called French industry minister Éric Besson a ‘nucleopath’ for his unwavering support for nuclear energy. Besson countered by saying in parliament that the Socialists and Greens ‘want us to believe that nuclear engineers and other workers can overnight become installers of solar panels and wind turbines ... We have to stop this masquerade.’

On 6 May 2012, François Hollande defeated Nicolas Sarkozy in a run-off for the French presidency. As this book goes to press, President Hollande has neither reneged on his promise to reduce the French nuclear fleet, not taken any concrete steps yet to do so. My guess is that he will at least disallow the construction of any more reactors.

The accident at Fukushima occurred at a time of gradual decline in Britain’s nuclear-power industry. Like early American reactors, Britain’s first reactor (at Calder Hall, near the village of Seascale, on the Irish Sea coast in Cumbria) was developed primarily to produce plutonium-239 for atom bombs. That it could also generate electricity was hailed by the government as a scientific triumph, although a suspicious public was less convinced. A fire at Windscale in 1957 ignited uranium piles, leading to the release of a mixture of transuranic elements, the contamination of large areas of dairy country, and an officially acknowledged death toll of 33. That, and two other significant nuclear accidents — at Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland in May 1967, and at Sellafield (formerly Windscale), close to Calder Hall, in 2005 — increased public scepticism. The government forged ahead with expansion of its program nevertheless. By 1997, 19 reactors across the country were supplying 26 per cent of the nation’s electricity. At the time of Fukushima, most reactors in the British nuclear fleet were advanced gas-cooled reactors, together with a Magnox reactor and a pressurised-water reactor.

With the sequential retirement of some ageing reactors, this percentage dropped to 16 per cent by 2009. Pro-nuclear forces were nevertheless manoeuvring to revive the industry. In 2006, prime minister Tony Blair produced an energy review which recommended that the private sector be encouraged to build a new generation of large nuclear power plants, with more capacity than Britain’s existing fleet. Despite a High Court challenge on environmental grounds, successfully mounted by the Greens against such expansion, the government pressed on. By 2010, four private European consortia had expressed interest in building reactors. The largest of these were EDF-Centrica, and RWE-E.On, with interest from two others — Iberdrola-SSE-GDF Suez, and the Swedish company Vattenfall, although these two withdrew in 2012. Meanwhile, the government had identified ten sites for new reactors — eight where existing reactors were located, and two new ones.

British reactions to Fukushima have been cautious. The Scottish parliament had already determined prior to March 2011 not to allow any new reactors to be constructed, laying the groundwork for a nuclear-free Scotland. And the plutonium-processing plant at Sellafield was to be closed, as its ‘risk profile’ had changed following the earthquake and tsunami at Fukushima. (The only customers for the Sellafield plutonium were Japanese electric-power companies, including TEPCO.) On the other hand, Conservative prime minister David Cameron commissioned a review of nuclear safety, to be conducted by Michael Weightman, Chief Inspector of Nuclear Installations, on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive, and the British Environment Agency. The report was carried out in September 2011, and appeared to reflect the conclusions of a survey conducted in June of all 143 reactors in 14 European nations, which found them to be safe and sound. Yet leaked emails published in The Guardian damagingly revealed that an approach had been made by the British government to the nuclear companies Areva, EDF Energy, and Westinghouse, shortly after the Fukushima meltdown, to draft a coordinated public-relations strategy to play down the disaster, so as not to derail Britain’s plans for a revived nuclear industry.

As a result of the Fukushima catastrophe, commitment to nuclear energy across Europe is highly fragile. Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as Germany, have all taken decisions to phase out nuclear power. Austria and Spain did so before events at Fukushima. Two months after the event, Switzerland voted against the continuation of nuclear power and for the decommissioning of all of their nuclear reactors as they reach the end of their operational lives (Switzerland has five, providing 39 per cent of the country’s electricity, compared to 56 per cent supplied by hydropower). The case of Italy is especially interesting. All four of its nuclear plants had been decommissioned in 1990, following a referendum driven by a public resentful that they were not being told about the full radiation effects of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. But prime minister Berlusconi, a powerful advocate of nuclear power, wanted to resurrect the four reactors and construct new ones, with the aim of producing 25 per cent of the country’s electricity with atomic energy by 2030. At a second referendum, held in June 2011, his program was thrown out as Italians voted overwhelmingly to close all of Italy’s reactors and build no new ones.

On the other side of the atomic ledger, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and, amazingly, Ukraine, despite the continuing emission of radiation from Chernobyl, have all declared their intentions to retain, and in some cases increase, their reliance on nuclear power. In some cases, autocratic governments are ignoring anti-nuclear public opinion; in others, popular opinion genuinely favours nuclear power. In the mix of motivations are pride and obduracy, a sense of nationhood, proof of a nation’s technological expertise, a desire to avoid the escalating costs of fossil fuels, and doubt that renewable-energy sources can provide reliable base-load capacity.

Finland’s case for a new (seventh) reactor — announced in October 2011 as the first new site anywhere in the world since Fukushima — is based on the price of energy consumption: the country’s long, cold winters require high energy consumption, and its forest and steel sectors rely on cheap and stable electricity. The reactor will be built at Pyhäjoki on the Hanhikivi peninsula, noted for its low seismic values and solid bedrock. Construction is expected to begin in 2015, with Areva and Toshiba being the leading tenderers. Czech prime minister Václav Klaus told the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2011 that the catastrophe at Fukushima should not be allowed to call into question the wisdom of atomic energy. One is seriously left to wonder what would.

Russians share much the same emotional mix. Ever since Lenin told H. G. Wells in 1920 that the power of the Soviet Union was based on military might plus the electrification of the whole country, abundant electricity has had a special cachet in Soviet mythology. Intense secrecy surrounded the Soviet Union’s early postwar dealings with the atom; as in the United States, Britain, and France, it was a by-product of the aspiration for nuclear weapons. But Russia is credited with being the first in the world to operate a nuclear-power station — a tiny 5 MW reactor at Obninsk, 100 kilometres south-west of Moscow, which began feeding power to the grid in 1954. Credit for this achievement goes to Vyacheslav Malyshev, a military engineer, who had previously, during the Battle of Stalingrad between August 1942 and February 1943, converted a tractor factory 200 metres from the front into a tank-repair unit, which helped turn the battle against the German Sixth Army under the command of general Friedrich Paulus.

After the execution in 1953 of Lavrentiy Beria, the much-feared head of the NKVD, the Soviet state-security apparatus, Malyshev took control of part of Beria’s empire — the nuclear program run by the Central Directorate for the Utilisation of Atomic Energy in the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Like the Western nuclear nations in the early to mid-1950s, the Soviet Union initially entertained a burst of optimism about nuclear power and the miracles it could bring. The optimism was blunted by falling expectations in 1957, and stopped cold in late 1957, when a nuclear-waste dump containing plutonium overheated and exploded at Kyshtym, between Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk on the West Siberian Plain. It was a conventional explosion, not a nuclear one; but, like a ‘dirty bomb’, it rendered thousands of square kilometres around the dump uninhabitable — a fact denied by the Kremlin for decades. But the poisoning of Kyshtym by radiation gradually emerged, indicating that in terms of human lives lost or shortened, and property damage, it was at least as bad as Chernobyl.

The Soviet leadership and its Russian successors appear to have blithely ignored in equal measure the lessons of Kyshtym in 1957, Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011. The overbearing pro-nuclear state apparatus appears not to face any public opposition, and is focused on pressing ahead with an ambitious nuclear-power program. By 2011, 31 power reactors were providing 21,244 MW, or 17 per cent of all electric power, to the vast Russian continent. Plans are afoot to expand the Russian nuclear fleet to 59 by 2030. Many of the existing units are ageing RBMK reactors of the same type as at Chernobyl. Like much heavy equipment in Russia, such as civil aircraft that can rapidly be converted into bombers, these reactors have dedicated dual civil and military uses. Fuelled by graphite-moderated uranium and cooled by light water, they can be kept operating to produce electricity even as plutonium is extracted for Russia’s nuclear-weapons program. Their designed 30-year lives have in many cases been extended to 50 years.

Although prime minister Putin (as he was then) ordered a safety check on all operating reactors in the months following Fukushima, subsequent official statements indicate that the Russian nuclear program will neither pause nor be halted by the Japanese disaster. Alexander Shutikov, director-general of Russia’s atomic-energy holding company, Rosenergoatom, boasted that, unlike Japanese reactors, Russian ones are designed to withstand earthquakes and floods. Alexander Borovoy, head of the Laboratory for Chernobyl Problems at Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute, asserted that reports on Fukushima ‘exaggerate the seriousness of the situation which requires cool-headed analysis, not emotions.’ And Victor Mikhailov, Russia’s former minister for atomic energy, told Japanese colleagues, ‘bluntly, you have been polluting the ocean with up to 30,000 curies from the wastewater of your nuclear plants each year. This is, by my estimations, even more than Fukushima’s damaged reactors have leaked.’

Russia continues to pursue a vigorous nuclear-export campaign. Representatives of Rosatom, Russia’s peak nuclear body, are attached to embassies in any country likely to be a customer for Russian nuclear technology. Existing customers include Iran, where a reactor at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf — begun by Siemens under the Shah’s direction in the early 1970s — has been completed by Rosatom and brought online in 2011. Orders have also been negotiated for a second large Russian reactor for Bushehr, two for Tianwan at Lianyungang in China, and two for Kudankulam in India. Prospective customers for Russian technology include Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. Indonesia could be a customer for a new series of seaborne reactors from Russia, although President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has gone decidedly cool towards nuclear power in Indonesia since Fukushima. Rosatom is also pursuing cooperative deals in South Africa, Namibia, Chile, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, and Kuwait. Most reactors would be supplied on a turnkey basis, with, as added inducements, the supply of enriched-uranium fuel for the life of the plant, and the reprocessing of spent fuel in Russia, with separated wastes eventually being returned to the customer country.

In the Asian subcontinent, India and Pakistan have ambitious nuclear-power programs. India’s nuclear industry originated from a clandestine weapons program. The Indian government accepted nuclear technology and materials provided in good faith by the United States and Canada in the 1950s and 1960s after India kept reassuring them that the assistance was only for a civil power program. Following China’s first nuclear-weapons test in 1964, however, Homi Bhabha, father of the nuclear program, was motivated to develop weapons by extracting plutonium from India’s Canadian-supplied heavy-water reactor by constructing a reprocessing plant at Trombay. His successor, Vikram Sarabhai, was anti-bomb, but prime minister Indira Gandhi wanted nuclear weapons. Still unwilling to admit that they had thoroughly conned the United States, the Indians called their first nuclear explosion, at the Pokhran test grounds in Rajasthan on 18 May 1974, a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ or PNE.

No one in the international nuclear community, least of all Pakistan, was fooled by this appellation. Future prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto said in 1965, ‘If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.’ On his deathbed in 1979, he exhorted the nation, writing, ‘The Christian, Jewish, and Hindu civilizations have this [nuclear] capability. The Communist powers also possess it. Only the Islamic civilization [is] without it, but that position [is] about to change.’ Change it did. Begging, borrowing, and stealing nuclear-weapons technology and materials from mainly unsuspecting nuclear companies in Europe, Pakistan rapidly developed its own weapons technology. At the end of May 1998, India carried out its second set of nuclear-weapons tests at Pokhran. It was followed within days by Pakistan, which conducted five nuclear tests in the Chagai Hills of Balochistan province and, days later, two more, in the Kharan Desert.

India’s civil nuclear program developed apace. By 2010, the country had 20 power reactors located at six complexes, generating 4780 MW — the country’s fourth source of electricity after fossil fuels, hydro, and renewable. Five more reactors were under construction, set to generate an additional 2750 MW — a total of 64,000 MW by 2032. Pakistan only had three power reactors, with technological assistance from France, Canada, and China, but had plans to construct another four. Neither government betrayed much concern that the Fukushima catastrophe would inhibit nuclear-power growth at home, although both had experienced nuclear accidents of their own. Accidents in India were particularly prolific, including a reactor-core rupture at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu in 1987, radiation leaks at the Tarapur reactor complex in 1989 and 1992, a fire in the turbine hall at Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh in 1993, leaks of radioactive helium and heavy water into the Rana Pratap Sagar Dam in Kota, Rajasthan, in 1995, and sodium leaks from India’s trial breeder reactor at Kalpakkam in 2002.

After Fukushima, like many others had done, the Indian authorities ordered a safety review of all their reactors, beginning with the Madras Atomic Power Station in Kalpakkam. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh instructed the Indian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to see whether there was a need for more sophisticated radiation-detection equipment or stronger steps to deal with an emergency to be put in place. AEC chairman Srikumar Banerjee sought a new assessment from French authorities on what happened at Fukushima before allowing Areva to proceed with the construction of two European Pressurised Reactors for the 9900 MW Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project in Maharashtra with an option for four more. Nevertheless, the opposition of several political parties towards expanded nuclear power in India increased strongly. Opposition became particularly strident in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra, both home to millions of fishing and farming people, now faced with forced acquisition of their land and loss of livelihood. The common reaction to Fukushima was that if the technically advanced Japanese cannot control their reactors to avoid catastrophes, India certainly cannot. To add anxiety to the mix, the Geological Survey of India, which had originally assessed the whole coastal region of Maharashtra as a zone-4 earthquake region, conveniently (and expediently) downgraded it to a zone-3 one. India boasts of being the largest democracy in the world; it will be interesting to see whether the authorities will try to suppress the growing grassroots anti-nuclear movement spreading across the country.

Three countries in Latin America have nuclear-power reactors owned by state monopolies — Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. Mexico has two General Electric BWRs, similar in design to the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors, at Laguna Verde in Alto Lucero, near Veracruz. Brazil’s two pressurised-water reactors are located at Angra, near Rio de Janeiro; a third was being constructed, but work was halted for a variety of reasons well before Fukushima. Argentina has two Canadian heavy-water CANDU reactors at Embalse; a third was recently completed at Atucha, and was opened by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in September 2011. Although both Brazil and Argentina have extensive uranium deposits, neither they nor Mexico have shown much enthusiasm for expanding their nuclear-reactor fleets, especially since the Fukushima catastrophe.

Canada has 18 power reactors, situated in New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec, which supply 16 per cent of its electric power. The reactors, called CANDUs, use unenriched uranium as a fuel, and heavy water as a moderator.

With large reserves of uranium and a nascent nuclear industry based at Chalk River in Ontario, Canada became a wartime partner of the United States in the Manhattan Project, which conveniently added to its reservoir of nuclear knowledge. After the war, the Canadian government developed and refined its CANDU reactors for power generation within Canada and for export. A convenient way of making weapons-grade plutonium-239, CANDU technology was exported to India in the late 1960s, ostensibly for a civil nuclear program, but in fact to develop nuclear weapons. While officially shocked when India exploded its first nuclear device in 1974, the Canadians were not deterred from continuing to export their technology. By the end of 2011, 32 CANDUs had been exported to seven countries, including South Korea, Romania, India, Pakistan, Argentina, and China.

Apart from some offsetting export income, Canadians are beginning to find nuclear energy to be prohibitively expensive. The last plant constructed was at Darlington in Ontario. Budgeted at CA$3.4 billion, its final cost was CA$15 billion when it came online in the mid-1980s. Once billed ‘too cheap to meter’, Canada’s state-owned Atomic Energy of Canada received subsidies between 1956 and 2000, according to the environmentalist David Suzuki, totalling CA$16.6 billion to keep going. Even with such subsidies, nuclear power in Canada is far more expensive than fossil fuels and, as the technology gets better, renewables. But it continues to have its proponents. In February 2012, Patrick Moore, honorary chair of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy (Canada), asserted with extraordinary complacency, ‘There is no good reason to be afraid of nuclear power. It is not harming anyone, and it did not harm anyone in Fukushima.’

The United States was the originator of both nuclear-weapons technology and its subsequent adaptation to civil use. How the latter came about is an interesting story. The United States Army ran the Manhattan Project, so it was army aircraft that dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States Navy, excluded from such activities, was stung into action. Its champion was captain Hyman George Rickover, a hard-headed, practical engineer and submariner who learnt his nuclear physics at the Oak Ridge laboratories in Tennessee. Rickover’s ambition was to develop a nuclear-driven submarine that did not need to surface to recharge its batteries, and could remain submerged indefinitely. Appointed head of the Naval Reactors Branch of the Bureau of Ships, Rickover had two nascent nuclear-propulsion systems to choose from — boiling-water technology being developed by General Electric, and pressurised-water technology being developed by Westinghouse. Both used slightly enriched uranium, with ordinary water as a coolant and moderator. He chose Westinghouse technology and supervised the construction of the world’s first nuclear-propelled submarine, the Nautilus, which, soon after being commissioned at Groton, Connecticut, began a series of record-breaking runs. In 84 hours, it steamed 2089 kilometres under water — ten times further than any submarine had previously travelled submerged. It also maintained a submerged speed of sixteen knots for longer than one hour, a record for a combat submarine of any navy at the time.

Promoted to rear admiral and appointed a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, Rickover used his influence to adapt his pressurised-water nuclear-submarine engine technology into a stationary steam-producer suitable for linking to a turbine and generating electricity. He chose Shippingport on the Ohio River near Pittsburg as the location for his civilian reactor, and Westinghouse to build it. Run by Duquesne Light of Pittsburg, the reactor came online in 1957, producing 60 MW of electric capacity. This cost ten times as much as electricity from coal- or oil-fired plants, but it was a start. Westinghouse had a new pressurised-water-reactor production line, with an operating reactor for demonstration and sales purposes. Its rival for nuclear power was General Electric, which developed a boiling-water system at its new laboratory near San Jose, California. GE’s first boiling-water reactor (BWR) was sold to Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, and came online as Dresden One in 1959, feeding 200 MW into the grid.

Nuclear power in the United States grew rapidly in the following three decades. By 1971, 22 reactors provided 2.4 per cent of the country’s total electricity; by 1984, 83 reactors provided 14 per cent; by 1989, 109 reactors generated 19 per cent; and in 1991, 111 reactors — the highest number — generated 22 per cent of the nation’s electricity. Following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, public opinion began to turn against nuclear power, and no new reactors were built or commissioned. By 2011, the number had fallen to 104 as old ones were decommissioned.

On 29 January 2010, President Obama announced a federal policy of nuclear revival, pledging US$54.5 billion in federal loan guarantees for new reactor construction (including, presumably, the US$8.33 billion federal support for two new reactors to be built by Georgia Power at its Vogtle complex, mentioned in Chapter Four). Notwithstanding the catastrophe at Fukushima, he continued to support more reactors in the United States. Steven Chu, secretary of energy, reinforced the message to Congress with soothing words that the United States would learn from Fukushima and move ahead. Obama’s and Chu’s support may be linked to the fact that Exelon, the largest reactor-operator in the country, contributed US$227,000 to Obama’s senate and presidential campaigns; and perhaps also to the influence of David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political advisor, who previously worked for Exelon.

Meanwhile, the nuclear industry tried to quell potentially costly anxiety by repeating its view that the Fukushima catastrophe was simply the unfortunate result of a tsunami rather than of seismic activity. Critics disagreed, as more and more evidence came to light that the earthquake caused structural damage and radiation leakages before the emergency generators were knocked out by the subsequent tsunami. The same critics have pointed out that at least two United States reactor complexes are on or near earthquake fault lines — Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, both in California. Furthermore, Oyster Bay in Ocean County, New Jersey, operated by Exelon, is a location susceptible to increasingly frequent and severe cyclones. Against such facts, Exelon spokespeople repeat the mantra that ‘we are safe’.

The American public, always unpredictable about nuclear issues, remains unconvinced. After Fukushima, their support for nuclear power as a viable and safe alternative to fossil-fuelled power fell to 43 per cent, lower than after Three Mile Island. Nearly one-third of American nuclear reactors are General Electric BWRs of identical type and age to the BWRs at Fukushima. Although unlikely to suffer from tsunamis on the scale of Japan, US reactors could still suffer damage from major cyclones and earthquakes. And Fukushima uncovered one bleak reality: it will cost the Japanese authorities between US$74 billion to US$260 billion in public compensation, far higher than the US$12.6 billion held in insurance against nuclear damage in the United States under the Price–Anderson Act of 1957. The Price–Anderson fund was tapped after the Three Mile Island disaster, which, although much less severe than Fukushima, still generated US$71 million in claims. A disaster of Fukushima proportions would quickly exhaust the fund. How this translates into the continuation of President Obama’s nuclear-expansion program remains to be seen.

A test case may be the Yankee reactor in Vermont, bought in 2002 by New Orleans–based Entergy. Entergy agreed to shut the reactor down if the Vermont Public Service Board denied it a certificate of public good to continue to operate and generate radioactive waste. The matter is still subject to court decision. But if the court rules in favour of Vermont, it may set a precedent under which states’ wishes about the location and operation of nuclear power plants might come to prevail over the wishes of the federal government and the nuclear-power industry itself. This could hasten the demise of nuclear power in the United States.