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Book Review: 'Fukushima' sounds warning on nuclear energy
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-fukushima-20140220,0,752043.story
BOOK REVIEW
'Fukushima' sounds warning on nuclear energy
A clear-eyed overview of the nuclear industry and the Japanese disaster doesn't split hairs over the risk: It can happen here.
By Michael Hiltzik, February 21, 2014
<snip>
These events and more are meticulously reconstructed in "Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster" by David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman and Susan Q. Stranahan of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Followers of Fukushima and its consequences for the nuclear power movement have come to rely on Lochbaum and Lyman for their scientific expertise on the topic. Stranahan, a journalist and writer whose experience with nuclear power dates back to her coverage of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, is evidently responsible for the book's lucid and gripping narrative.
No one with an interest in the present and future of nuclear power in the United States should miss it.
Books and news coverage about nuclear power coalesced into three periods, roughly tracking the fortunes and self-image of the industry itself. First came the years of optimism, starting in the late 1940s and extending into the 1950s, when physicists and government bureaucrats alike were eager to spread the idea of the "peaceful atom" as counterpoint to the image of nuclear technology as a tool of war established by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S. government heavily subsidized the nascent nuclear power industry, and General Electric and Westinghouse, manufacturers of the two leading power reactor designs, offered nuclear plants to a willing utility industry on loss-leader terms.
But reactor technology was vastly more complex than anything America's utilities had dealt with previously. Their executives and their workforces were incapable of safely managing the willful atom. Meanwhile, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission kept a tight lid on its own staff's reports of the health perils of radioactivity loosed into the environment and the implications of runaway reactions. Anxious to tamp down public opposition to the novel technology, the AEC issued earnest reassurances about the rigorous safety standards of the nation's burgeoning fleet of nuclear power stations.
By the late 1970s the truth was beginning to leak out, in part through the indefatigable efforts of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the home of the authors of "Fukushima," which used the Freedom of Information Act to spring reams of documents from purgatory. The years of doubt culminated in 1979, when the Three Mile Island accident underscored the inadequacy of the "human factor" in managing power reactors. Over the next 10 years, plans for more than 60 nuclear plants in the U.S. were canceled.
<snip>
"Fukushima" is an indispensable reminder of the nuclear power industry's failure to learn from the past. The assurances of greater rigor in the operation and regulation of the peaceful atom after Three Mile Island are contradicted by the flaws exposed by Fukushima. As Lyman, one of the authors of this book, observed in congressional testimony shortly after the disaster, a similar event could happen in the U.S. "We have plants that are just as old. ... We have a regulatory system that is not clearly superior to that of the Japanese. We have had extreme weather events that exceeded our expectations and defeated our emergency planning."
<snip>
BOOK REVIEW
'Fukushima' sounds warning on nuclear energy
A clear-eyed overview of the nuclear industry and the Japanese disaster doesn't split hairs over the risk: It can happen here.
By Michael Hiltzik, February 21, 2014
<snip>
These events and more are meticulously reconstructed in "Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster" by David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman and Susan Q. Stranahan of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Followers of Fukushima and its consequences for the nuclear power movement have come to rely on Lochbaum and Lyman for their scientific expertise on the topic. Stranahan, a journalist and writer whose experience with nuclear power dates back to her coverage of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, is evidently responsible for the book's lucid and gripping narrative.
No one with an interest in the present and future of nuclear power in the United States should miss it.
Books and news coverage about nuclear power coalesced into three periods, roughly tracking the fortunes and self-image of the industry itself. First came the years of optimism, starting in the late 1940s and extending into the 1950s, when physicists and government bureaucrats alike were eager to spread the idea of the "peaceful atom" as counterpoint to the image of nuclear technology as a tool of war established by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The U.S. government heavily subsidized the nascent nuclear power industry, and General Electric and Westinghouse, manufacturers of the two leading power reactor designs, offered nuclear plants to a willing utility industry on loss-leader terms.
But reactor technology was vastly more complex than anything America's utilities had dealt with previously. Their executives and their workforces were incapable of safely managing the willful atom. Meanwhile, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission kept a tight lid on its own staff's reports of the health perils of radioactivity loosed into the environment and the implications of runaway reactions. Anxious to tamp down public opposition to the novel technology, the AEC issued earnest reassurances about the rigorous safety standards of the nation's burgeoning fleet of nuclear power stations.
By the late 1970s the truth was beginning to leak out, in part through the indefatigable efforts of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the home of the authors of "Fukushima," which used the Freedom of Information Act to spring reams of documents from purgatory. The years of doubt culminated in 1979, when the Three Mile Island accident underscored the inadequacy of the "human factor" in managing power reactors. Over the next 10 years, plans for more than 60 nuclear plants in the U.S. were canceled.
<snip>
"Fukushima" is an indispensable reminder of the nuclear power industry's failure to learn from the past. The assurances of greater rigor in the operation and regulation of the peaceful atom after Three Mile Island are contradicted by the flaws exposed by Fukushima. As Lyman, one of the authors of this book, observed in congressional testimony shortly after the disaster, a similar event could happen in the U.S. "We have plants that are just as old. ... We have a regulatory system that is not clearly superior to that of the Japanese. We have had extreme weather events that exceeded our expectations and defeated our emergency planning."
<snip>
