The European Environment Agency has just published a landmark report on the state of environmental pollutants in the EU, ‘Late Lessons from Early Warnings: Science, Precaution, Innovation’ - and part of the report deals with a broad range of nuclear issues, including radiation releases and health effects from Chernobyl and Fukushima, costs of nuclear reactors, accident liability, risk assessment, and the impact of Fukushima on proposed new nuclear build.
Chernobyl
The report's analysis of post-Chernobyl research suggests that estimates for cancer mortality extrapolation may range from at least 17,000 to 68,000 over 50 years. Correspondingly, the Chernobyl nuclear accident also caused non-cancerous diseases, such as cardiovascular and immunological disorders, which have been reported for both clean-up workers and the environmentally exposed population affected by the Chernobyl accident. In children, marked immune disturbances were detected after Chernobyl, with significant differences between directly exposed children and children born to irradiated parents. One significant implication of these finding is that differing people may have differing responses and susceptibilities to radiation.
Fukushima
The report concludes that the multiple melt-down of reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant released more radiation than any accident since Chernobyl. The emissions started earlier, lasted longer, and were therefore higher than earlier official estimates assume. In other words, Fukushima releases may have contained an estimated 3.5 × 1016 Bq Cs, with almost one fifth falling on the Japanese mainland. This means that the Fukushima release can be estimated to equal to 40% of the Cs-137 release from Chernobyl.
The French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety estimated that between March and mid July, the amount of radioactive Cs-137 discharged into the Pacific from the Fukushima Daiichi plant amounted to 27.1 million megabecquerels - the greatest amount known to have been released to water from a single accident. Because of the extent of these releases, it is too early to make an full estimate of the potential health impact of the Fukushima disaster.
Costs
There are two nuclear reactors currently being built in Western Europe, one in Finland and one in France. The report notes that both are over-budget and over-time.
Both use the same technology as is proposed for the UK, the EPR supplied by the French company AREVA. The Finnish reactor was planned to go online in early 2009, but the Finns are now crossing their fingers and hoping to complete around late 2014.
And things are no better in France. Here, EDF forecast that the reactor would be complete this year, but time-scales keep slipping and it now says it would hope to complete the project around 2016. Originally priced at just over EUR 3 billion, this reactor is currently estimated at EUR 8.5 billion EUR and rising.
Liability
Reactor accidents are the single largest financial risk facing the nuclear industry, far outweighing the combined effect of market, credit, and operational risks. Currently, individual European nuclear accident liabilities are capped at only EUR 169 million.
The planned Paris Convention on Nuclear Third Party Liability and Brussels Convention aims to raise this to EUR 1.5 billion for any one accident. However, starting estimates for Fukushima stand at $200 billion and rising. Because of this, the report concludes that current and planned major accident liability regimes are inadequate, and a significant re-adjustment is essential.
Risk
Key to the analysis of nuclear safety is the analytical concept of probabilistic risk assessment (PRA). However, PRA has proven structurally limited in its ability to conceive and capture the outcomes and consequences of a nuclear accident resulting from a cascading series of events, as described in the Fukushima disaster and all previous major nuclear accidents. The report suggests that an urgent re-appraisal of this approach, and its real-life application is overdue.
Pre-Fukushima probability estimates of a major nuclear accident were around 1:100 000 for the 440 reactors in operation over the next 20-25 years. But Chernobyl and Fukushima together comprise catastrophic meltdown in four nuclear reactors over the past few decades, which means that that the probability of a major accident in the current worldwide fleet over the next 20-25 years is now around 1:5 000. In other words, the likelihood of a major nuclear accident has increased significantly.
Whatever one’s view of the risks and benefits of nuclear energy, it is clear that the possibility of catastrophic accidents must be factored into the policy and regulatory decision-making process. In the context of current collective knowledge on nuclear risks, both the regulation of operating nuclear reactors and the design-base for any proposed reactor will need significant re-evaluation (beyond that proposed after the 'Stress tests'). There is also the need to defend and adapt the coastal sites of nuclear plants to the hazards of rising sea levels, storm surges, flooding and nuclear site islanding.
Fukushima
Despite further new-build plans in Finland, France and the United Kingdom; the general post-Fukushima situation in the EU implies that the limited construction of nuclear new-build since 2000, and potentially in the coming decade, combined with the ageing of nuclear power plants and the finalization of nuclear phase-out in Germany and other European countries, will lead to a relative decreasing share of electricity production sourced from EU nuclear energy after 2020. The emphasis is likely to shift towards maximizing output of existing reactors through extension, up-grade and retrofit.
Given that Germany uses around 20 % of all EU electricity, the government’s decision to phase out nuclear power by 2022 and to invest in renewables, energy efficiency, grid network infrastructure, and plan for trans-boundary pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH), may prove significant for European energy policy as a whole.
The above is based on Professor Dorfman's contribution to the European Environment Agency report available at http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/late-lessons-2.
Guest posts do not reflect the views of Greenpeace and/or Energydesk.
