The twin catastrophes wrought by Mother Nature on the nation of Japan last week—known as the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami—devastated the lives of millions of people in one of the world’s most developed nations.
The earthquake that struck off the northeast coast of the island nation registered a whopping 9.0 magnitude on the Richter scale—nearly 1,000 times stronger than the 1989 Loma Prieta quake experienced here in the Bay Area—and launched a massive tsunami whose waves ravaged Japan’s east coast and whose destruction reached as far as Santa Cruz.
As the death toll continues to rise, possibly into the tens of thousands, Japan’s nuclear engineers are fighting desperately to contain a series of explosions rocking the country’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, which has also experienced system failures and partial meltdowns in the immediate aftermath of the disasters.
Parallels to the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island incidents abound—the clouds of radioactive steam being spewed from the Fukushima reactors and the rising levels of radiation being recorded as far as Tokyo (nearly 150 miles southwest) have resurfaced nightmares of nuclear disaster ingrained in the Japanese conscience since the end of the Second World War.
In the United States and the rest of the world, the Japanese atomic crisis has sparked new concerns over the safety and inherent volatility of nuclear power, which has been regarded as a leading source of “cheap” and “clean” energy in a world facing the encroachment of global warming. As the world approaches the 25-year anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, public support for nuclear energy has seen little decline, despite being neither cheap nor particularly clean.
California is home to two of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors, which account for 20 percent of the country’s total energy output. Both of the Golden State’s facilities are located south of the Bay Area: the Diablo Canyon plant near San Luis Obispo and San Onofre in San Diego County, and both are located along fault lines.
Both plants are built to withstand an earthquake whose magnitude would be expected in their area, but predicting the severity of a disaster like the Japanese one is impossible. Indeed, the Tohoku earthquake registered as one of the five strongest on record since 1900, when records were first taken, surpassing the 1906 San Francisco and 2010 Chilean and Haitian earthquakes in magnitude.
Nuclear power proponents have been quick to point out that Japan’s unique location on the globe make it more susceptible to monumental natural disasters. Certainly, the Japanese took this into account, and as a result have the strictest building codes and most earthquake-ready society on the planet—and yet, all the emergency preparedness and costly structural retrofitting could not prepare them for a crisis on this scale.
Attempts to engineer modern nuclear power facilities equipped for natural disasters or terrorist attacks have resulted in a cooperative Franco-German project in Finland, where a proposed $4 billion “next-generation” nuclear facility has exceeded cost by 50 percent and whose completion date—2009—has yet to be realized.
Existing facilities worldwide are rapidly approaching their shelf life, and plans to extend the lives of these plants are being considered, given both their material and environmental costs. Yet, even as the Japanese nuclear emergency calls into the question the safety and viability of nuclear energy, many experts hold that green, renewable energy alternatives are far more costly and expansive.
A recent report from researchers at Stanford University and UC Davis offer a detailed analysis of the cost and effort likely required for implementing and maintaining an entirely renewable energy program worldwide. Needless to say, the task is herculean, even Sisyphean in nature.
The collaborative report describes the need for four million five-megawatt wind turbines, of which the Chinese have only just built the first model—current wind turbines have only about the half the energy output. Also, some 90,000 large-scale solar plants are needed—as a comparison point, only some three dozen exist globally. To top it off, 1.7 billion three-kilowatt rooftop solar systems—one in four of all households worldwide—would be the icing on the renewable cake, assuming the rare-earth material required is available in the necessary quantity.
The cost to wean humanity off the teat of nuclear and fossil fuel is daunting, no doubt, but not impossible. The colossal effort required is something that is in humanity’s interests, and its emergence, slow and encumbered by deniers and skeptics, is gradually gaining steam.
Experts say the fears over Fukushima, while not quite overblown, do not possess the potential of another Chernobyl disaster, but concerns over the safety of nuclear energy persist. California is long overdue for the next big earthquake, according to numerous reports by the United States Geological Survey, and valid questions must be addressed over the safety of the state’s existing reactors should a shake on the scale of the Tohoku 9.0 quake strike the West Coast in the next decade or so.
Of course, given the innovation that Americans pride themselves upon, it is imperative on us as a global technological leader to find alternatives to the inherent instability of nuclear power as we prepare for the next big disaster, whether it be along the San Andreas fault or any of the ever-shifting tectonic plates across the globe. After all, if the technologically brilliant competent Japanese, the first victims of nuclear disaster on the planet—in the form of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945—must bravely face down a catastrophe, none of us can feel too confident in the wonders of technology.
