UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned us that the events ta Fukushima and Chernobyl are just the beginning.
As reported here, he says we have to prepare for more nuclear accidents on the scale of Chernobyl and Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. It's inevitable, he says, because we haven't actually correctly worked out all the risks. "To many, nuclear energy looks to be a relatively clean and logical choice in an era of increasing resource scarcity. Yet the record requires us to ask painful questions: have we correctly calculated its risks and costs? Are we doing all we can to keep the world's people safe?" Ban said. "The unfortunate truth is that we are likely to see more such disasters."
The problem with nuclear power stations, as Hugh Gusterson says in the latest Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is that they are too complex and interconnected. It's impossible to calculate the risk.
"Nuclear reactors are such inherently complex, tightly coupled systems that, in rare, emergency situations, cascading interactions will unfold very rapidly in such a way that human operators will be unable to predict and master them. To this anthropologist, then, the lesson of Fukushima is not that we now know what we need to know to design the perfectly safe reactor, but that the perfectly safe reactor is always just around the corner. It is technoscientific hubris to think otherwise. This leaves us with a choice between walking back from a technology that we decide is too dangerous or normalising the risks of nuclear energy and accepting that an occasional Fukushima is the price we have to pay for a world with less carbon dioxide. It is wishful thinking to believe there is a third choice of nuclear energy without nuclear accidents."
no comment untill now