Nuclear hazards

Safety of Nuclear Power Reactors ( Updated March 2022) • From the outset, there has been a strong awareness of the potential hazard of both nuclear criticality and release of radioactive materials from generating electricity with nuclear power. • As in other industries, the design and operation of nuclear power plants aims to minimise the likelihood of accidents, and avoid major human consequences when they occur. • There have been two major reactor accidents in the history of civil nuclear power – • These are the only major accidents to have occurred in over 18,500 cumulative reactor-years of commercial nuclear power operation in 36 countries. • The evidence over six decades shows that nuclear power is a safe means of generating electricity. The risk of accidents in nuclear power plants is low and declining. The consequences of an accident or terrorist attack are minimal compared with other commonly accepted risks. Radiological effects on people of any radioactive releases can be avoided. Context In relation to nuclear power, safety is closely linked with security, and in the nuclear field also with safeguards. Some distinctions apply: • Safety focuses on unintended conditions or events leading to radiological releases from authorised activities. It relates mainly to intrinsic problems or hazards. • Security focuses on the intentional misuse of nuclear or other radioactive materials by non-state elements to cause harm. It relates mainly to external threats to materials or...

Keeping good records is a cardinal rule of bureaucracy, and at government agencies routinely hiding the sensitive ones, and utterly suppressing the most embarrassing ones, is the prevailing general imperative. In the United States, outsiders with resources and persistence, such as activists and journalists, can try to use the legal crowbar of the Freedom of Information Act to pry facts loose. But there is an easier way to look at government secrets and even peruse them at leisure: just be appointed an official government historian. There are hundreds of them working for the various federal agencies in the U.S., salary and benefits decent. Their job is to sift, with scholarly thoroughness, through raw, archival evidence, in order to determine how well or badly an agency has carried out its mission. Because these histories are usually published, in installments, long after the events they describe, agencies somehow relax. They permit quasi-independent, in-house scholars to poke through their business, potentially releasing information that would have brought the agency to its knees if it had been revealed in more timely fashion. Thomas Wellock, formerly a professor at Central Washington University, became the historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (N.R.C.) more than a decade ago. He brought chops to the job—training in engineering, experience testing nuclear reactors, and a Ph.D. in history from Berkeley—and, in March of 2021, published the sixth in a series of ...

Author • Najmedin Meshkati Professor of Engineering and International Relations, University of Southern California Disclosure statement Najmedin Meshkati received research funding from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the mid-1990s. Partners The Conversation UK receives funding from these organisations View the full list A blast on June 6, 2023, destroyed the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River in eastern Ukraine. The rupture lowered water levels in a reservoir upriver at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Enerhodar. The reservoir supplies water necessary for cooling the plant’s shutdown reactors and spent fuel, which is uranium that has been largely but not completely depleted by the fission reaction that drives nuclear power plants. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has inspectors on-site to monitor effects of the war at the plant, issued a statement saying that there was The Conversation asked Why are dropping water levels a threat to the power plant? The immediate situation is becoming very precarious. The dam is downstream from the plant, meaning that the flooding will not jeopardize the plant. But the plant draws water from a major reservoir on the river for its cooling system. This reservoir is draining because the downstream dam has been damaged. The plant doesn’t need the massive amount of water it otherwise would because its six reactors are in cold shutdown. But the plant still needs water for three purposes: to reduce the res...

An International Atomic Energy Agency team arrived in Tokyo on Monday for a final review before Japan begins releasing massive amounts of treated radioactive water into the sea from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, a plan that has been strongly opposed by local fishing communities and neighboring countries The head of a South Korean team of experts said Wednesday they saw all of the facilities they had requested to visit at Japan’s tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant and Japanese officials had carefully answered their questions about a contentious plan to release treated but still slightly radioactive water into the sea, a sign of a further thawing of ties between the countries In the days that followed, some 47,000 residents left their homes, many people in areas As workers continued their attempts to cool the reactors, the appearance of increased levels of radiation in some local food and water supplies prompted Japanese and international officials to issue warnings about their On April 12 nuclear regulators elevated the severity level of the nuclear emergency from 5 to 7—the highest level on the scale created by the