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THE WITNESS
Historic news that Japan will phase out nuclear power has rounded off yet another terrible week for the global nuclear industry.
Japan’s decision to end its reliance on nuclear power by the 2030s means it will join countries such as Germany and Switzerland in turning away from nuclear power after last year’s Fukushima disaster. Continue reading
A satellite image shows damage at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant In Fukushima Prefecture after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami (© DigitalGlobe)
The Japanese authorities stated last Friday that Fukushima is in a state of “cold shutdown. This is not true. At first glance, the announcement that the stricken nuclear reactors are now “stable”sounds like some rare good news from the disaster zone. Not at all. As we all know, first impressions can be deceptive.
The industry definition of “cold shutdown” means that the temperature inside a nuclear reactor has stabilized below 95℃ from the hellish temperatures of the nuclear fission process. In the case of Fukushima, this suggests the crisis is over. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, the Japanese authorities have cheated by redefining “cold shutdown” to suit the situation at Fukushima. Only operating nuclear reactors can be put into a state of “cold shutdown”. Reactors that have suffered meltdowns – like those at Fukushima – cannot be. The 260 tons of nuclear fuel inside the Fukushima reactors melted and burned through the steel floors of the containment vessels and into the thick concrete under pads. The melted fuel is far from under control. This means the temperature inside the reactor can’t be regulated by conventional means. Nobody at Fukushima actually knows what state this highly radioactive molten fuel is in or what temperature it is at because it’s obviously far too dangerous to go in and find out.
Also, tens of thousands of tons of water that was pumped into the reactors in the attempt to cool them remains inside and is highly radioactive. The authorities have no idea what to do with it. It’s leaking into the environment with some of it reaching the Pacific Ocean. Last week, Fukushima’s operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) had to abandon plans to dump it in the ocean after protests by local fishermen. Right now, there’s nowhere for it to go, other than to leak into the sea and groundwater.
So, we don’t have a “cold shutdown” at Fukushima.
If we dig a bit deeper, we find that the disaster at Fukushima is an ongoing nightmare that shows no sign of ending soon.
The government chose the inadequate, 20-kilometre exclusion zone around the plant because it didn’t want to evacuate highly populated areas like Fukushima City, about 60 kilometres from the disaster site. A much larger zone should have been declared to ensure public safety. Nine months after the disaster people are still waiting for proper support and compensation from the TEPCO and the government. Greenpeace’s latest analysis continued to find radioactive hotspots in the city, even at places that were supposed to have been decontaminated. Of the thousands of contaminated houses in Fukushima City, only a few have been decontaminated.
On the eve of the “cold shutdown” announcement last week, undercover reporter Tomohiko Suzuki told a chilling story of conditions for workers at the Fukushima plant. It reads like a dispatch from Hell. Suzuki says workers are manipulating the readings of their radiation detectors or not using detectors so they can spend longer on the site. The radiation screening of workers isn’t being carried out properly and work is apparently “purely cosmetic” and “shoddy.” Corners are being cut and there’s no money to try new solutions that might help solve the crisis. “Absolutely no progress is being made,” he says. To make matters worse, Suzuki claims that that organized crime – Japan’s Yakuza – is playing a big part in recruiting workers.
News of a “cold shutdown” sounds like a PR smokescreen.
Where is the leadership from TEPCO and the Japanese government? They certainly are working hard on their public relations and spin. If only they were putting as much energy into bringing the Fukushima reactors under control and looking after the wellbeing of the Japanese people.
The priority for the Japanese Government should also be to ensure that all remaining nuclear reactors across the country are shutdown permanently while providing resources for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. It’s the least they can do.
By: Justin McKeating
One of the many odd qualities of the nuclear industry is its seemingly boundless optimism: “everything’s going to be just fine, folks.”
Apparently, there’s no need to worry about terrorists attacking nuclear reactors. Which is why Greenpeace activists could peacefully walk into two French nuclear power plants – Nogent-sur-Seine and Cruas – this morning without being challenged by any security measures whatsoever should be absolutely no cause for alarm, according to the authorities. The two activists who entered the Cruas plant were able to avoid detection for 14 hours. Our team that entered the Nogent-sur-Seine power plant, just 95 kilometres from Paris, were even able to scale the dome of one of the reactors and paint a pretty picture on it.
By: Justin McKeating
The debate on the future nuclear power is back on in earnest in France, and many other countries. That’s thanks to our activists paying surprise visits to two French nuclear power plants this week. The news that they could so easily get through the security around the nuclear plants has taken off, rekindling the debate about the safety of nuclear power right across the world. News of the embarrassment of the French nuclear industry over its weak security system has reached Russia, Japan, Brazil, China and many points in between. Is the nuclear industry and media finally waking up to how vulnerable nuclear reactors are? We hope so.
In an attempt to deflect criticism from his beloved nuclear industry, France’s President Sarkozy called our action “rather irresponsible”. Mr Sarkozy – we would say that security at nuclear reactors that is so weak that people walk in and out as they please is a great deal more irresponsible.
Dominique Miniere, the head of French nuclear reactors for the plant’s owner EDF, tried very hard to put a positive spin on things by saying the Greenpeace teams at the Cruas and Nogent-sur-Seine nuclear plants were caught by security “much faster this time than in the past”. That might be true but our people still managed to evade security at Nogent-sur-Seine for four hours and for a much longer 14 hours at Cruas. If that’s “much faster” we’d hate to think how slow those security guys were before.
No amount of spin from the French government or EDF can hide the fact that our action this week is big news in France and across the world. Nor is this a unique problem, a one-off event or a concern just in France. In 2002, our activists scaled the dome of the now closed Jose Cabrera reactor in Spain, gained access to South Africa’s Koeberg nuclear power plant, and infiltrated the Doel plant in Belgium. In 2003, we entered the UK’s Sizewell B nuclear power plant. In 2005, we visited the Borselle plant in the Netherlands. The following year saw an activist fly his paraplane within 300 metres of the reactors at the Flamanville plant in France. The country’s Belleville plant was Greenpeace’s destination in 2007. We painted a skull on the dome of Germany’s Unterweser reactor in 2009. Then there was Forsmark in Sweden in 2010.
Need we go on? Maybe the nuclear industry should hire Greenpeace as security consultants because whoever’s been responsible for protecting nuclear reactors up until now clearly isn’t earning their money. Nuclear reactors, wherever they are in the world, are vulnerable. They always have been and remain so right now.
French Industry Minister Eric Besson said in response to our latest action this week: “We will have to take measures to ensure it doesn’t happen again”. Emergency meetings are apparently being held. “There will be lessons learned,” says Dominique Miniere. They’ve certainly failed to learn the lessons of previous infiltrations so we can only hope that they will this time. The motives of the next people to walk into a nuclear power might not be as pure as Greenpeace’s. The world is now watching.
Huge delays and cost overruns totalling billions for nuclear reactors under construction in Finland and France are once again demonstrating that nuclear power is no match for renewables in the fight against climate change. Since construction started on these two reactors global capacity of renewables like wind and solar has grown at rates between 15% to 50% a year – way ahead of even the Chinese economy. In the same period, new solar plants alone have added more electricity generation to the grid than nuclear plants.
The fight against climate change is a race against time. If we are to avoid the catastrophic consequences of rising global temperatures then strong and meaningful action must be taken immediately. The world needs to forget about building nuclear reactors that are massively expensive, dangerous and take too long to build, and embrace safe, cheap renewable energy and energy efficiency that are safe, quickly established and getting cheaper every day.
Enough solar energy hits the Earth in one hour to give us power for a whole year. We’re never going to run out of wind. Solar power is already cheaper than nuclear power and will soon be cheaper than oil power. Look at Google building the world’s largest wind farm.
However, the nuclear industry claims that nuclear power is a vital part of the energy mix needed to beat climate change. The disastrous problem with that idea is that despite the squandering of massive amounts of time, money and resources the nuclear industry is showing no sign of urgency in the battle against global warming.
There is, and has been, much talk about the new generation of nuclear reactors that are somehow going to miraculously spring up across the world in the next ten years and save us from climate change. The news that is emerging from the nuclear industry this week shows this to be a fantasy.
The leader in this so-called Third Generation of nuclear reactors is the European (or Evolutionary) Pressurised Reactor (EPR), designed by French nuclear giant, AREVA. The EPR, if any are ever completed, will be the largest nuclear reactor the world has ever seen. Three EPRs are currently being built worldwide at Olkiluoto in Finland, Flamanville in France and Taishan in China. News coming from the Finnish and French construction sites this week is alarming to say the least. New problems have been revealed in the two projects that were already billions of euros over budget and years behind schedule.
Finland’s EPR was supposed to begin operation in 2009 but – because of delays, safety concerns and lack of proper oversight – will not be working until 2013 at the earliest. Its initial cost of three billion euros has almost doubled. Now we hear there are yet more, new problems: despite being under construction since 2005, the reactor’s design is not yet complete. If the design does not pass inspection, yet more money and time will be wasted making any necessary changes.
There have also been yet more worrying lapses in safety procedures and quality control of the reactors safety systems including the backup cooling systems (these are the systems that failed at Fukushima in Japan causing the nuclear disaster we are now witnessing). Work is being carried out without the required plans or tests and there is a lack of effective supervision. All this means significant delays to the reactors completion. Remember that race against time we mentioned.
Over at Flamanville in France things are no better. We were promised that lessons would be learned from Finland’s disastrous experience but once again we see the nuclear industry’s stubborn refusal to learn those lessons. We see almost exactly the same problems in France as in Finland.
French energy giant EdF, which is building the EPR at Flamanville, has announced this week that instead of being operational in 2012
the reactor will not now be ready until 2016 at the earliest. The cost of the project has rocketed from 3.3 billion euros to six billion. Tragically, two workers have also been killed during construction.
Just look at these costs – lives, time, money, energy and resources. We cannot afford to waste any of them. Think what could have been achieved if they had been devoted to renewable energy and energy saving projects. Perhaps the race against climate change wouldn’t be as urgent as it is now.
Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Kuwait are already leading the way in abandoning nuclear power. Japan’s Prime Minister Kan has called for his country to look to a nuclear-free future in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Germany already has 370,000 people employed in its renewable energy industry. They’re way ahead in the race to beat climate change. It’s not too late for the rest of the world to catch them but time is short.
These EPR reactor projects in France and Finland – along with plans to build new reactors everywhere else – should be abandoned immediately and priorities fully devoted to safe, clean and sustainable methods of energy production.
Read more: Greenpeace’s new briefing about the construction problems of the EPR reactor at Olkiluoto, Finland