You're reading: Japan tragedy revives nuclear power debate

As Japan struggles to contain the worst nuclear power disaster since Ukraine’s Chornobyl in 1986, debate over the safety of the energy source is flaring again.

The renewed focus is coming amid a renaissance of the nuclear power industry in Ukraine and in many nations of the world – even, perhaps, in Belarus, which absorbed 70 percent of the radioactive fallout from the accident.

Russia is a leader of the nuclear power revival, providing billion-dollar loans to its impoverished neighbors in a push led by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Rosatom, the state-run nuclear power company, claims 16 percent of the world’s nuclear power construction market.

The government monopoly designed and helped build several plants in China, India and Bulgaria during the 2000s and has announced plans to construct more in India, Slovakia, Turkey, Jordan and Morocco. But many plans are now under review or being suspended in the wake of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan, the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that threatens the plant’s reactors with a radioactive meltdown.

A man wears two signs -“Chornobyl – 25 years” and “Warning – Radioactive Breathers” takes part in a rally on March 16 organized by Ukrainian Chernobyl Union and the Chornobyl Invalids Union in front of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov’s office. Liquidators of the 1986 nuclear catastrophe are demanding that the government maintain their social benefits while the cabinet plans to cancel them. Demonstrators also expressed their solidarity with the Japanese people following blasts at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. (AFP)

While European countries are unlikely to see a similar earthquake, a tradition of anti-nuclear industry activism in a number of European countries and contemporary political dynamics could slow down the post-Fukushima construction of new power plants. So far, Ukraine’s government has given no indication it will reconsider plans to sharply increase its number of nuclear reactors by 2030 from a current 15, as provided for in the country’s energy strategy adopted in 2006.


You cannot reduce to absolute zero the possibility that something can go wrong. You have to do nuclear power right, but even when you do it right – and the Japanese may very well have done it right – accidents still happen.”


– Laurin Dodd, who helps to manage a project to build a shelter for the damaged Chornobyl reactor.

Laurin Dodd, who helps to manage a project to build a shelter for the damaged Chornobyl reactor, said that nuclear energy will always carry big and uncertain risks. “You cannot reduce to absolute zero the possibility that something can go wrong,” Dodd said. “You have to do nuclear power right, but even when you do it right – and the Japanese may very well have done it right – accidents still happen.”

According to international experts, the situation in Japan is still less dire, from the standpoint of radiation released, than the explosion at the Chornobyl power plant 25 years ago this April. But Japan’s problems are close and still uncontained. So far, four reactors at the Fukushimi plant are in danger of meltdown and all have experienced hydrogen explosions. There are confirmed reports that radiation is leaking from the plant while elevated levels of radiation have been measured in Tokyo.

While Germany and Switzerland have reconsidered the use of nuclear power, Ukraine has decided to increase its dependence on its 15 water-cooled reactors at four nuclear power plants that currently generate about half of the nation’s electricity. Construction of two more nuclear reactors at the Khmelnytsky nuclear power plant resumed last year and are scheduled to come online in 2016 and 2017.

The government in February signed an agreement with Russia’s state-run Atomstroyexport, a subsidiary of Rosatom, to complete the work. Russian banks will largely finance the project, giving Ukraine a 3.4 billion euro loan that has to be paid back within five years after the new reactors go into service.

Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko inked a similar deal with Russia on March 16 to build a nuclear power plant on its border with Lithuania. During the signing ceremony in Minsk on March 16, Putin said that the final contract would be hammered out in the next month to provide at least $6 billion of the total required in loans.

The billion-dollar projects will likely anchor the countries even further in Russia’s political and economic orbit, according to critics, who say Ukraine and Belarus will depend on Russian nuclear fuel to power the new reactors.

This image from Tokyo Electric Power Co. via Kyodo News, shows the damaged No. 4 unit of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Okumamachi of northeastern Japan on March 15. White smoke billows from the No. 3 unit. (AP)

“If Japan can’t control its nuclear reactors, making European countries uneasy, then what can we expect to happen in Ukraine, where all reactors in operation are obsolete,” Dmytro Khmara, a nuclear expert for Ukraine’s National Ecological Center, said. “In order to modernize energy production safely and economically, we should, step by step, take the old reactors offline and develop new modern sources of energy,” he added.

Worldwide, the trend is the same, with some 62 new nuclear reactors under constructions, another 158 planned and proposals for yet another 324 more.

If Japan can’t control its nuclear reactors, making European countries uneasy, then what can we expect to happen in Ukraine, where all reactors in operation are obsolete.”

– Dmytro Khmara, a nuclear expert for Ukraine’s National Ecological Center.

According to Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, there is presently no alternative to nuclear energy use in Ukraine. “Only rich countries can afford to discuss the possibility of closing [nuclear power plants],” he told journalists in Istanbul, Turkey, on March 15.

Dodd expressed a similar view, saying the benefits of electricity produced by nuclear reactors still outweigh the potential risk of another disaster. “I feel very badly for the Japanese. Even though the nuclear power plants which broke down [in Fukushima] are rather old units, the Japanese were using them safely and the systems worked … until the tidal wave rolled in.”

Most experts say a combination of human error and design flaws caused the accident Chornobyl on April 26, 1986, when a reactor exploded spewing radiation over Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, most of Europe and beyond. Some 50 workers died fighting the fire and meltdown of the reactor core, while another 4,000 deaths resulted from exposure to excessive radioactivity. More than 135,000 people were evacuated from the area, including the nearest town of Prypyat, immediately following the accident, and another 200,000 over the ensuing months.

The Soviet-designed RBMK (reaktor bolshoy moshchnosty kanalny, high-power channel) built in Chornobyl was a pressurized water-cooled reactor with individual fuel channels that used graphite as its moderator, unlike the boiling water reactors currently used in the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

Japanese nuclear expert Dr. Yoshio Matsuki said the fundamental difference between the Chornobyl and Fukushima Daiichi plants is the containment vessel housing the Japanese reactors.

While there is no one alternative to electricity generated by today’s nuclear power plants, we should make it a priority to develop environmentally safe sources of energy.’

– Laurin Dodd, who helps to manage a project to build a shelter for the damaged Chornobyl reactor.

“At Chornobyl, there was no containment structure. “The nuclear fuel was ejected into the atmosphere when the reactor exploded. The Fukushimi plant has several additional safety features, such as the containment structure housing the reactor,” he said.

In addition to making electricity, the Chornobyl nuclear reactor was also designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium, according to Zakhar Byelotserkovsky, who for almost 30 years (1974-2003) worked as the chief design supervisor for the Ukraine’s Rivne nuclear power plant. He blamed the curiosity of Kharkiv engineers for triggering the 1986 meltdown at the plant.

“They wanted to find out how long the stations steam turbines could keep spinning after powering down. The safety systems shut down during the ‘experiment,’” he said.

Byelotserkovsky, 75, said Soviet engineers in the late 1960s came to the conclusion that it was unsafe to build a safe nuclear power stations in seismically active zones. When his colleagues at UralTeploProekt proposed building an underground nuclear reactor on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, the geologists threw a fit, he said.

Plans to build a nuclear reactor in Kazantip, Crimea were also nixed because earthquakes measuring 8 on the Richter magnitude scale are also possible there.

“While there is no one alternative to electricity generated by today’s nuclear power plants, we should make it a priority to develop environmentally safe sources of energy,’ he said. “Some countries, such as Norway, can generate enough electricity for their domestic needs using hydropower, but not Ukraine, which is relatively flat. Unlike the Netherlands, Ukraine also can’t erect tens of thousands of wind turbines to produce enough electricity. Hydroelectric power stations built on the Dnipro River during Soviet times destroyed colossal amounts of arable land, killing flora and fauna.”

Dodd agreed, but said it will likely take decades for Ukraine to phase in alternative sources of energy. “It is unlikely this will happen in our lifetimes. Indeed, our children and our grandchildren will no doubt have to rely more on electricity generated by nuclear energy than we do today,” he said.


Kyiv Post staff writer Peter Byrne can be reached at
[email protected].

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