fukushima's lasting legacy is a fear of nuclear power
TRANSCRIPT
9 March 2013 | NewScientist | 3
TWO years ago, on 11 March 2011, the world watched as technicians struggled to bring the overheating Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in eastern Japan under control. Fears mounted that there might be dire consequences as far away as the west coast of the US.
As it turned out, the effects of the crisis paled in comparison with the destruction wreaked by the triggering earthquake and tsunami. While 16,000 people were killed by the natural disaster, a new analysis suggests that relatively few people will suffer serious health effects from the nuclear fiasco (see page 4).
Fukushima has nonetheless joined Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in the roll call of big-headline nuclear disasters; and its impact on the fortunes of nuclear energy – and low-carbon power generation – is still playing out.
For Germany, Fukushima was the last straw. Within a decade, all its nuclear plants will be shut. In the UK and the US, public hostility, combined with a commercial reluctance to build nuclear plants without financial safety nets from governments, make any major nuclear revival unlikely. In both countries too, the toxic legacy of
past military and civil nuclear endeavours looms large. Even France’s legendary enthusiasm for nuclear power has faded under President François Hollande.
Today, the majority of new nuclear builds are in China, India and Russia. Nuclear’s future looks increasingly Asian – including,
perhaps, Japanese. Most of the country’s nuclear plants will probably reopen next year, following costly safety upgrades.
Worldwide, nuclear capacity continues to rise, but more slowly than before Fukushima. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported this week that construction began on seven new plants in 2012. So nuclear is certainly not dead. But its rate of expansion is feeble compared with that of coal and gas-fired plants, hundreds of which are opening every year.
And there’s the rub. Although renewable energy is making good progress, large-scale power generation is still dominated by burning fuel, whether uranium or fossil carbon. It seems the world still fears nuclear energy more than it fears climate change. That is very probably a mistake. n
A dangerous shutdown
EDITORIAL
Nuclear power has yet to recover from the Fukushima fiasco
ONE of the more unorthodox ornaments that adorns New Scientist’s London office is a large model of an inflatable space station that might one day be put into Earth orbit. Not long ago, a film-maker wanted to borrow it. We were fine with that, as was its inventor. But the views of another party had to be considered too: the US Department of State.
The reason? US anti-arms trafficking rules extend to information about space flight equipment. The model had to be judged for its relevance to, say, North Korea’s rocket programme.
This example might seem absurd, but the rules can have more serious consequences. It may prevent SpaceX from fully describing the difficulties that
beset its Dragon cargo capsule last week, for example (see page 4), thus depriving the space-flight community of technical insights. Those planning to send a couple to Mars, who may need SpaceX to lift off, face many stiff challenges (see page 6). Knee-jerk secrecy should not be among them.
Our friendly film-maker did eventually get the green light. Let’s hope those working with the real thing can cut through the red tape too. n
Gagging for space secrets
“Large-scale power generation is still dominated by burning uranium or carbon fuel”
THE Stone Age; the Bronze Age; the Iron Age. Mastery over a new material has at times changed human society so radically as to be practically synonymous with whole swathes of our history.
Are those times over? Today, we rely more than ever on inventing, rather than discovering, new materials. Precision engineering on microscopic scales even lets us devise metamaterials that behave in ways that nature can’t match – like those that manipulate light to make much-celebrated “invisibility cloaks”.
But while the creation of useful materials has become something of an everyday miracle (see page 41), our era could still plausibly be badged the Silicon Age or, more gloomily, the Age of Carbon Dioxide. Perhaps we are at the dawn of the Graphene Age, or the Age of Hydrogen. Only future historians will know for sure. n
Everyday miracle for our times
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