Facing Up to Nuclear Risk

Nuclear accidents like Japan's Fukushima crisis are scary. So is a future without nuclear power

Testing for radiation exposure in Kawamata on Mar. 14 Asahi Shimbun/EPA

By Brendan Greeley

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A German group frequently meets in front of nuclear plants wearing T-shirts that read "aussteiger," or dropout. On Mar. 12 they had planned a protest in front of Neckarwestheim 1 and 2, reactors that squat together on the Neckar River near Germany's border with France. Germany gets more than a quarter of its power from nuclear reactors, but the group was not attempting to improve safety features or tighten regulatory control; they want Germany to drop out of nuclear power altogether.

They may get their wish. As news of explosions at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant reached Germany, the rally swelled to tens of thousands, and protesters ran a human chain from Neckarwestheim 30 miles south to Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg. Two days later, mindful of looming elections in the region, Germany's conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, agreed to power down five of the country's oldest reactors—including Neckarwestheim 1—pending a national safety review. Previously Merkel had reversed her predecessor's plan to end the country's nuclear program by 2022. A lot has changed since Mar. 11.

It's hard to disagree with a nuclear safety review. Switzerland, China, and the U.K. have announced them, as has the Obama Administration. Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wants the U.S. to go further and suspend permits for any reactor in seismic areas. These steps all seem sensible and may prove smart politics. They also fail to address the problem. America does not want for safety assessments of nuclear power; what it lacks is an honest public debate about it. Anyone who would take reactors off line has to explain what carbon-free alternative would replace them. Anyone who would keep them has to explain why they're not being replaced over time by newer plants with more safety features and, more important, has to admit that there is no such thing as a zero-risk nuclear plant. As tempting as it is to poke fun at the German Left, America suffers from a different strain of the same denial: The Germans, at least, have a plan, even though it's unrealistic. We've ignored the problem altogether.

"People in democratic societies," says Bill Kinsella, "don't know how to talk about a phenomenon as complex as nuclear energy." An associate professor at North Carolina State University, Kinsella has spent his career studying how societies communicate about nuclear power. Nuclear reactors, he says, seem too potent and mysterious for an ordinary person to understand, so citizens tend to respond in two ways—they either reject nuclear power out of hand (Germany's Green Party) or defer to expert opinion (the U.S., at least for now).

Experts and safety reviews can inform our decisions, but they can't make them for us. David Okrent, who advised the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on reactor safety for 20 years, points out that reactors are designed for only a set of defined events. "The early nuclear reactors weren't designed for tornadoes," he says, "until one came along in Arkansas, and then we thought, 'we gotta design for tornadoes.' It's not easy to be all-knowing."

Reactor risk modeling, like financial risk modeling, he says, stops short of accounting for truly rare events. While working for the NRC, Okrent spoke to seismologists, whose opinions diverged only on low-probability events. "It's hard to quantify a rare event. When you get to rare events, the design is usually up-to-but-not-including." This is where the experts begin to arrive at irreconcilable differences of opinion. It is up to us, the consumers of energy, to reconcile them.

If President Obama's safety committee were to heed Representative Markey's advice, it would have to tell Arkansas to power down its Russellville Nuclear 1 plant, which lies 180 miles from the New Madrid Fault line—and supplies 30 percent of the state's power. We don't need a safety review to tell us this; we need to decide whether we're willing to accept the risk of a New Madrid earthquake. If we aren't, we need to decide what will replace Russellville Nuclear 1. Will it be a newer reactor, farther away? A coal-fired plant?