Here, we would be speaking of up to tens of trillions of dollars and Swiss francs of financial losses, not to speak of human ones. Think for instance of the real-estate value of New York City in the USA or of Zurich in Switzerland, both rather close to a nuclear plant in operation, which would become in a worst case scenario. But this upper cut-off could be exceedingly large and there is yet no evidence of a maximum being reached thus far …. Of course, the Earth itself is finite, thus there is an upper cut-off … to the maximum possible damage. A 2015 study from European researchers estimated that there was a 50% chance of another Fukushima-scale nuclear accident within the next 50 years, a Chernobyl-scale event in the next 27 years, or a Three Mile Island-scale event in the next 10 years.īut the study also suggested that accidents such as those at Fukushima and Chernobyl – devastating though they were – are not the worst such disasters imaginable. If it is impossible to map out all of the possible ways in which a nuclear power plant or another complex system might fail, that has not stopped some researchers from using statistical tools to attempt to quantify the potential of a future disaster. Moreover, Perrow wrote, the systems we create to prevent the failures we can imagine add even more complexity to the system and can themselves create additional pathways for failure. The potential pathways for failure in such systems are so numerous, so difficult to imagine, that it is impossible to control for them all. It is easy to see their error in hindsight, but how likely is it that we can imagine and prepare for all of the possible ways in which a nuclear accident might play out?Īs Charles Perrow wrote in his book, Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies, complex, tightly coupled systems create the potential for cascading failures. But the specific series of cascading events that led to the Fukushima disaster were not anticipated by the operators of the plant (or else were considered and dismissed). The years since Fukushima have seen the United States take steps to improve the safety of nuclear power plants, which should reduce the likelihood. So, the question we really mean to ask is: How likely is it? If there is one thing that the last decade – heck, 2020 alone – showed, it is that anything is possible. The duration of the cleanup will be measured in decades, but how many decades remains unclear.Īs the public and policy-makers consider the legacy of Fukushima, one question that is likely to emerge is: Can a nuclear accident of a similar scale happen again? The price tag of the cleanup could range – depending on who you ask and which costs you include – from $73 billion (the Japanese government’s estimate) to as much as $470 billion. It is still unclear how or when the 880 tons of fuel that melted during the disaster will be removed or how the 770,000 tons of radioactive waste created at the plant will be dealt with. No one is quite sure what will happen when the tanks storing the radioactive water that is continually being generated at the plant – tanks that now hold 1.2 million tons of water – reach capacity in 2022. No one knows when or if the tens of thousands of people who remain displaced from the area around the plant will be able to return to their homes. Even a decade after the event, however, the fog surrounding the costs and impacts of the Fukushima disaster continues to linger. Looking back at our posts 10 years later, it’s striking to recall the confusion of that time period. Half a world away, my former Frontier Group colleague Travis Madsen and I worked for the next two weeks to compile and disseminate the most accurate information we could find about the ongoing disaster and its implications – an attempt to fight through the rampant misinformation being circulated at the time. Ten years ago today, an earthquake and tsunami triggered multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan.
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