Japan: Is this the end for nuclear power?

So much for the “nuclear renaissance,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. Until last week’s earthquake-triggered disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, even some prominent environmentalists had begun championing nuclear power, portraying it as a means to end our dependence on foreign oil and “significantly mitigate global warming, all at the same time.” President Obama has promoted the addition of nuclear plants in his new energy policy, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was poised to approve the construction of 20 new reactors. But with crisis turning to catastrophe in Japan, those plans will now almost certainly go on hold, so these plants’ ability to withstand earthquakes can be reviewed. There will probably be questions raised about all the 104 operating nuclear plants around the United States—many of them close to population centers and/or seismic fault lines. Even if the risk of catastrophe is tiny, “the worst-case scenario is so dreadful as to be unthinkable.” Rather than the answer to all our prayers, nuclear power is suddenly looking “more like a bargain with the devil.”

The Japanese are keeping admirably “cool amid the chaos,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. “We wish we could say the same for the reaction in the U.S.” The fact is that “every energy source has risks.” Oil rigs sometimes blow up and cause giant spills; coal mines sometimes collapse, killing miners. Adding more solar and wind power, meanwhile, would require claiming vast tracts of land and seascape for giant windmills and vast arrays of solar panels—and overcoming the fierce resistance of the “not in my backyard” crowd. To see the scope of the problem, consider the Cape Wind project, said Alex B. Berezow in RealClearScience​.com. When a company proposed building a windmill farm off the Massachusetts coast, the wealthy environmentalists who own homes on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard—including the Kennedy family—raised a giant stink. Environmentalists “should not be given a seat at the adults’ table until they demonstrate an ability to propose a serious solution to the most serious of problems.”

Fine, let’s get serious, said Anne Applebaum in The Washington Post. Advocates of nuclear energy insist that the next generation of nuke plants will be safer still. But “if the competent and technologically brilliant Japanese can’t build a completely safe reactor, who can?” The Fukushima plant may have been built 40 years ago, but its safety systems were constantly reviewed and re-engineered to proof it against any conceivable natural disaster. The engineers were wrong—weren’t they?

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Indeed they were, said James Acton in Foreign Policy, making this a pivotal moment for the nuclear industry. It must resist the temptation to argue “that the accident in Japan was simply an extraordinarily improbable confluence of events and that everything is just fine.” The only way for the industry to restore public trust is to reassess the basic design of all nuclear reactors, and “to determine whether they are truly capable of withstanding the whole range of natural and man-made disasters that might befall them.” But let’s also realistically “weigh the risks of every alternative,” said the Chicago Tribune. Air pollution from burning fossil fuels, scientists say, kills 2 million people a year—far more than “all the nuclear incidents worldwide,” including Chernobyl. The possibility of a nuclear accident will always be with us, and it will always be scary, “but not as scary as a world starved for electricity.”