According to latest news, the German government has decided to close down two more of its Nuclear reactors. With this the number of active nuclear reactors inside Germany will be reduced to just six.
In 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel had announced that Germany will gradually shut down all of its 17 Nuclear Power reactors by the year 2022.This came in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster of Japan. At that time all 17 were operational and immediately after the japanese disaster, Merkel asked to close down 8 of the 17 plants. Some call it a wise decision, while others criticize it as a hasty and immature one. Let us analyse.
Since the commissioning of the first nuclear reactor in the US,in 1952, it has been a subject of intense debate, to discuss "the safety aspects of having a nuclear power plant". Although, some may argue that it provides cheap electricity at just 2 cents per unit, many are of the opinion that still it is advisable "not" to have a nuclear power plant. What is the reason? Well, there are mainly two reasons :-- (1) When the nuclear material like Uranium or Plutonium has been used inside the plants, it does produce electricity through a controlled process of atomic fission.But,at the same time,it also produces radioactive waste,which by all accounts is very harmful to mankind. This radioactive waste needs to be disposed off very quickly to such areas where there are almost no living beings, for example Antarctica. If this gets delayed,it may cause life-threatening diseases like Blood cancer,etc. to those who come into its aerial contact within a matter of minutes. (2) Governments across nations realized, what a Tsunami or an earthquake can do to the lives of innocent people, after what happened at the Fukushima power plant during March 2011,in Japan. The number of lives affected by the earthquake at the Fukushima plant, is estimated to be somewhere near 200,000 !! Such a large number of people are estimated to have received direct nuclear radiation which started occuring, after the earthquake struck,at that plant. The scientists and the plant employee staff there, tried to stop this disaster, but it couldn't be controlled. Initially it was expected that the number of people which got affected would be somewhere around 10,000, but then gradually it was declared that even after 3 months of the earthquake, in June 2011, there was a very high percentage of nuclear waste found inside the drinking water and underground water channels of Fukushima. As that city is near the sea-coast,it was also feared that some nuclear material got submerged into sea-water and possibly could have made it all the way to the western shores of the Unites states !! Fortunately, that didnot occur. Yet, even as on today, thousands of people of Fukushima are seen still under the influence of radiation and many of them have been diagnosed of cancer. Even so many new-born babies, born after 2011, are showing symptoms of abnormal diseases like autism,etc. The Fukushima disaster is considered to be the worst nuclear disaster after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.
On April 26,1986 the nuclear power plant located at Chernobyl in the then undivided country of USSR ( now it comes inside Ukraine ).An explosion and fire released huge quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe.
The disaster began during a systems test on 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, which is near the city of Pripyat and in proximity to the administrative border with Belarus and the Dnieper River. There was a sudden and unexpected power surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, a much larger spike in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of steam explosions. These events exposed the graphite moderator of the reactor to air, causing it to ignite. The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere over an extensive geographical area, including Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. According to official post-Soviet data, about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.
Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have been burdened with the continuing and substantial decontaminationand health care costs of the Chernobyl accident. A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency examines the environmental consequences of the accident.Another UN agency, UNSCEAR, has estimated a global collective dose of radiation exposure from the accident "equivalent on average to 21 additional days of world exposure to natural background radiation"; individual doses were far higher than the global mean among those most exposed, including 530,000 local recovery workers who averaged aneffective dose equivalent to an extra 50 years of typical natural background radiation exposure each.Estimates of the number of deaths that will eventually result from the accident vary enormously; disparities reflect both the lack of solid scientific data and the different methodologies used to quantify mortality—whether the discussion is confined to specific geographical areas or extends worldwide, and whether the deaths are immediate, short term, or long term.
Thirty-one deaths are directly attributed to the accident, all among the reactor staff and emergency workers. An UNSCEAR report places the total confirmed deaths from radiation at 64 as of 2008. The Chernobyl Forum predicts the eventual death toll could reach 4,000 among those exposed to the highest levels of radiation (200,000 emergency workers, 116,000 evacuees and 270,000 residents of the most contaminated areas); this figure is a total causal death toll prediction, combining the deaths of approximately 50 emergency workers who died soon after the accident from acute radiation syndrome, nine children who have died of thyroid cancer and a future predicted total of 3940 deaths from radiation-induced cancer and leukemia.
In a peer-reviewed publication in the "International Journal of Cancer" in 2006, the authors (following a different conclusion methodology to the Chernobyl Forum study, which arrived at the total predicted death toll of 4,000 after cancer survival rates were factored in) stated, without entering into a discussion on deaths, that in terms of total excess cancers attributed to the accident:
The risk projections suggest that by now [2006] Chernobyl may have caused about 1000 cases of thyroid cancer and 4000 cases of other cancers in Europe, representing about 0.01% of all incident cancers since the accident. Models predict that by 2065 about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident, whereas several hundred million cancer cases are expected from other causes.
Also based upon extrapolations from the linear no-threshold model of radiation induced damage, down to zero, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that, among the hundreds of millions of people living in broader geographical areas, there will be 50,000 excess cancer cases resulting in 25,000 excess cancer deaths.
For this broader group, the 2006 TORCH report, commissioned by the European Greenspolitical party, predicts 30,000 to 60,000 excess cancer deaths.The environmental advocacy group Greenpeace reports the figure at 200,000 or more.
The accident raised concerns about nuclear power worldwide and slowed or reversed the expansion of nuclear power stations.The accident also raised concerns about the safetyof the Soviet nuclear power industry, slowing its expansion for a number of years and forcing the Soviet government to become less secretive about its procedures.The government coverup of the Chernobyl disaster was a "catalyst" for glasnost, which "paved the way for reforms leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union".
In short, although the Chernobyl disaster seems small in terms of casualties rightnow, in the next 50 years, it is likely to take away the lives of more than one million people in countries like Russia,Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakistan, Uzbekistan,Poland, Hungary etc. which are located not so far from the Chernobyl power plant. The argument here is,it is advisable not to have a nuclear plant at all rather than have one and then suffer from such huge scale devastation, when something goes wrong.
As of today,USA has the highest number of Nuclear power reactors in the world at 99, functioning at 61 Nuclear power plants spread amongst 30 different states of that country. France comes second with 58 operational reactors. Japan has 48,China has 30,South Korea has 24 and India has 21. With the knowledge that energy from non-conventional sources like wind,sun has much lesser risk involved in it, countries like Germany are considering a gradual phase-out from its reliance on nuclear power. The germans donot want to take any chance, after they faced massive destruction in the holocast of the second world war,it seems. Because, looking at the world map,Germany is the only country in the world rightnow,which has a target of completely shutting down all of its nuclear reactors within the next 6 years now. This at a time, when some countries like India and Pakistan are still considering massive expansions in their capacity of power generated from nuclear reactors !! As on today, India has 21 operational nuclear reactors with a total installed capacity of 5308 MW, and it plans to add 6 more nuclear reactors to enhance its nuclear power production capacity by 4300 MW taking the total to 9600 MW. Similarly, India's neighbor but at the same time its age-old foe Pakistan, has just 3 power reactors as on today but it plans to expand it to a total of 5. It also holds an ambitious plan of taking the tally to 32 by the year 2050.
So we have a peculiar scenario here. Some countries are expanding their nuclear power capacities and number of reactors, whereas countries like Germany and Italy either are considering a total phase-out from nuclear energy ( like Germany ) or they have made civil nuclear power "illegal" (as in case of Italy ). Countries like Austria, Australia, NewZealand,etc. didnot and donot have any nuclear reactor, at all. Those who are not having any reactor at all, are obviously considering the safety aspects at a much higher level. Whereas those, who are already having a large number of plants yet considering to build several more, are ready to take risks of the kind of Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. In other words, they have a mindset that thinks -- " What if tens of thousands of people are very likely to suffer in cancer and then die,due to the above two tragic events. How can we not forget the fact that the power produced from nuclear power reactors is much cheaper than other sources of power like a Thermal power plant running on coal ?" This very reason is driving nations like India and Pakistan towards further expansions in their nuclear power capacties.
After a detailed analysis, I personally would opine that although the power produced by a nuclear power plant is much cheaper compared to other sources of power, one cannot overlook completely the safery hazards they come in the same single package alongwith the huge power generation capacities. Not only the lives of the citizens are very important but also their disease-free manner of living inside a country is equally important. A country leader, with the designation of a Prime Minister or a President of that country,who choses to build more number of nuclear reactors,even after the world has witnessed such massive disasters as Chernobyl and Fukushima, isnot a leader in a true sense. Because if he really loves his country, his motherland, he wouldnot put the lives and life-standards of its people at any sort of risk, in order to generate more power at cheaper rates. It is high time, that Prime Ministers and Presidents of various countries should understand this now very categorically,so that within the next decade, the world slowly switches from nuclear energy into renewable sources of energy.
**************************************************************
Comments