Japanese plants prompt U.S. nuclear power discussion

As Japan tries to address nuclear reactor problems, the United States should try to stay a step ahead, according to some professors.

Looking at the problems in Japan could be educational for the United States, Environmental Science professor Benjamin Horton said. Because the earthquake and tsunami caused destabilization of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, Horton believes that the United States should be learning from Japan’s mistakes.

“I do not think they were prepared for a tsunami of this magnitude,” Horton said. Although the reactors were built to code, those codes have changed since their construction about 60 years ago. “Our understanding of seismology has increased so much” since the generators were constructed, Horton said.

Because Japan had not updated its reactors, the earthquake placed necessary backup generators — which help maintain the nuclear reactors’ temperatures — below sea level.

As Horton explained, although the reactors were not significantly damaged by the earthquake and tsunami, “the permanent flooding has caused problems to the reestablishment of cooling systems.”

Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Noam Lior also sees the danger of nuclear power. The current reactors are outdated in the United States and “technological leaps are needed,” Lior said. He believes that the United States cannot continue using “these old reactor designs.”

Since half of the nuclear reactors functioning today are older than the average Penn undergraduate according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, concerns regarding their technology worry both Lior and Horton. According to Environmental Science professor Stephen Phipps, most of our generators in the U.S. are from the same period as Fukushima Daiichi power plant’s generators.

In particular, Horton is looking at the Pacific Northwest fault line off the coast of northern California. Though it has been peaceful for 300 or 400 years, he said it is due to rupture. This is an active area of research, according to Horton, and acting now could protect the United States from a similar disaster.

Although Lior believes that the Japanese nuclear reactors’ destabilization was caused by “a combination of accidents,” Horton is confident that areas of Northern California to Washington could face a similar magnitude earthquake and tsunami. Similarly, some nuclear reactors within the U.S. were built close to faults, specifically near the San Andreas faultline.

However, according to Lior, “nuclear energy has the potential for being a good source of power once the issues are resolved.” But the current technology makes nuclear reactions potentially dangerous source of energy for two reasons.

First, the nuclear material, once used, is still potentially dangerous for up to a million years — and according to Lior, we are not disposing of the waste properly.

Second, the materials themselves could be dangerous in the wrong hands. Misuse of nuclear material meant for creating energy could result in nuclear weapons such as bombs or poisons. “The risk is there, the cost is there. Vigilance is necessary,” Lior said.

But a future in nuclear energy could be a cleaner future, Lior said. Currently, the United States’ electricity comes mainly from the burning of fossil fuels. Only 20 percent of energy comes from nuclear plants, which produce “less greenhouse gases than most renewable energies” such as solar or wind energy, Lior said. Compared to fossil fuels, nuclear plants produce about ten thousand times the energy per unit weight.

According to Phipps, initial reaction to the problem in Japan is impacting energy opinion in the same way the Gulf of Mexico incident impacted the opinion of drilling. “There’s going to be a lot of reexamination of the design of the reactors and their vulnerabilities” which could improve the status of generators, since many reactors attempt to extend the lifetimes of the generators rather than build new ones, said Phipps.

Potential problems with nuclear power “could be resolved with time,” Lior said. But now, the only problem is finding the means to make this cleaner source of energy safe.

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