US POWER PLANTS:AMERICA'S "NUCLEAR renaissance" could become a casualty of explosions in two reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant north of Tokyo.
“We just have to call a time-out and examine whether or not those safety features necessary in the future are built into new nuclear power plants in our country,” representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts told CNN yesterday.
Mr Markey, a member of the House committee that oversees nuclear power, earlier sent a letter to president Barack Obama asking for a moratorium on new nuclear plants in the US until emergency procedures are defined. Mr Markey says no new plants should be built in earthquake-prone areas, and that 31 US plants which use GE boiling water reactors like those at Fukushima should be thoroughly reviewed.
Senator Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, who is usually a proponent of nuclear energy, told CBS News that the US should “put the brakes on right now until we understand the ramifications of what’s happening in Japan”.
The US produces 20 per cent of its electricity in 104 nuclear reactors located in 65 plants across the country.
Yet the nuclear power programme was virtually frozen for three decades after the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. No one was killed there, but Americans were terrified when the plant vented radioactive steam to prevent a meltdown.
In recent years, a consensus formed around nuclear energy, which was seen as a “clean” alternative to fossil fuels because it does not contribute to global warming. Republicans, Democrats and even some environmental groups advocated pressing ahead with new plants. In February 2010, Mr Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to build two new reactors at a plant in Georgia.
In his 2012 draft budget, Mr Obama proposed $36 billion for the construction of up to 20 new plants. New reactors in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee were to have begun operating over the next four years, and a total of eight new reactors were due to come online by 2020.
A White House spokesman said, “information is still coming in about the events unfolding in Japan, but the administration is committed to learning from them and ensuring that nuclear energy is produced safely and responsibly here in the US.” Mr Obama “believes that meeting our energy needs means relying on a diverse set of energy sources that includes renewables like wind and solar, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear power,” the spokesman said.
But renewable sources are not yet capable of supplying electricity on the scale required in the US. Both the coal and petroleum sectors have been struck by disasters in the past year. Twenty-nine miners were killed in an explosion in a coal mine in West Virginia in April 2010. The same month, 11 men were killed when BP’s Deep Horizon oil rig exploded before spilling millions of gallons of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico.
Nuclear power is seen as indispensable to the US economy, but the industry will come under close scrutiny following the radiation leaks at Fukushima. At particular risk are two plants on California’s Pacific coast, within miles of the San Andreas fault. Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, and San Onofre, near Long Beach, have two pressurised water reactors each.
Both California plants were designed to withstand a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, but the 1906 San Francisco quake measured 8.3 and the Japanese quake 8.9.
Some defenders of nuclear power are undeterred by events in Japan. “I don’t think right after a major environmental catastrophe is a very good time to be making American domestic policy,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, told Fox News. “We ought not to make American and domestic policy based upon an event that happened in Japan.”