The Chernobyl accident happened during a supposedly benign experiment. The reactor core heated up uncontrollably, its cooling stopped, the fuel melted, and an explosion and fire occurred, spewing out huge quantities of radioactivity.

Chernobyl has three lessons to offer. First, while no technology is 100 percent safe, nuclear technology is uniquely disaster-prone and in a category of its own. There’s an orders-of-magnitude difference between the world’s worst chemical accident, the Bhopal gas disaster, and Chernobyl. In Bhopal, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people died from toxic exposure since 1984.

For Chernobyl, conservative estimates, based on assumptions of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, put the additional cancers and leukaemias at 34,000 to 140,000, leading to 16,000 to 73,000 deaths. Other researchers, who rely on 5,000 medical and scientific papers (compared to 350 for the conservative estimate), put the fatalities at 850,000. Whatever the right estimate, it’s indisputable that Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout has killed tens of thousands.

Chernobyl revealed the demonic potential of a nuclear accident to turn into a prolonged public health and social catastrophe. Chernobyl is still present in Europe—in the sheep in Scotland that face slaughter restrictions because they fed on contaminated grass, in curbs on consumption of wild mushrooms and berries in Germany, and in the decades-long displacement of 350,000 people from radioactive zones in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Company town Pripyat, near Chernobyl, has become a ghost city.

Second, Chernobyl exposed the global nuclear industry’s practice of secrecy, deception and disinformation to hide the ugly truth about nuclear disasters, mislead governments and minimise its own responsibility for endangering public safety. The USSR, to which Ukraine belonged, didn’t officially acknowledge Chernobyl’s radioactivity release for two full days. Festive May Day parades were organised in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, further exposing the public.

Soon, the Western nuclear industry jumped in and claimed Chernobyl happened because Ukraine belongs to the East and is industrially backward. The radioactivity release was high because the reactor didn’t have a containment dome. Such accidents could never happen in the West. However, the force of the explosion was at least 20 times greater than the maximum any Western containment dome can withstand.

Besides, engineers who have designed, operated and licensed reactors have carefully analysed different reactor types in the world and concluded that all of them are vulnerable to a loss-of-coolant-accident (LOCA), leading to a core meltdown and catastrophic radioactivity release.

Meanwhile, the Soviet government delayed evacuating the worst-affected zones. The International Atomic Energy Agency stepped in with offers of assistance in researching Chernobyl’s health effects. The IAEA’s charter commits it to propagate nuclear power as safe and economical. It has never taken a remotely impartial stand vis-à-vis the nuclear industry.

To gain a figleaf of credibility, the IAEA deviously roped the World Health Organisation into estimating the health damage. But under a 1959 agreement between the two, the IAEA can veto anything WHO proposes. The IAEA unethically trivialised the Chernobyl damage. For years, it claimed only 32 people, mostly fire-fighters, died.

In the current crisis, Fukushima’s operator TEPCO and the Japanese government also practised the same kind of deception and hid the truth. TEPCO has a record of lying on 200 earlier occasions.

In India, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) Secretary Srikumar Banerjee went one better. More loyal than the King, he declared there was “no nuclear accident” at Fukushima. The March 12-14 hydrogen explosions, a result of severe nuclear-core damage, were “a purely chemical reaction”! Nuclear Power Corporation chairman SK Jain described the crisis not as a nuclear “incident”, but “a well-planned emergency preparedness programme …”.

Similarly, the CEO of the French company Areva, which has designed the European Pressurised Reactors being built at Jaitapur, said “Fukushima was not a nuclear catastrophe.” But Areva evacuated its own employees from Fukushima the day after the accident!
Chernobyl’s third lesson is that nuclear power generation is inherently hazardous given the nature of the technology. No amount of precautions and multiple safety systems with redundancy can cope with accidents and make nuclear power safe. Besides, the nuclear industry, now strapped for resources the world over—thanks to massive under-performance, losses and strain on public budgets—won’t even take simple, relatively inexpensive, measures to improve safety.

The Fukushima disaster was only waiting to happen. The reactors were 40 years old and based on a design (General Electric’s Boiling Water Reactor) with a primary containment that TEPCO knew was weak. TEPCO also stored intensely radioactive spent fuel in the reactor building, thus spreading hazards through “common-mode failure”. The back-up generators weren’t stored at a height and were vulnerable to flooding.

The sequence of events at Fukushima may be special. But the all other reactors in the world too can undergo a crisis—with different sequences, but the same end-result. The Fukushima disaster wasn’t caused by the earthquake/tsunami. They only triggered a crisis in reactors that were vulnerable in the first place. There was a station blackout, which caused a LOCA and three partial meltdowns. But station blackouts aren’t rare in reactors.

Other nuclear disasters, including LOCAs and core meltdowns, such as Chalk River (Canada, 1952), Windscale (UK, 1957), Three Mile Island (US, 1979) and Chernobyl, were caused by operator error, equipment breakdown, emergency backup failure, and loss of external power. Natural disasters only make nuclear accidents more likely.

The nuclear industry has persistently understated the probability of core-damage accidents. In the US, the 1975 Rasmussen Report said the probability was one in 20,000 years of reactor operation. But Three Mile Island happened within 500 reactor-years. On current industry estimates, one core-damage will occur every 45 to 100 years. But this has happened once every 8 years since 1970.

According to a better estimate, severe accidents may occur as often as once every 1,400 reactor-years. So, in the world’s 437 reactors, an accident could occur every 3.2 years. Damage from nuclear accidents is uncontrollable in space and time. Radioactivity knows no boundaries. Many isotopes remain hazardous for thousands of years, threatening future generations.

Nuclear power confronts society with a problem of exceptional gravity: should we accept two Chernobyls every seven years, with thousands of deaths and huge expanses of land made uninhabitable for centuries? The answer must be a resounding no.

Nuclear power is unsafe for two other reasons. It involves radioactivity exposure at each step, from uranium mining to reactor operation and waste storage/reprocessing. Radiation is harmful in all doses. Secondly, nuclear power leaves toxic wastes which remain hazardous for thousands of years. The half-life of plutonium-239, produced by fission, is 24,000 years. Once released, ultra-toxic plutonium, named after the Greek God of Hell, will be significantly present for a quarter-million years. Science knows no way of safely storing nuclear wastes for such periods, leave alone neutralising them.

However, if nuclear power is inherently unsafe, and also expensive, why is the world investing in it? In truth, the world is moving away from nuclear power. Global nuclear output has annually declined by 2 percent over the past four years and now only accounts for about 5.5 percent of the world’s commercial primary energy. The number of operating has fallen from its 2002 peak (444) to 437. The world’s reactor fleet is rapidly aging. Not enough units are coming online.

The global nuclear industry was on life support even before Fukushima. In fact, it never fully recovered from Chernobyl. Since January 2008, only 9 new reactors have been added. But 11 reactors have shut down. Swiss investment bank UBS describes the Fukushima crisis as “the most serious ever for the credibility of nuclear power”. The industry seems headed for terminal decline.

As this bad dream ends, there’s good news. Renewable energy is making great forward strides. Renewable capacity additions have outpaced nuclear start-ups for 15 years. In the US, the share of renewables in new capacity addition skyrocketed from 2 percent in 2004 to 55 in 2009. In 2010, for the first time, the world’s capacity in wind turbines, small hydro, solar and biomass reached 381,000 MW, higher than the global nuclear capacity (375,000 MW).

In India, there’s abundant scope for renewables which are safe, economical, leave no toxic waste, and are appropriate to decentralised energy consumption. Yet, our rulers are hell-bent on pushing through nuclear power projects in utter contempt towards public opinion, in violation of fundamental rights and rational considerations of safety and environmental protection. They showed crass insensitivity by announcing on Chernobyl Day that they would go ahead with the ill-conceived Jaitapur plant. They will regret this decision. (IPA Service)