Sun, Aug 03, 2014
Safety of nuclear plant not
guaranteed
By Lai Cheng-i
賴正義
The Ministry of economic Affairs announced on
Wednesday that Reactor No. 1 of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei
City’s Gongliao District (貢寮), also known as the Longmen (龍門) Nuclear Power Plant, had passed safety inspections
and tests. Minister of Economic Affairs Chang Chia-juch (張家祝) and members of the ministry’s safety evaluation
group said that they would feel quite confident about the plant should it go
into operation.
However, assessments of a nuclear plant’s safety
should take into account its entire life cycle.
A plant that is up to standard before it starts
operating provides no guarantees to assuage people’s worries about the plant’s
safety once in operation, not to mention the disposal of spent fuel from the
plant when it is eventually decommissioned.
Is the Longmen plant really safe?
Apart from risks arising from deliberate or
accidental human actions, any qualified civil engineer has full confidence in
the safety of a nuclear power plant or waste disposal facility that they have
designed based upon the conditions and safety factors on which the engineer
relied during production. There is plenty of data to show that the natural and
social conditions of today will change in time, and Taiwan is an especially
changeable environment.
Natural threats like typhoons, earthquakes and
landslides, as well as human factors such as overdevelopment, make Taiwan’s
steep and mountainous terrain very unstable. Also, in recent years the
greenhouse effect has had a noticeable impact in the form of climate change.
Super-powerful typhoons and super-heavy rainstorms can cause sudden changes in
the surface terrain, and they also bring about gradual changes in the
subterranean geological and hydrological environment.
When the environment in which nuclear power stations
or fuel disposal facilities are located changes to the extent that it no longer
matches the conditions under which the structures were originally designed,
they will no longer comply with safety factors, creating a high risk of nuclear
disasters.
Experience teaches that nothing is absolutely safe
and no environment will remain unchanged forever. No technology is completely
fail-safe and everyone makes mistakes. If weather experts are still unable to
precisely predict the track that a typhoon will follow, what guarantee can
nuclear power experts give for safety in an industry that involves very
long-term, complex and changeable factors?
All worldwide nuclear accidents have fallen outside
experts’ predictions. Luckily for Taiwan, it has thus far not suffered a
destructive or deadly nuclear accident, but government officials and nuclear
experts cannot deny or overlook the possibility of such an accident occurring
in the future.
Safety evaluation group members who took part in the
recent inspection emphasize that nuclear safety is a very specialized, complex
and rigorous field. What they should admit, however, is that an assessment of
the safety of a nuclear power plant throughout its life cycle goes beyond
expertise and complexity. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to account for
every eventuality.
Thousands of Taiwanese school students are suffering
the consequences of education reforms that were not planned with sufficient
thought, but at least those mistakes can be rectified. However, when it comes
to nuclear power, it can never be guaranteed to be 100 percent safe, and if
anything goes wrong it could wreck the lives of millions of people for
countless generations. How can we gamble away people’s lives and livelihoods
just to save a few dollars on our monthly electricity bills?
Lai Cheng-i is a professor at National Taiwan
University of Science and Technology.
Translated by Julian Clegg
