Nuclear safety and security

[7] As of 2011[update], nuclear safety considerations occur in a number of situations, including: With the exception of thermonuclear weapons and experimental fusion research, all safety issues specific to nuclear power stems from the need to limit the biological uptake of committed dose (ingestion or inhalation of radioactive materials), and external radiation dose due to radioactive contamination.

National requirements and regulations for addressing this objective throughout the lifetime of nuclear power plants are to take into account the relevant IAEA Safety Standards and, as appropriate, other good practices as identified inter alia in the Review Meetings of the CNS.

However, it was in 1972 when three hijackers took control of a domestic passenger flight along the east coast of the U.S. and threatened to crash the plane into a U.S. nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Former NRC Chairman Dale Klein has said "Nuclear power plants are inherently robust structures that our studies show provide adequate protection in a hypothetical attack by an airplane.

[57] In March 2012, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said that the Japanese government shared the blame for the Fukushima disaster, saying that officials had been blinded by an image of the country's technological infallibility and were "all too steeped in a safety myth.

[73] This is partly because the timeframes in question when dealing with radioactive waste range from 10,000 to millions of years,[74][75] according to studies based on the effect of estimated radiation doses.

[82] An assessment conducted by the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA) in France concluded that no amount of technical innovation can eliminate the risk of human-induced errors associated with the operation of nuclear power plants.

[83] According to Mycle Schneider, reactor safety depends above all on a 'culture of security', including the quality of maintenance and training, the competence of the operator and the workforce, and the rigour of regulatory oversight.

[84] Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control, discovered that at least 700 "significant" accidents and incidents involving 1,250 nuclear weapons were recorded in the United States between 1950 and 1968.

[5] The list of potential black swan events is "damningly diverse":[5] Nuclear reactors and their spent-fuel pools could be targets for terrorists piloting hijacked planes.

[102][103] Many of the early safety procedures and waste disposal practices were inadequate, and government documents have since confirmed that Hanford's operations released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the Columbia River, which still threatens the health of residents and ecosystems.

[104] The weapons production reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, but the decades of manufacturing left behind 53 million US gallons (200,000 m3) of high-level radioactive waste,[105] an additional 25 million cubic feet (710,000 m3) of solid radioactive waste, 200 square miles (520 km2) of contaminated groundwater beneath the site[106] and occasional discoveries of undocumented contaminations that slow the pace and raise the cost of cleanup.

[111] The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles, crippling the Soviet economy.

There were flaws in, and lax enforcement of, the safety rules governing Japanese nuclear power companies, and this included insufficient protection against tsunamis.

The establishment repeatedly played down the risks and suppressed information about the movement of the radioactive plume, so some people were evacuated from more lightly to more heavily contaminated places".

[2] Nuclear reactors are such "inherently complex, tightly coupled systems that, in rare, emergency situations, cascading interactions will unfold very rapidly in such a way that human operators will be unable to predict and master them".

[3] Lacking electricity to pump water needed to cool the atomic core, engineers vented radioactive steam into the atmosphere to release pressure, leading to a series of explosions that blew out concrete walls around the reactors.

The cascade of events at Fukushima had been predicted in a report published in the U.S. several decades ago:[45] The 1990 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for safety at the country's power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.

Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, has said that Japan's history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering.

[45] According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japan "underestimated the danger of tsunamis and failed to prepare adequate backup systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant".

This repeated a widely held criticism in Japan that "collusive ties between regulators and industry led to weak oversight and a failure to ensure adequate safety levels at the plant".

The report says the "inadequate" basic reactor design — the Mark-1 model developed by General Electric — included "the venting system for the containment vessels and the location of spent fuel cooling pools high in the buildings, which resulted in leaks of radioactive water that hampered repair work".

Facing a dearth of reliable information on radiation levels, citizens armed themselves with dosimeters, pooled data, and together produced radiological contamination maps far more detailed than anything the government or official scientific sources ever provided.

[127] Two government advisers have said that "Japan's safety review of nuclear reactors after the Fukushima disaster is based on faulty criteria and many people involved have conflicts of interest".

[128] In March 2012, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda acknowledged that the Japanese government shared the blame for the Fukushima disaster, saying that officials had been blinded by a false belief in the country's "technological infallibility", and were all too steeped in a "safety myth".

[83] As one director of a U.S. research laboratory put it, "fabrication, construction, operation, and maintenance of new reactors will face a steep learning curve: advanced technologies will have a heightened risk of accidents and mistakes.

[83] There are concerns about developing countries "rushing to join the so-called nuclear renaissance without the necessary infrastructure, personnel, regulatory frameworks and safety culture".

[121] Some countries with nuclear aspirations, like Nigeria, Kenya, Bangladesh and Venezuela, have no significant industrial experience and will require at least a decade of preparation even before breaking ground at a reactor site.

Non-proliferation policy experts have questioned "the use of private contractors to provide security at facilities that manufacture and store the government's most dangerous military material".

[149][150] Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in June 2010 that is believed to have been created by the United States and Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.