[ RadSafe ] Fukushima Daiichi Was: RadSafe Digest, Vol 2378, Issue 1

[andrewa at alder.ws]

>    1. Is This Green Peace Campaigner Written Article Accurate?
>       (Roger Helbig)

It looks pretty good to me. We need to face the facts that Fukushima
Daiichi was and is a big black eye for the nuclear industry. The article
is political, yes, but it doesn't distort the facts. It doesn't need to.

Fukushima Daiichi was a showpiece of the Japanese Nuclear industry. My
father was proudly shown around it on one of his visits to Japan as the
then Managing Director (and Chief Scientist) of the then Australian Atomic
Energy Commission.

It underlines to me that some nukes are better than others. But if we
don't learn from it, others will validly conclude that no nuke is safe.

Of course this will not in any way hinder the Chinese or Indian nuclear
programs, any more than the western environmental movement hindered the
Soviet nuclear program which the western world had condemned as unsafe in
the mid 1950s when the RBMK design was first announced.

I quote (not word for word) from the answer my father heard the Soviet
delegation give on that occasion: "Yes, it is true that this design has
positive power and void coefficients of reactivity, and we are aware that
in the west this is considered unsafe. But our control systems are so far
in advance of anything that the west will ever develop that in our hands,
this is a safe design." I imagine it's there somewhere in the World Power
Conference archives.

Andrew Alder