Nuclear Safety - Risks

Risks

The routine health risks and greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear fission power are small relative to those associated with coal, but there are several "catastrophic risks":

The extreme danger of the radioactive material in power plants and of nuclear technology in and of itself is so well-known that the US government was prompted (at the industry's urging) to enact provisions that protect the nuclear industry from bearing the full burden of such inherently risky nuclear operations. The Price-Anderson Act limits industry's liability in the case of accidents, and the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act charges the federal government with responsibility for permanently storing nuclear waste.

Population density is one critical lens through which other risks have to be assessed, says Laurent Stricker, a nuclear engineer and chairman of the World Association of Nuclear Operators:

The KANUPP plant in Karachi, Pakistan, has the most people — 8.2 million — living within 30 kilometres of a nuclear plant, although it has just one relatively small reactor with an output of 125 megawatts. Next in the league, however, are much larger plants — Taiwan's 1,933-megawatt Kuosheng plant with 5.5 million people within a 30-kilometre radius and the 1,208-megawatt Chin Shan plant with 4.7 million; both zones include the capital city of Taipei.

• International Nuclear Events Scale
• Comparative Risk Assessment
• Statistical Risk Assessment
• Probabilistic risk assessment
  • Severe Accident Risks: An Assessment for Five U.S. Nuclear Power Plants NUREG-1150 1991
  • Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences CRAC-II 1982
  • Rasmussen Report: Reactor Safety Study WASH-1400 1975
  • The Brookhaven Report: Theoretical Possibilities and Consequences of Major Accidents in Large Nuclear Power Plants WASH-740 1957

The AP1000 has a maximum core damage frequency of 5.09 x 10−7 per plant per year. The Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) has a maximum core damage frequency of 4 x 10−7 per plant per year. General Electric has recalculated maximum core damage frequencies per year per plant for its nuclear power plant designs:

BWR/4 -- 1 x 10-5

BWR/6 -- 1 x 10-6

ABWR -- 2 x 10-7

ESBWR -- 3 x 10-8