The National Politics of Nuclear Power: Economics, Security, and Governance by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Public Policy, Arms Control, Political Science, Political Freedom, Environmental Policy
ISBN: 9781136294372
Google: CfddxpE6TFwC
Goodreads: 17537511
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

National security arid secrecy Strong Weaker

Technocratic ideology Strong Slightly weaker

Economic interventionism Strong Weaker

Centrally coordinated energy stakeholder network Strong Strong

Subordination of opposition to political authority Strong Slightly weaker

Social peripheralization Strong Slightly weaker

Source: Authors.

Following the accident, 116,000 people were evacuated from a 30 square kilometer exclusion zone constituting parts of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. The large city of Pripiat, Ukraine, had to be completely abandoned. The Chernobyl meltdown distributed more than two hundred times the radiation released by the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. More than five million people, including 1.6 million children, were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, and about 246,000 square kilometers of land was contaminated with iodine-131, ruthenium-106, cerium-141 and -144, cesium-137, strontium-89 and -90, and plutonium-238. Some tracts of land will remain lethally radioactive for more than 10,000 years. At least 350,000 more people eventually had to be forcibly resettled from the area. Cesium and strontium severely contaminated agricultural products, livestock, and soil as far away as Japan and Norway.29

Public confidence in nuclear power governance has become more tenuous in modern times because the disaster at Chernobyl highlighted the threats posed by human error. For instance:

The safety test responsible for the accident was being conducted under the jurisdiction of experts not trained in nuclear safety, only electrical engineering.

Operators failed to stabilize the reactor at 20 percent of power, operating it counter to operating procedures at just 6 or 7 percent.

Operators withdrew all but six of 215 control rods from the reactor core, although at least 30 were required to safely operate.

Operators turned off automatic safety equipment intended to shut down and cool the reactor in an emergency.

Operators kept the unit running despite computer warnings several minutes before the accident that the reactor was in serious danger.

Design flaws meant that operators had only four seconds to get control rods into the core to stop the explosion – not enough time – and the graphite moderator suffered a runaway reaction that saw power increase 1,400 times in five seconds, more than 100 times the reactor’s capacity at full power.

The facility had no containment structure, ostensibly so the Soviets could build the reactor as cheaply as possible.30

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.