Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era

Lyman, Edwin; Schoeppner, Michael; Hippel, Frank von

doi:10.1126/science.aal4890

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…evacuation within their defined zones depending on the level of severity of a disaster. Recently, an international effort led by the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM, 2016; see also Lyman et al, 2017) has sought to understand from the Fukushima nuclear accident the health and safety risks associated with nuclear plant operations. This work has led to the finding that for certain accidents, an extension of the evacuation zone is needed to 110-170 km (NASEM, 2016, 40-41 and 178-183;and Lyman et al, 2017).…”

Section: South Korea's Nuclear Power Build-out As a Case Of Systemic mentioning

confidence: 99%

Expanding the Conceptual and Analytical Basis of Energy Justice: Beyond the Three-Tenet Framework

Lee

Byrne

2019

Front. Energy Res.

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Energy justice is now an established research topic in the field of energy policy. Despite the growing popularity of energy justice research, however, conceptual and analytical frameworks used in the field have remained limited. This paper reviews the prevailing three-tenet framework of energy justice which has shaped the current discourse based on the three dimensions-distributional, procedural, and recognition justice. As an effort to contribute to expanding the research agenda of energy justice problems, we propose a new understanding of the production of energy injustice by characterizing three institutionalized tendencies of dominant modern energy systems:(1) preference for large-scale technical systems and distancing of system designs from local decision-making processes, (2) centralization of energy production and concomitant distancing of supply from users, and (3) widespread 'risk-taking' tendencies portrayed by designers and proponents of current energy supply systems as a necessary 'price to pay' for technological innovation and social progress. We then connect these three tendencies to political, economic, and technical ideologies of modernism that often provide justifications for energy inequity: (1) top-down political and economic decision-making systems, (2) technical interpretation of sustainability, (3) specialist understanding of fairness, and (4) path dependency in the modern energy paradigm. Finally, we present an illustration of how this new conception of systemic energy injustice can be applied in practice using the case of South Korea's nuclear power system and Seoul's One Less Nuclear Power Plant Initiative.

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Section: South Korea's Nuclear Power Build-out As a Case Of Systemic mentioning

confidence: 99%

Expanding the Conceptual and Analytical Basis of Energy Justice: Beyond the Three-Tenet Framework

Lee

Byrne

2019

Front. Energy Res.

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“…And the tool that had been been used to rationalize the capture was the same probabilistic risk assessment that the AEC had introduced 40 years earlier to try to convince the US public that nuclear power plants were safe. Unfortunately, as two colleagues and I showed in a recent confrontation with the NRC over the practice of dense-packing spent fuel pools in the US, regulation based on estimates of the probabilities of events that have never happened is so arbitrary and opaque that it can be and has been skewed against safety upgrades that nuclear-power plant operators consider unacceptably costly (Lyman, Schoeppner, and von Hippel 2017).…”

Section: The Aps Reactor Safety Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Citizen Scientist: Frank Von Hippel’s Adventures in Nuclear Arms Control

Hippel

Kurokawa

2019

Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament

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In this part, von Hippel starts by briefly describing his family background, his education and his pursuit of a career in theoretical physics. He then describes the beginning of his engagement with policy issues as a result of the student protests and activism while he was an assistant professor at Stanford University and a fellow at the University of California Berkeley during 1966-70. This resulted in the book, Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the Political Arena, coauthored with one of his students. A spin-off article in Science magazine on "Public-Interest Science" resulted in a one-year fellowship at the National Academy of Sciences during which he organized the American Physical Society's 1974 summer study on nuclear reactor safety, which facilitated his transition into a career in nuclear policy analysis at Princeton University.

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“…It is noted that this observed zirconium fire phenomenon would occur at elevated temperatures when the coolant in the spent fuel pool is sufficiently drained out as assumed in the OECD/NEA SFP project. a zirconium fire to the environment was raised by Hippel and Schoeppner [3][4][5]. In addition, a number of spent fuel pool accident analyses were performed by several safety analyses codes such as MELCOR, MAAP, ASTEC, ATHLET-CD, ICARE/CATHARE, RELAP/SCDAPSIM, MAAP, and SPECTRA [6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Limitations of an Air-Oxidation Breakaway Model to Predict a Zirconium Fire in a Spent Nuclear Fuel Pool Accident

Park¹,

Park

2019

Sustainability

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The OECD/NEA Spent Fuel Pool (SFP) project was conducted to investigate consequences of spent nuclear fuel pool accident scenarios. From the project, it was observed that cladding temperature could abruptly increase at a certain point and the cladding was completely oxidized. This phenomenon was called a “zirconium fire”. This zirconium fire is one of the crucial concerns for spent fuel pool safety under a postulated loss of coolant accident scenario, since it would lead to an uncontrolled mass release of fission products into the environment. To capture this critical phenomenon, an air-oxidation breakaway model has been implemented in the MELCOR code. This study examines this air-oxidation breakaway model by comparing the SFP project test data with a series of MELCOR code sensitivity calculation results. The air-oxidation model parameters are slightly altered to investigate their sensitivities on the occurrence of the zirconium fire. Through such sensitivity analysis, limitations of the air-oxidation breakaway model are identified, and needs for model improvement is recommended.

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Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era

Abstract: Flawed analyses underlie lax U.S. regulation of spent fuel

Cited by 14 publications

References 5 publications

Expanding the Conceptual and Analytical Basis of Energy Justice: Beyond the Three-Tenet Framework

Expanding the Conceptual and Analytical Basis of Energy Justice: Beyond the Three-Tenet Framework

Citizen Scientist: Frank Von Hippel’s Adventures in Nuclear Arms Control

The Limitations of an Air-Oxidation Breakaway Model to Predict a Zirconium Fire in a Spent Nuclear Fuel Pool Accident

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