Risk of another Chernobyl- or Fukushima-type accident worryingly plausible

Professor Benjamin Sovacool of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, who co-authored the studies, says: “Our results are sobering. They suggest that the standard methodology used by the International Atomic Energy Agency to predict accidents and incidents — particularly when focusing on consequences of extreme events — is problematic. 

“The next nuclear accident may be much sooner or more severe than the public realizes.”

The team also call for a fundamental rethink of how accidents are rated, arguing that the current method (the discrete seven-point International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, or INES, scale) is highly imprecise, poorly defined, and often inconsistent.

In their new analysis, the research team provides a cost in U.S. dollars for each incident, taking into account factors such as destruction of property, the cost of emergency response, environmental remediation, evacuation, fines, and insurance claims. And for each death, they added a cost of $6 million, which is the figure used by the U.S. government to calculate the value of a human life.

That new analysis showed that the Fukushima accident in 2011 and the Chernobyl accident in 1986 cost a combined $425 billion — five times the sum of all the other events put together.

However, these two extremes are rated 7 — the maximum severity level — on the INES scale. Fukushima alone would need a score of between 10 and 11 to represent the true magnitude of consequences.

Further, the authors emphasize that such frequency-severity statistical analysis of holistic consequences should be used as a complementary tool to the industry standard Probabilistic Safety Assessment, especially when aggregate consequences are of interest.

Professor Sovacool adds: “The results suggest that catastrophic accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima are not relics of the past. 

“Even if we introduce new nuclear technology, as long as older facilities remain operational — likely, given recent trends to extend permits and relicense existing reactors — their risks, and the aggregate risk of operating the global nuclear fleet, remain.” 

Finally, the authors emphasize that this work is not comparative in nature, that is, it does not quantify the risks of other energy sources. It provides a risk assessment for nuclear power alone, thus informing a single criterion, for a single power source, in the selection of a portfolio of multiple power sources, where many criteria must be considered.

Fellow co-author Professor Didier Sornette stresses: “While our studies seem damning of the nuclear industry, other considerations and potential for improvement may actually make nuclear energy attractive in the future.”

The fifteen most costly nuclear events analyzed by the team are:

  1. Chernobyl, Ukraine (1986) — $259 billion
  2. Fukushima, Japan (2011) — $166 billion
  3. Tsuruga, Japan (1995) — $15.5 billion
  4. TMI, Pennsylvania, U.S.(1979) — $11 billion
  5. Beloyarsk, USSR (1977) — $3.5 billion
  6. Sellafield, U.K.(1969) — $2.5 billion
  7. Athens, Alabama, U.S.(1985) - $2.1 billion
  8. Jaslovske Bohunice, Czechoslovakia (1977) — $2 billion
  9. Sellafield, U.K.(1968) — $1.9 billion
  10. Sellafield, U.K.(1971) — $1.3 billion
  11. Plymouth, Massachusetts, U.S.(1986) — $1.2 billion
  12. Chapelcross, U.K.(1967) — $1.1 billion
  13. Chernobyl, Ukraine (1982) — $1.1 billion
  14. Pickering, Canada (1983) — $1 billion
  15. Sellafield, U.K.(1973) — $1 billion

An open-source Nuclear Events Database of all 216 analysed nuclear events is available online, containing dates, locations, cost in US dollars, and official magnitude ratings. This is the largest public database of nuclear accidents ever compiled.

— Read more in Spencer Wheatley et al., “Reassessing the safety of nuclear power,” Energy Research & Social Science 15 (May 2016): 96-100 (DOI: 10.1016/j.erss.2015.12.026); and Spencer Wheatley et al., “Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents and Accidents,” Risk Analysis (22 March 2016) (DOI: 10.1111/risa.12587)