Germany Unprepared for Major Nuclear Disaster

[xchrom]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,823126,00.html

The projected catastrophe would begin on the cold winter's day of Dec. 1, 2010. In the scenario envisioned by scientists, fuel elements begin melting at the Philippsburg 2 nuclear power plant in the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg. Engineers release pressure to prevent the plant from exploding, and for the next 25 days, radioactive clouds move north toward the Rhine Valley, over the cities of Speyer and Hockenheim, toward Mannheim and Heidelberg.

The scenario sounds like something out of best-selling German novel "Die Wolke" ("The Cloud&quot , but in fact it was created by specialists at the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS). These specialists compiled 2010 weather data for both the Philippsburg 2 location, in southwestern Germany, and the northern Unterweser nuclear plant, which has since been decommissioned. They then combined this data with a course of events resembling the accident at Fukushima to calculate how a radioactive cloud would spread. The maps they created look like those from Japan a year ago, but the affected towns are named not Namie, Odaka or Tomioka, but Linkenheim-Hochstetten, Schwanewede and Bremerhaven.
The most worrying aspect of this study, made available to the Federal Environment Ministry (BMU) last autumn, is that the country's authorities are hardly prepared for a catastrophe like that one that occurred at Fukushima. Radioactive material would contaminate far larger areas than previously assumed and entire cities would need to be evacuated -- but all of this is "not provided for in the emergency planning."

A year after the nuclear catastrophe in Japan, those in charge of managing disasters in Germany have yet to make significant changes at home. Germany's nuclear phase-out and shift in energy sources were indeed a political response to the disaster, a clearer reaction than in any other country. But specialists in the field say no one in the federal government is willing to take on the nine German reactors that will still be in operation for up to a decade, or of fuel elements that still pose a danger at the reactors that have already been shut down.

[HereSince1628]

1. Fukushima should have taught us preparedness hinges on imagination

If you can't imagine the next most disasterous disaster, you won't be ready for it.

I am not sure that any institution that believes in nuclear power enough to see billions of dollars invested in it has a level of imagination that would recognize possibilities needing risk management that would make the projects devastatingly unprofitable.

[kristopher]

2. There is no place that is prepared for a Major Nuclear Disaster

Response and recovery requires that all affected parties practice responding to different scenarios on a regular basis. The public is not a flock of sheep and the roles of the various emergency agencies must be practiced with real world conditions included full scale involvement of the public.

Can you imaging conducting drills requiring evacuation of NYC, Washington DC and Balitimore 4 times a year each?

In addition to the logistical impossibilities to establishing an effective level of preparedness, the nuclear industry would accept neither the $$ costs nor the damage to public confidence that would result once people realized the scale of potential damage.