Crisis in Japan will affect U.S. nuclear power industry, experts say

While elevated radiation levels from Japan's crippled nuclear power reactors probably won't cause health problems in the United States, the U.S. nuclear power industry will see effects from lessons learned as a result of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated the island nation, UNLV experts said Monday night.

The impacts might include more stringent requirements for 20-year license extensions of more than 40 U.S. reactors under review.

A push also will be made to centralize storage of used nuclear fuel that is currently kept in pools and above-ground casks at reactor sites, said Paul Seidler, manager of a nuclear research program at UNLV's Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies.

Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was studied for such centralized storage of nuclear reactor waste, but federal funding for the project has been terminated.

"There will be significant implications from this event," said Seidler, a former Nuclear Energy Institute official and executive director of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business.

"There will be impacts on new nuclear reactors. The biggest impact on the policy side will be re-licensing," he said.

On a global scale, Seidler said he wouldn't be surprised if some reactors in areas of high seismic activity are eventually closed.

"Frankly we don't know what's happening fully in Japan. We will learn a lot of lessons ... good things that will improve technology," he said.

More than 100 people attended Monday night's forum, sponsored by the Reid Center for Environmental Studies. It featured five experts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' Barrick Museum Auditorium.

Denis Beller, a nuclear engineering research professor at UNLV, said more upgrades for U.S. reactors "are certainly coming" as a result of the crisis in Japan.

However, nuclear power reactors in California, particularly the San Onofre plant near San Clemente, are in a better position to withstand a tsunami as big as the one that wiped out power and backup systems for cooling nuclear fuel at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex in Japan.

The San Onofre plant is 50 feet above sea level and has a 30-foot seawall that's 5 feet taller than the tsunami wave that pounded Japan's coast after the 9.0-magnitude earthquake.

"Even if it came over the seawall, it couldn't hit the backup generator," Beller said.

Panel member Steve Curtis, a health physicist, said radioactive materials that were injected into the atmosphere by explosions and venting of the disabled Japanese reactors will cause "no significant radiation danger to citizens of the United States."

Radiation is 100 times above naturally occurring background levels outside the Fukushima plant and 2,000 times natural background radiation inside the complex.

"That sounds really bad, but you need levels 10 million times background" for lethal doses, Curtis said.

Beller added that the dose rate per hour at the Fukushima plant is "very, very low. These values are tiny compared to the dangerous dose."

Curtis said, "Japan radiation levels, although elevated, are not deadly."

UNLV chemistry professor Ken Czerwinski said isotopes of krypton and xenon escaped when the coolant loss allowed nuclear fuel to heat up and melt the metal casing that encased the uranium fuel pellets at the Japanese plant.

But the accident in Japan wasn't as contaminating as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union that ignited graphite control rods and caused them to burn "more like a volcano," he said.

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.