Excerpt
On March 11, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was struck by an earthquake more powerful than the one it was engineered to handle, and then flooded by a tsunami far higher than it was designed to withstand. In the aftermath of the triple core meltdown that followed, observers around the world pointed fingers at the plant’s operator, TEPCO, for not having prepared for such a disaster, citing Japan’s obvious seismic and tsunami risks. In the United States, a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), George Apostolakis, said that the accident was “not unthinkable,” implying that TEPCO and the Japanese government should have anticipated and planned for such a catastrophe. In a recent speech, Peter Sena III, the chief nuclear officer for FirstEnergy Corporation, expressed a similar view, faulting the Japanese and boasting that US plants, like the ones in his fleet, are required to meet higher safety standards for environmental disasters.
In fact, it’s highly debatable whether Japanese nuclear regulators and utilities really exhibited a level of negligence out of step with those in other countries with nuclear plants, the United States included. Before the accident, the evidence of the Fukushima Daiichi site’s vulnerability to large tsunamis was inconclusive, giving the Japanese authorities plausible deniability. But today, the NRC and the US nuclear industry won’t have the same excuse if a nuclear plant here suffers a fate similar to Fukushima and contaminates a wide area with radioactivity for decades to come.  This is because the evidence is clear that dozens of nuclear plants in the U.S. are at significant risk of experiencing natural disasters exceeding their “design basis”—the conditions that each reactor was designed to tolerate without experiencing severe core damage and a large radioactive release.
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