Great article by Gwyneth Cravens at Bloomberg Businessweek, starting to address the true lessons to learn from Fukushima:
The technical community will review the Japanese nuclear crisis and recommend improvements. Although the reactors properly shut down with the first jolt, the cascade of difficulties brought by the tsunami overwhelmed the site.
In any case, that 1966 plant is outmoded. Modern ones have redundant passive-safety features that would have ensured Fukushima’s stability. These innovations are partly thanks to lessons learned about oversight and human engineering from the meltdown at Three Mile Island. U.S. plants are continuously upgraded, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be instituting new improvements and encouraging other countries to follow suit.
And she mentions this ultimate key point, that even though it is less visible than the Fukushima crisis, the health and environmental hydrocarbon crisis is ever-present now and needs an ultimate solution:
We are all suffering from a health and environmental catastrophe being unleashed by hydrocarbon combustion. By 2030, power demand is expected to almost double. If we are to keep the lights on while reducing harm to humans and the planet, nuclear power must grow and fossil-fuel power must shrink.
