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The red tsunami alert issued on the coast of Japan after a strong earthquake in Russia has served as a raw reminder of the 2011 disaster. Japanese televisions cut their usual programming to show an unequivocal order in capital letters: “Tsunami! Evacuate!“The message, shouted in unison by the presenters, resonated with those of 14 years ago. But this time, the nuclear power plants were much better prepared.
Context. For millions of Japanese, The scene that was lived this Wednesday It was too familiar. The collective memory immediately returned to March 11, 2011, when an earthquake of magnitude 9 unleashed a tsunami that not only charged about 20,000 lives, but caused the worst nuclear accident of the 21st century in the Fukushima central.
Yesterday, the workers of the own Fukushima plant They suspended their tasks and evacuated the nuclear power plant towards higher land, knowing that nuclear safety has suffered a radical transformation. The global nuclear industry not only learned Fukushima’s lessons: it made them concrete, steel and new protocols on an unprecedented scale.
The turning point. To understand the magnitude of the changes, we must remember what exactly failed in Fukushima-Daiichi. The disaster It was not caused directly by the earthquakebut for the tsunami that followed. Waves of up to 15 meters far exceeded the containment wall of the plant, flooding the emergency diesel generators and cutting all the plant power of the plant.
Without capacity to refrigerate reactors, Three of the nuclei merged. The lesson was brutal: the security margins, designed for probable events, were insufficient before an extreme event. Fukushima was a global attention call that unleashed a regulatory and technical revolution. The paradigm shift is summarized in moving from a probabilist approach (designing for what is expected) to a total resilience (being ready for the unexpected).
Not only in Japan. Immediately after the accident, regulators around the world launched A thorough review of its facilities, creating international frames to ensure that the lessons learned will be applied everywhere.
China and the United States They promoted strategies so that all nuclear power plants can support an indefinite loss of energy. In Europe, all plants passed Stress tests against earthquakes, floods and total loss of security systems, forcing each country to implement a national action plan in case of finding defects. Gravelines, the largest nuclear power plant in France, reinforced his dike and added new gates Mobile
Concrete and steel. Japanese centrals have been working like none, investing billions of dollars. They sealed all possible water input routes with stagnant doors, installed high capacity Achique pumps and built higher walls.
Onagawa, the central closest to the 2011 epicenter, survived thanks to its 14 -meter wall. After Fukushima’s accident, the Tohoku Electric Power energy company did not walk with little girls and built A new 2 meter high dikealmost like a 10 -story building. Hamooka raised his breakwater 22 meters above sea leveland relocated the emergency diesel generators in a hill at 25 meters high. Tokai-2 raised A slope 1.7 kilometers longprepared to resist a wave of 17.1 meters.
The reactors of the future. These lessons have also moved to the new designs of third and fourth generation reactors, including compact modular reactors (SMR), which incorporate them as standard. The AP1000 and its Chinese CAP-1000 derivative They can keep safe for 72 hours without any human intervention or external energy thanks to passive cooling systems that work by gravity and convection.
The European EPR-2 includes double containment, a filtered vent system and A “Core-Catcher” Designed to contain the molten nucleus in the hypothetical case of an accident. And the Nuscale or the BWRX-300 of Gen-Hitachi can be installed as underground reactors, which makes them intrinsically immune to tsunamis and other surface disasters.
A safer world. Wednesday’s Tsunami alert is a reminder that we are still at the mercy of nature. But also an opportunity to verify that, in the 14 years that have passed since Fukushima, the defenses of nuclear power plants have become a real fortress. The 2011 disaster was not in vain.
Image | IAEA
In Xataka | People did not take the drills seriously, so Japan found something much more effective: video game drills
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