Ten years ago this week, the world watched in horror as a nuclear plant with multiple reactors in Fukushima, Japan, melted down on live TV day after day after day – the aftermath of a natural disaster in the form of a March 11, 2011, earthquake and its ensuing tsunami.
Here in the Tennessee Valley, we were especially attentive: The Japanese nuclear plant was a near-twin of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s oldest and largest nuclear plant – the Browns Ferry plant in Athens, Alabama, which has three spent fuel pools elevated several stories high and housed in the same secondary containment areas as the plant’s three reactors.
We needed to be attentive. A month and a half after the Fukushima disaster, an April 2011 tornado outbreak – 492 tornadoes in the Southeast in the space of about three days – left nearly 360 people dead, twisted miles of electrical grid in Northeast Alabama and Mississippi into enormous steel pretzels and sent all three of Browns Ferry’s reactors into “automatic” shutdown.
All nuclear plants are designed to go into automatic shutdown when something goes wrong. It’s a safety feature – like a fuse blowing when your circuits are overloaded. But it’s not a fail-safe, as Fukushima continues to show us.
In Japan, not even a shutdown prompted by the shaking ground could prevent catastrophe when less than an hour after the quake, two enormous ocean waves swamped the back-up diesel generators, the seawater pumps, the back-up electrical switchgear and a series of batteries in the plant’s basement. With no power, the pumped flow of cooling water ceased to surround the pooled hot radioactive spent fuel rods and the reactor cores.