Nuclear power is a kind of energy with great controversy on it.

Those who see the risk, or those who are truly responsible for the risk, are worried and oppose the construction of nuclear power plants; whereas, those who work on the nuclear power sector, and those who like the nuclear technology, have repeatedly stressed the necessity and safety of nuclear power. In fact, those advocate the use of nuclear power have neglected a key point, the handling of nuclear accidents is very difficult and complex. To some extent, once the nuclear accident occurs, it cannot be handled safely and properly.

Suppose we use a "controllable" perspective to look at the operation of the nuclear power plant, as those who are working on the nuclear power sector constantly told us that everything is "under control", this statement or assumption actually does not include the part of nuclear power accident handling. They are using a "best state assumption" to cover the huge threat of the handling process once the nuclear accident occurs.

In 1979, the most serious commercial nuclear accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the United States, at that time, there were about 25,000 people lived within five miles of the giant cooling towers. After the accident, the whole country was shocked and the residents near the nuclear power plant were frightened. It results about 200,000 people withdrew from the area. People in major cities of the United States and residents in areas where nuclear power plants were being to built have held demonstrations to call for the halt or shut down of nuclear power plants. Some governments in the United States and Western Europe have had to review their plans to develop nuclear power. At this stage, the problems caused by nuclear leakage were just begun. The Washington Post has since revealed that the United States had covered up a large number of problems in the handling process of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident, especially the great danger to the accident handling personnel, which once again triggered the wave of opposition to nuclear power in the American society. It is reported that there were up to 400 workers involved in the handling of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident, and their health was seriously affected, many of them suffered from blood diseases and cancer.

The problems at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant is about 100,000 times worse than the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster.

It has been a long time since the Japanese government claimed to be in control of the nuclear damage situation, but the facts now revealed that the reality is far from so-called "under control". Despite Japan is a developed country, the treatment of nuclear pollutants still relies heavily on labor handling, which cannot avoid the occurrence of secondary injury. In an effort to clean up the pollution, the Fukushima nuclear power plant employed more than 3,000 workers to clean up the pollutants, which is nine times that of Three Mile Island. As a result, there were more people injured passively through the cleaning of Fukushima nuclear pollutants.

The foreman, who is in charge of decontaminating the plant, said the leaders had asked for a faster pace, but the workers were inexperienced and sometimes did not even know the names of the tools. The team changed frequently, and the works were very hasty. Many of those involved in the pollutants cleanup are locals, some of them were farmers who unable to farm because of contaminated land, and the others came from all over the nation; among them, there were very few professionals involved in the pollutants clean-up, and most of the workers were actually reluctant to take part in this dangerous work. Besides, the Japanese acknowledge that simply removing nuclear pollutants and dismantling disused nuclear plants could take 40 years of work in a dangerous state and require tens of thousands of such workers with little experience.

In fact, in the event of nuclear leakage, the harm caused by nuclear pollution is pervasive, from air to water, soil, tools, furniture, plants, animals, and everything that exposed to the radioactive substances will be polluted. To deal with such nuclear pollution, the contamination must be removed and disposed of. With such a large workload, even if there is a place to store these nuclear pollutants, the workload is quite amazing. As a matter of fact, nuclear pollution is still severe around Chernobyl (Ukraine) today.There are about 160,000 square kilometer nuclear-polluted areas in Chernobyl, almost the total size of England, Northern Ireland and Wales. The soil there has been destroyed, no crops could be grown on it, and they had all been abandoned. Besides, the Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years which means it takes 30 years for a sample Cesium-137 to decay. So this suggests that Cesium-137 would take decades and decades for it to decay sufficiently to be accessible by people.

Therefore, in this regard, what we think about nuclear power is not important at all, the most important issue is what will happen after a nuclear accident. In respect of the nuclear accident, we don’t have a safe and secure solution to the problem, that is the biggest risk of nuclear power. As mentioned, there were more than 200,000 people have been evacuated from Three Mile Island in the United States following the nuclear disaster. The Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan also caused the emergency evacuation of 80,000 people, in fact, the actual number of people leaving the area due to the nuclear accident could be far more than the reported number. On the other hand, Chinese nuclear power plants are basically located in the densely populated southeast coastal areas, in the event of a nuclear accident, the economic loss will be more remarkable. Assume there are 2 million people to evacuate due to the nuclear accident in southeast coastal areas and economic losses of RMB 100,000 per capita, the RMB 220 billion assets of China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) are just enough to compensate the losses. If include the consideration of the urban population in the southeast coast of China is far more than 2 million people, the costs to rebuild the cities, as well as the long-term medical and rehabilitation cost of a large number of radiation personnel, CNNC will lose the entire asset, on the occasion, the state finances may also have to pay a heavy price to solve the problem.

On this issue, vague and confusing attitudes will lead China at great risk of nuclear disaster. When Japan started nuclear power, many supporters had hoped for "no accidents" or thought the risks of the nuclear disaster were "under control". After the problems of the Fukushima nuclear power plant came out, those who support nuclear power have lost their voices. We should learn from such a lesson that we couldn’t afford such huge social costs from the nuclear disaster.

FINAL ANALYSIS CONCLUSION:

There is still a great risk of developing nuclear energy in China, more consideration should be given to energy conservation, solar energy, wind power, shale gas, and other clean energy sources to replace the demand for nuclear power.