Climate change creates new flooding risks for U.S. nuclear reactors safety
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Extreme weather disasters, especially floods, are on the rise (see Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding). Last year, we had Tennessee’s 1000-year deluge aka Nashville’s ‘Katrina’. And Coastal North Carolina’s suffered its second 500-year rainfall in 11 years.
Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in December, “The term ‘100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year” (see Munich Re: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change”).
A couple weeks ago, I asked how many U.S. nuclear plants are vulnerable to a tsunami and/or a 500-year 100-year flood? Here a very initial treatment of the flood vulnerability issue.
The following article by Sean Pool, Elaine Sedenberg and Matt Woelfel is cross-posted at Science Progress.
As the situation at Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility continues to worsen, policymakers in the United States are taking the opportunity to review the safety policies for our aging nuclear reactors.
Japan’s recent 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the tsunami it caused together killed 9,737 people and left an additional 16,501 missing. The destruction left millions homeless and caused almost $200 billion in damage.