As nuclear safety officials in Japan struggle to prevent a complete reactor meltdown after a powerful earthquake and tsunami devastated that country's coast, the question that reverberated across the U.S. seemed to be: Could this happen here?
"The short answer is: These accidents never really follow any script and certainly, no script that anyone's ever thought of," said Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute. "In this particular case, the reactors haven't failed at all, but the cooling water system has."
Emergency crews in Japan are grappling with cooling systems failures at three of the six reactors at the the Fukushima Daiichi power plant that happened simultaneously, a critical issue because the reactor's containment vessel requires constant cooling to keep from exploding and to prevent the fuel inside from melting down.
While industry officials and observers agree that it could likely take months or even years before there is a clear understanding of what happened, Smith said early reports suggest that the infrastructure of the nuclear plant held up relatively well during the earthquake.
Core components of the reactor are "fairly robust, and held up just fine," Smith said. "But the pumps that supply cooling water into this boiling water reactor" were damaged.
Under those circumstances,"if you were to lose the water supply to any of those, you would have approximately the same result," he said.
Stephen Nelson, an associate professor and chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Tulane University, said Monday it's unlikely that southeast Louisiana would experience a major earthquake. "I don't think that it's a huge threat," he said Monday.
Occasionally, Nelson said, the area is subject to "small earthquakes" throughout the Gulf of Mexico, known as growth faults, which develop because of sedimentation in areas where the Earth's crust is subsiding rapidly or being torn apart.
"But those are small earthquakes," he said. "I don't think they're a big threat to the nuclear industry at all."
Smith agreed. "The good news for Louisiana is that we're on an extraordinarily quiet area of the Earth's crust," he said, "so we don't get a lot of earthquakes."
In Louisiana, nuclear power accounts for nearly 20 percent of the state's total power generation, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Energy. With a little over 2,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity, Louisiana falls in the middle of states generating nuclear power.
New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., the second-largest nuclear power generator in the nation, is among more than a dozen companies considering building upward of 30 new nuclear plants, including one in Louisiana. However, plans for the Louisiana plant were put on hold in 2009after Entergy failed to strike a deal with the manufacturer of its reactor of choice.
Two of its subsidiaries, Entergy Gulf States and Entergy Louisiana, operate nuclear power plants in Louisiana. The River Bend Station nuclear plant in West Feliciana, near the State Capitol at Baton Rouge, runs off a General Electric Type 6 boiling water reactor, which has been in operation since June 1986. Meanwhile, he Waterford 3 plant in St. Charles Parish, a boiling water reactor from General Electric that has been in operation since 1985, is the closest nuclear plant to New Orleans.
"Entergy's nuclear plants were designed and built to withstand the effects of natural disasters, including earthquakes and catastrophic flooding," Chanel Lagarde, an Entergy spokesman, said in a statement Monday. He added that requirements from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission specify that "safety-significant structures, systems and components be designed to take into account the most severe natural phenomena historically reported for each site and surrounding area."
Dale Klein, a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who served from 2006 until 2009, said in an interview Monday that the agency has requirements in place for reactors to be designed to withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters that could be expected in that region.
If it applies to the region, Klein added that a reactor would also be assessed on its ability to withstand a deadly tandem, such as an earthquake and a tsunami, like what happened in Japan. "They would look at being able to withstand both," he said.
Describing the scale of the catastrophe in Japan as "what one could call an act of God," Klein said the situation wasn't "precipitated by bad training, equipment failure, that sort of typical thing that you're concerned about in terms of normal situations."
"I think it could turn out that as long as the containment holds and the reactor vessel remains in tact, and there is not a major release," he said, "I think it should give people confidence that these reactors were designed in a very robust manner to take the one-two punch."
In a conference call with reporters, David Lochbaum, a director of Union of Concerned Scientists, said the cascading problem facing Japan was losing the normal power supply, which likely was knocked out during the earthquake. Then, the tsunami likely knocked down the backup, he said, leaving the three units dealing with safety equipment power.
"I think it's a little bit early to tell what went wrong and why," Lockbaum said. He believes the backup batteries powering the cooling system could be seen as a "potential vulnerability, and they need to be addressed."
"The situation that plant faced was having batteries that lasted eight hours and then having the clock run out," he said, adding: "While many of our plants may not be vulnerable to the one-two punch of an earthquake and a tsunami," other types of natural diasters could "cause extensive blackouts that put us in a very similar situation."
"I think that battery capacity and what we can do when the batteries go dim may be an area we need to shore up so our plants aren't as vulnerable as Japan was," he added.
Richard Thompson can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org or 504.826.3496.