Battery, Aziz!

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Interview: Waiting for an Iranian Chernobyl


Russian nuclear store 'a powder keg'
4 June 2007
Iran's nuclear boast causes international anxiety
14 April 2007
The world's worst nuclear accident
18 November 2006
A struggle for nuclear power
22 March 2003
Web Links

Najmedin Meshkati's home page
Nuclear facility at Bushehr
BBC report on the Chernobyl disaster




Earlier this year an Iranian nuclear scientist at the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan died from poisoning with uranium hexafluoride gas. Accidents like this keep Najmedin Meshkati awake at night. A leading expert in nuclear safety at the University of Southern California, the Iranian-born engineer worries that the Russian technology and human error that led to the Chernobyl disaster may cause a similar tragedy at Iran's nuclear facilities in Bushehr and elsewhere. The biggest nuclear threat from Iran is not from an attack but from an accident, he told Deborah Campbell,

and international sanctions
are only increasing the risk






How did you become involved in nuclear safety?




I was a graduate engineering student
researching mathematical models for decision analysis.
Then Three Mile Island happened on 28 March 1979.
That changed my research direction and my life.

The root cause of that accident was considered to be human error,
and my dissertation project became
measuring the mental workload of the operators
of nuclear and other plants.






My career, which has focused on the safety of complex technological systems such as nuclear power plants, was shaped by three accidents: Three Mile Island, the Bhopal chemical plant in 1984, and Chernobyl in 1986. These three catastrophic accidents all involved large-scale technological systems that contained hazardous materials, and all were caused by human and organisational failures.




You visited Chernobyl.
What was it like?



Driving to the plant from Kiev, there is a checkpoint before you can enter the exclusion zone. It's a circle around the plant with a radius of 40 to 50 kilometres from which all the inhabitants have been evacuated. At the time of the accident about 7 million people lived in the surrounding area. I went to the city of Pripyat where 100,000 employees and their families used to live. It's a ghost town now, right down to a deserted Ferris wheel.

Arriving at the reactor site, at the smoke stack and the sarcophagus they built around reactor 4 where the accident happened, hit me very hard. This accident caused a radioactive fire that burned for 10 days, releasing 190 tonnes of toxic materials into the atmosphere. There is no other human construction on this planet that has had as much impact, not only on the people living around it but on those downwind of the fallout and the generations born with birth defects.




What struck you about the control room?




I went to the control room of reactor 3, which is a few hundred metres from the doomed control room of reactor 4. I've been to many control rooms around the world, but the design of this one shocked me. It looked as if someone had thrown dials into a bag and tossed them against the wall. The haphazard nature of the arrangement and the height of the display of dials defied logic. You could barely see it. Valery Legasov, the physicist at the Soviet Academy of Sciences who investigated the meltdown for the Politburo, concluded that the primary cause of the accident was rooted in human factors: confusing control room design, inadequate operating procedures and the lack of a safety culture. He later committed suicide.

Throughout my career I have been trying to transfer the lessons from one industry to the next. All the factors that existed at Bhopal and Three Mile Island were present at Chernobyl. No one had learned from the previous accidents. Russian control room design and nuclear safety culture are still among the worst in the world.




You have sounded alarm bells
about the current state of nuclear safety in Iran.
What concerns you?



The fact that Iran is at the mercy of Russians. Because of sanctions, Iran has not been able to hire qualified western contractors to conduct safety analyses and quality control inspections. So the Russians are not only building the nuclear reactor at Bushehr, they are supervising themselves. The fox is in charge of the henhouse. For project oversight work Iran has to use companies staffed by former officials of the same ministry of nuclear energy that was in charge of Chernobyl.

We have an expression in Persian that the knife doesn't cut its handle.
Basically, people will not be critical of their colleagues.


Also, Iran cannot hold the Russian contractors to account. Through my personal contacts, I know that the Iranians have pushed the Russian contractors to adhere to the latest standards in the design, construction and operation of nuclear plants, but the Russians refused due to cost and lack of technical capability. The Iranians would lose face if the Russians pulled out, so they have to acquiesce.




Aren't sanctions necessary
to prevent Iran from proceeding with its nuclear programme?



Sanctions on certain technologies may be necessary, but when it comes to safety, a nuclear accident anywhere is a nuclear accident everywhere. Chernobyl is exhibit A. The fallout travelled all over Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is up to diplomats and others whether to give Iran nuclear fuel or a reactor but when it comes to quality control or the expertise to review control room design, this is benign technology that can only be used to ensure safety. It won't enable Iran to make a bomb. As Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has said:




"The first lesson that emerged from Chernobyl
was the direct relevance
of international cooperation to nuclear safety."






How far would the fallout from a nuclear accident in Iran spread?

There would be a lot of contamination. If it happens in Bushehr, which is on the Persian Gulf, and the containment dome can't stop the fallout from travelling, the whole of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai and the rest of the Gulf will be downwind. If it happens at one of the uranium enrichment plants, the local population centres will be at the mercy of the wind direction, as with the accident at Japan's enrichment plant in Tokaimura in 1999.




Where does the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
stand on these issues?



Under the NPT every signatory [Iran included]
is entitled to technical assistance from the IAEA.
But on 9 February, under US pressure, the IAEA announced
that it is ending 22 of 55 technical cooperation projects with Iran,
several of them directly related to nuclear safety.



The only place Iran can look to for independent safety review, knowledge and practices is the IAEA technical cooperation programme, and now it is prevented from doing that.




Some would argue that safety issues raise the stakes
and we must try harder to stop Iran.


This is a double-edged sword. Being a signatory to the NPT gives countries the right to build nuclear power plants for peaceful civilian purposes. So stopping them is not legal or logical. If you want to stop Iran getting a nuclear bomb, do it through negotiation.




But by preventing Iran from accessing safe nuclear technology
you are potentially harming the whole planet.






How then should the international community respond to the crisis?




Nuclear safety must be decoupled from political considerations.


Technology and know-how that relate to nuclear safety
should never be made a pawn of political feuds.
To paraphrase the French statesman Georges Clemenceau -


nuclear safety is much too serious a matter
to entrust to diplomats and politicians.






From issue 2612 of New Scientist magazine, 11 July 2007, page 46-47

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Strong quake rocks Japan, nuclear plant By KOJI SASAHARA, Associated Press Writer
26 minutes ago



KASHIWAZAKI, Japan - A strong earthquake struck northwestern Japan on Monday, causing a fire and minor radioactive water leak at one of the world's most powerful nuclear power plants and turning buildings into piles of lumber. At least seven people were killed and hundreds injured.

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The quake, which left fissures 3 feet wide in the ground along the coast, hit shortly after 10 a.m. local time and was centered off Niigata state. Buildings swayed 160 miles away in Tokyo. Sirens wailed in Kashiwazaki, a city of about 90,000, which appeared to be hardest hit.

Japan's Meteorological Agency measured the quake at a 6.8 magnitude and said a 6.6 magnitude quake was among the aftershocks. The U.S. Geological Survey, which monitors quakes around the world, said the initial quake registered 6.7.

"I was so scared — the violent shaking went on for 20 seconds," Ritei Wakatsuki, who was on her job in a convenience store in Kashiwazaki. "I almost fainted by the fear of shaking."

Flames and billows of black smoke poured from the Kashiwazaki nuclear plant — the world's largest in terms of power output capacity. The fire, at an electrical transformer, was put out shortly after noon, said Motoyasu Tamaki, a Tokyo Electric Power Co. official.

The plant leaked about a half-gallon of water in the building housing one of the reactors, said Katsuya Uchino, another Tokyo Electric official.

Uchino said the water contained a tiny amount of radioactive material — a billionth of the guideline under Japanese law — and is believed to have flushed into the Sea of Japan. A company statement said the leak had stopped and that there had been no "significant change" in the seawater under surveillance and no effect on the environment.

The fire and subsequent leak triggered fresh concern about the earthquake resistance of Japan's nuclear power plants, which supply nearly a third of the country's electricity.

Aileen Mioko Smith, of the environmentalist group Green Action, said the fire showed that some facilities at nuclear power plants such as electrical transformers were built to lower quake-resistance levels than other equipment such as reactor cores.

"That's the Achilles heel of nuclear power plants," said Mioko Smith, who said it took the plant two hours to extinguish the fire. "Today's a good example of that... How prepared are they to put out fires when they happen?

A series of smaller aftershocks rattled the area, including one with a 6.6 magnitude. The Meteorological Agency warned that the aftershocks could continue for a week.

The quake hit on Marine Day, a national holiday in Japan, when most people would have been at home.

Four women and three men — all either in their 70s or 80s — were killed, according to the National Police Agency in Tokyo and NHK, which reported more than 800 people were hurt.

Nearly 300 homes in Kashiwazaki — a city known mainly for its fishing industry — were destroyed and some 2,000 people evacuated, officials said.

A ceiling collapsed in a gym in Kashiwazaki where about 200 people had gathered for a badminton tournament, and one person was hurt, Kyodo reported. The quake also knocked a train car off the rails while it was stopped at a station. No one was injured.

Several bullet train services linking Tokyo to northern and northwestern Japan were suspended.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — whose ruling party is trailing in the polls — interrupted a campaign stop in southern Japan for upcoming parliamentary elections, rushed back to Tokyo and announced he would head to the damaged area. He later arrived in a blue uniform to survey the damage.

"Many people told me they want to return to their normal lives as quickly as possible," Abe told reporters in Kashiwazaki. "The government will make every effort to help with recovery."

Japan sits atop four tectonic plates and is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries. The last major quake to hit the capital, Tokyo, killed some 142,000 people in 1923, and experts say the capital has a 90 percent chance of suffering a major quake in the next 50 years.

In October 2004, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake hit Niigata, killing 40 people and damaging more than 6,000 homes. It was the deadliest to hit Japan since 1995, when a magnitude-7.2 quake killed 6,433 people in the western city of Kobe.

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Associated Press writers Kozo Mizoguchi and Chisaki Watanabe in Tokyo contributed to this report.