US Nuclear Plants Have Same Risks, and Backups, as Japan Counterparts - New York Times

With the Japanese authorities working to avert a catastrophic meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and one other Japanese plant showing problems, the safety of America’s nuclear plants — and the wisdom of any expansion — is beginning to come under a new round of scrutiny.

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Although exactly what happened at Japan ’s nuclear power plants is still being sorted out, most of the nuclear plants in the United States share some or all of the risk factors that played a role at Fukushima Daiichi: locations on tsunami-prone coastlines or near earthquake faults, aging plants and backup electrical systems that rely on diesel generators and batteries that could fail in extreme circumstances. David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and the director of the Nuclear Safety Project of the Union of Concerned Scientists , suggested Sunday that while emergency preparedness and safety redundancies were built into the DNA of every nuclear plant in the United States, the string of events that damaged the Fukushima plant was beyond the sort of situations imagined by nuclear regulators and plant designers.

US Nuclear Plants Have Same Risks, and Backups, as Japan Counterparts - New York Times