Fukushima Highlights Russia "Safe Nuclear" Marketing

April 10, 2011 - PRLog -- The 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl was truly a trial by fire —

and one that is now a key part of Russia’s nuclear marketing message — cynical as that might seem.

In April that year, as workers and engineers scrambled to keep the plant’s molten radioactive uranium from burrowing into the earth —

the so-called China syndrome —

a Soviet physicist on the scene devised a makeshift solution for containing remnants of the liquefied core.

Teams of coal miners working in shifts tunneled underneath the smoldering reactor and built a platform of steel and concrete,

cooled by water piped in from outside the plant’s perimeter.

In the end the improvised maneuver — a so-called core-catcher — was not needed.

The melted fuel burned through three stories of the reactor’s basement but stopped at the foundation —

where the mass remains so highly radioactive that scientists still cannot approach it,

but have walled it off as much as possible in the sarcophagus pictured above.

Although 25 years later Chernobyl remains the radiation calamity by which all subsequent nuclear accidents will be measured,

core-catchers are now a design feature of the newest reactors that

Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, Rosatom, is selling around the world.

That includes a contract the company signed with Belarus last month,

even as radioactive steam was rising from the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.

Meanwhile that inventive physicist, Leonid A. Bolshov, who was awarded a Soviet hero’s medal for his efforts at Chernobyl,

is now the director of the Institute for Nuclear Safety and Development, formed in 1988 in the wake of that disaster.

Like many others involved in his country’s nuclear power industry, Mr. Bolshov, 64,

expresses what to some ears may sound like a jarringly opportunistic sales pitch:

that Chernobyl was the hard-earned experience that made Russia the world’s most safety-conscious nuclear proponent.

“The Japanese disaster will give the whole world a lesson,” Mr. Bolshov said in an interview last month.

“After a disaster, a burst of attention to safety follows.”

Opportunistic or not, in recent years the Russian nuclear industry has profited handsomely

by selling reactors abroad, mostly to developing countries.

That includes China and India — whose insatiable energy appetites are keeping them wedded to nuclear power,

despite their vows to proceed even more cautiously in light of Japan’s disaster.

And though Fukushima Daiichi provides a new opportunity to stress the message,

Rosatom has long been marketing its reactors as safe — not despite Chernobyl, but because of it.

The Russians say they are now building more nuclear power plants globally than anyone,

15 of the 60 new reactors under construction today ...

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