'Busan needs more preparation against nuclear disaster'

Two Korea Coast Guard boats patrol waters in front of the Gori Nuclear Power Plant in Gijang-gun, Busan, on July 15. The guard dispatched the ships to prevent Greenpeace’s environment monitoring schooner Rainbow Warrior III, unseen, from approaching the nuclear plant to stage an anti-nuclear energy protest. / Courtesy of Greenpeace

Possible Gori plant crisis could affect 3.43 mil. people: Greenpeace

By Nam Hyun-woo

Busan, the second-largest city in Korea and home to 3.58 million people, may not be safe from the effects of a nuclear accident, according to environmental activists and nuclear power experts.

On June 9, four multinational activists of Greenpeace set up an aerial camp on a 90-meter tower of the Gwangan Bridge in the port city, calling for a widening of the Emergency Planning Zones (EPZ) around nuclear power plants across the country.

They staged their high-altitude protest, with a banner that read “25 kilometers,” for 52 hours before they were arrested by police on June 11.

According to Greenpeace, the 25 kilometers sign showed that the bridge, which lies in the middle of the city, is only 25 kilometers from the country’s oldest nuclear facility, the Gori Nuclear Power Plant. But Korea applies an EPZ radius of eight to 10 kilometers from each reactor site, an insufficient distance in the event of a nuclear accident.

An EPZ is a zone which comes under the immediate control of predetermined protective action plans in the event of a possible incident involving a nuclear plant.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suggests EPZ standards and advises countries to divide EPZs into two parts. The nuclear regulating body designates the closest area to a nuclear facility as the Precautionary Action Zone (PAZ). Within this, urgent protective actions are taken if a nuclear accident occurs, regardless of the amount of radiation leaked.

Areas five to 30 kilometers from the facility are designated as Urgent Protective Action Planning Zones (UPZs). UPZs are required to take urgent protective action if an off-facility radiation leak is discovered.

Korea applies EPZs with a radius of eight to 10 kilometers around each reactor site, which does not satisfy any of the IAEA standards.

Greenpeace demands that the radius should be widened to at least 30 kilometers to minimize potential damage.

Why should it be a 30-km radius?

If a nuclear accident occurs, a massive amount of radioactive isotopes, such as cesium, neptunium and plutonium, spreads out from the accident site. While cesium, which is relatively light, can quickly travel further than a 50-kilometer radius, neptunium and plutonium, which are extremely hazardous to the human body, remain within a radius of 30 kilometers.

A 30-kilometer area around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, where a catastrophic nuclear accident occurred 27 years ago, is still contaminated with extreme radiation and the nearby city of Pripyat, Ukraine, was abandoned because of the incident.

The nuclear disaster of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011 also devastated an area of some 20 to 50 kilometers around the accident site, causing residents to abandon their homes.

When a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011, a reactor in the power plant exploded the following day. Then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters that areas further outside of a 20 kilometers radius from the explosion site would be safe.

Two weeks later, however, the Japanese government announced that residents at the 20 to 30 kilometers boundaries should “voluntarily evacuate.”

Japan also designated an eight to 10 kilometers radius for an EPZ near the ill-fated power plant before the accident. But, the country failed to provide immediate necessary responses such as medication and evacuation for nearby communities.

Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun reported that some 90 patients evacuated from the disaster were temporarily left behind at a hospital due to a lack of proper measures being set up by the Fukushima prefectural government.

According to Prof. David Boilley, chairman of the French nuclear monitoring organization ACRO, the Fukushima disaster showed that even Japan, one of the most experienced and equipped countries when it comes to handling large-scale disasters, found that its emergency planning for nuclear accidents was not functional.

Due to the dysfunctional planning, the evacuation process became chaotic and many people were unnecessarily exposed to radiation, he wrote in a report to Greenpeace.

He argued that evacuation planning based on diameters of several kilometers was too rigid and inadequate for nuclear power plants.

What if the Gori plant fails?

The Gori Nuclear Power Plant is located in a coastal area bordering Busan and Ulsan, an industrial city of 1.16 million people. It is only 25 kilometers from the Gwangan Bridge, close enough to affect residents of the two cities in the event of an emergency.

Greenpeace says approximately 3.43 million people, the combined population of the two densely-populated cities reside within a 30-kilometer zone around the nuclear facility, the diameter of the area damaged by the two nuclear accidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The environmental group warns that if the Gori facility fails, people living in this zone could be exposed to extreme radiation as seen in the two catastrophic disasters.

Citizens in a dangerous zone should be evacuated immediately under government control, but since the government set the EPZs at eight to 10 kilometers, any unprepared evacuation will likely be chaotic. The situation could become even worse than the Fukushima disaster.

According to the Korea Institute of Nuclear Safety (KINS), one of the harmful effects of radiation exposure is an increased risk of thyroid cancer due to radioactive iodine accumulating on the gland.

To counter this, potassium iodine should be ingested within 24 hours before exposure or within three hours afterwards for it to have at least 50 percent of efficiency. To achieve that, medication preparedness, accurate predictions of the fallout and communication systems to warn affected populations are necessary.

However, stocks of potassium iodine medication in Busan’s Gijang-gun and Ulsan’s Ulju-gun, where the Gori plant is located, are not sufficient for the large population.

Currently the stocks are for 113,000 people in Gijang-gun, 23,700 in other areas in Busan, and 56,000 in Ulju-gun.

If the 3.43 million people were affected by radiation, as the environmental organization predicts, only 5.6 percent of them will get proper medication. But there is no guarantee of successful medication even for the small percentage of the people because there is no emergency distribution system.

Post-emergency economic damage will also likely be enormous. Busan is the fifth-largest industrial port city in the world where some $27.3 billion inter-country trades are made annually.

It is also home to leading heavy industries players such as Hyundai Heavy Industries and Hanjin Heavy Industries. Experts say that massive damage on such companies could wreak havoc on the Korean economy.

The Hyundai Research Institute (HRI) estimates in a report, “The Hidden Cost of Nuclear Power Plant,” that if a Fukushima-level nuclear crisis occurs in the Gori Nuclear Power Plant, the number of victims will be 3.2 million and 11.6 percent of the country will be contaminated with radioactive material.

Compensation costs would also be challenging. After the Fukushima disaster, about 130,000 compensation claims were filed and the average cost of a reactor’s accident reached 58 trillion won ($51.7 billion), according to HRI.

Korea sets the maximum amount of compensation for a nuclear accident at 500 billion won and has no plan to increase the figure.

Possibility of Gori’s failure

The Korean government has been advocating nuclear power as a source of clean energy. It seeks to build more nuclear plants. But it is difficult to guarantee 100 percent safety of nuclear plants.

The Gori plant started operating commercially in 1978 and is the oldest nuclear facility in the country which has so far reported 225 malfunctions, according to KINS.

Among the long list of failures, the second-most frequent is mechanical glitches with 79 incidents, following gauging problems at 93.

In April, the state-run Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power shut down the Gori 4 Reactor after detecting abnormal signals. Amplified by failures of other nuclear power plants in Wolseong and Yeounggwang, the shutdown recently caused the nation to suffer from a power shortage.

Also recent corruption scandals over substandard parts have raised concerns about the safe operation of nuclear plants.

Last December, it was found that two Gori reactors used major parts that did not pass the quality test and issued fake certificates.

Natural disasters also pose a safety threat. According to a report by Nuclear Safety and Security Commission, 75 earthquakes occurred within the 50-kilometer diameters of four nuclear power plants in the country.

Given that a 9-magnitude earthquake from deep waters from 160 kilometers off Fukushima triggered the Japan tragedy, Korea may also face a natural disaster-triggered nuclear crisis.