Copyright © 2011 Massachusetts Medical Society. On March 11, 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck the east coast of Japan. The total number of people who died in the earthquake and the tsunami that it generated is still being assessed, but the official estimation already exceeds 14,000.1 The natural disaster also caused substantial damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the con...

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011, an international review of nuclear safety indicated that two of the three nuclear power plants (NPPs) operating in Taiwan were listed as the most dangerous in the world. To understand the perception of NPP risks by the public in Taiwan and their attitudes regarding a planned fourth NPP after the Fukushima nuclear incident in 2011, a study was ...

Defense-in-depth is a fundamental safety principle for the design and operation of nuclear power plants in the United States. Despite its general appeal, some authors have identified potential drawbacks in defense-in-depth in its potential for hazardous state concealment. To prevent this drawback from materializing, we propose in this work a novel safety strategy, namely “observabilityin-depth”...

A simple dynamic model of an industrial size synchronous generator operating in a nuclear power plant is developed in this paper based on first engineering principles. The constructed state-space model consists of an LTI state equation and a bi-linear output equation. It has been shown that the model is asymptotically stable with parameters obtained from the literature for a similar generator b...

Major nuclear accidents as recently in Fukushima set nuclear power plant security at the top of the public agenda. Using data of the German Socio-Economic Panel we analyze the effects of the Fukushima accident and a subsequent government decision on nuclear power phase-out on several measures of subjective perception in Germany. In the light of current political debates about the strategic orie...

Although India has a long written record, the shaking intensity of few damaging earthquakes that occurred before AD 1800, can be quantified. Since reliable estimates of future shaking near planned nuclear power plants depend on the extrapolation of historical earthquake data spanning many centuries, estimates of seismic risk to the planned Jaitapur nuclear power plant assessed from a short data...

BACKGROUND The 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. AIMS To quantify emotional responses among British nationals in Japan and to assess whether perceptions about the incident or accessing information about it were associated with responses. METHOD A total of 284 participants randomly selected from official records completed a survey th...

Nuclear power plant concrete structures are described and their operating experience noted. Primary considerations related to management of their ageing are noted and an indication of their status provided: degradation mechanisms, damage models, and material performance; assessment and remediation (i.e., component selection, in-service inspection, non-destructive examinations, and remedial acti...

In response to contamination from the recent Fukushima nuclear accident, we conducted radionuclide analysis on bamboos sampled from six sites within a 25 to 980 km radius of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Maximum activity concentrations of radiocesium (134)Cs and (137)Cs in samples from Fukushima city, 65 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, were in excess of 71 and 79 kBq/kg, ...