Fukushima

Introductionから第1章Fukushimaの途中、Loc.351まで。

Your secretary of energy thinks that the nuclear reactor disaster at Fukushima was so horrible that it should be the death knell of nuclear power, but your science advisor says there is no tsunami danger in the United States, nobody was killed by the radioactivity released, and the accident illustrates the robustness of nuclear power. You have to balance the advice and make the decision, but reconciling the disagreement seems impossible.

there is tsunami dangers in Japanではより難しそうですが、アメリカにしても、

even tougher - you have to lead the public and Congress.

とのこと。今の原発問題で言われるような、第一印象で判断するのではなく冷静な視点を持つべきというのは、

In the months and years following a disaster, we often learn that our first impressions were wrong. That is certainly the case with the Fukushima nuclear disaster, with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and even with much of the public perception of the effects of fossil fuels on global climate change.

化石燃料と気候変動の問題にも言えることだそうです。で、少なくともアメリカでは、

the biggest of all, global warming and climate change

であるとのこと。だったら、化石を使いまくるという選択肢がありそうな気もしますが、ここまで読んだところではよくわかりません。
つづいて福島と原爆とチェルノブイリについて。まず福島と原爆。

Nothing, not a tsunami, not an asteroid impact - not even a terrorist takeover - could cause the Fukushima reactor to explode like a nuclear bomb. The reasons are deeply fundamental, not based on engineering but on the physics of the reactor itself. It takes more than uranium to make a nuclear bomb explode; if that weren't true, many more nations and several terrorist groups would already have such weapons.

For the bomb to work in that way, the uranium must be virtually pure U-235. But in a nuclear reactor, the uranium is typically only 4% U-235, with the rest consisting of heavy uranium, U-238, a form that grabs the neutrons but doesn't fission in a way that can sustain a chain reaction. Because of the polluting U-238, the chain reaction never gets going, unless a trick is employed.

続いてチェルノブイリ。

In 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor did explode, dynamite-like, from a runaway nuclear chain reaction - a reactivity accident.

The explosion was enough to destroy most of the reactor building, but that was it. The disaster that followed didn't come from the explosion, but from the enormous amount of radioactive debris that was released. The number of cancers caused by radiation released is plausibly estimated at 24,000; fortunately, many of these are thyroid cancers and are readily treatable.

チェルノブイリと福島。

Unlike at Chernobyl, the reactor at Fukushima did not explode. A buildup of hydrogen gas caused the upper building to explode, but the reactor itself survived the tsunami, turned itself off, and sat safely for several hours.

福島は原爆ともチェルノブイリとも違ったものの、残念なことに

the Fukushima reactor was not the most modern kind.

であって、

station blackout failure

が問題を大きくしてしまいました。