![Cooling towers at the Alvin W. Vogtle nuclear plant in Waynesboro, Georgia, last month. Picture by Mike Stewart Cooling towers at the Alvin W. Vogtle nuclear plant in Waynesboro, Georgia, last month. Picture by Mike Stewart](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/TFWurqJd3WWgt5tunziPf4/108acd65-5278-4499-9f47-58db5fa13cea.jpeg/r0_0_7600_5067_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Peter Dutton's plan to build nuclear power stations has ignited a national debate about costs and climate but, for people living close to one of the proposed nuclear sites, safety is a burning issue.
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Mr Dutton has identified the decommissioned Liddell Power Station, 14 kilometres from Muswellbrook, 77km from Maitland and 97km from central Newcastle, as one of the locations for a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear reactors are unlike any other power source in that an accident, however improbable, could have a catastrophic and enduring impact on the region and its industries.
Shortland MP Pat Conroy said on Friday that "my community are telling me they don't want a nuclear power station next to their kids' school".
The Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents have cast a shadow over nuclear power for decades, but what are the chances of a nuclear accident, and how would one affect the Hunter?
Nuclear power stations work by splitting uranium atoms contained in ceramic pellets inside a fuel rod and creating a chain reaction which releases huge amounts of heat to produce steam and spin turbines.
The Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents were caused by cooling-system failures resulting in core meltdowns which released harmful radiation into the atmosphere.
The Newcastle Herald asked University of NSW nuclear materials engineer Associate Professor Edward Obbard for his views on the safety of modern nuclear plants.
What happened at Fukushima?
The large-scale reactor suffered a meltdown in 2011 after a huge earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale struck off the coast of Honshu, Japan's largest island.
It was the biggest earthquake recorded in Japan and the fourth-largest measured anywhere.
The Fukushima plant's reactors shut down automatically when the quake struck, but a 14-metre-high tidal wave hit the power station 50 minutes later, flooding its back-up diesel generators.
"The earthquake didn't damage the nuclear power plant at all," Dr Obbard said.
"The reactors all shut down safely.
"When a big reactor shuts down, such as in an earthquake or something, which they are designed to do, you have to continue cooling the core, because even after shutdown the core produces about 6 per cent of the maximum of the operating power when you shut it down.
"And you have to remove that by keeping the pumps and the coolant going.
"The diesel generators on the site were inundated by the tidal wave, so they didn't work."
The meltdown released radioactive elements into the environment, but a 2021 United Nations report found "no adverse health effects among Fukushima residents have been documented that are directly attributable to radiation exposure from the accident".
The accident displaced 164,000 people and has had a lasting impact on fishing and agricultural production.
The final evacuation zone was 20km, though many others inside a 30km zone also left their homes.
What if the Hunter has another earthquake?
The Japanese earthquake dwarfed the size of the 5.7-magnitude Newcastle quake in 1989.
It killed more than 20,000 people and caused an estimated $US360 billion in damage.
Dr Obbard said the Fukushima accident, though serious, was one element of a disaster "of Biblical proportions".
"Something like 20,000 people died from the tsunami, and so you kind of have to put it in that context to make sense of it. Just to sort of isolate it out and say, 'Oh, this was a nuclear accident. That could happen here.'
"Well, if it did, I wouldn't care about the accident; I'd be worried about the people dying in the tsunami."
The Liddell site sits close to a geological fault line known as the Hunter-Mooki Thrust.
Geoscience Australia recorded seven earthquakes near Muswellbrook ranging from 2.1 to 3.5 on the Richter scale over a five-day period in 2018.
Dr Obbard said a Muswellbrook nuclear plant would not be subject to the massive earthquakes and tidal waves that hit Fukushima.
"And future reactors will be designed so that those kind of threats are taken into account," he said.
"You must design all of the concrete and steel structures and pipes and tanks and everything to handle this horizontal and vertical acceleration of the ground.
"That simply imposes a higher kind of strength requirement on the structures and the civil engineering.
"It's something you can design for, and the regulator would impose that requirement."
But what if it did happen?
Dr Obbard said a Fukushima-style accident in the Hunter would "not be as dangerous as people think".
"I guess it's possible. You have to understand that stuff can go wrong, but when it does it's not sort of mortal danger," he said.
"It's not like, 'Oh my god, I'm melting.' It's like, 'Oh no, exclusion zone. Can't go into this part of the country.'
"It's almost a public health response ... like COVID but very localised.
"In the event of a terrible, very, very unlikely accident, radiation release, these days it's almost incredible that anyone would die from it."
He said modern nuclear power plants had reactors inside containment buildings.
"The tragedy of Chernobyl was that when the reactor blew up everything just spewed out into the air. It was just in a shed. The reactor wasn't even contained."
He said a nuclear accident would be "psychologically catastrophic".
"The actual hazard is in your mind, but that doesn't make it less bad."
An estimated 51 elderly people died in the Fukushima evacuation, and a 2015 Japanese study estimated 1700 mostly older people died of evacuation-related stress.
Would you move to Muswellbrook?
Dr Obbard said the risk of off-site radiation exposure in a disaster was "so small that it's commensurate with sort of medical X-rays and medical procedures".
But he said governments needed to justify why they wanted to develop nuclear power, which came with inherent risks.
"Working with radiation involves risk, if only to the people who work there," he said.
If you're creating jobs, if you're creating electricity, if you're providing energy security, if you're sure of that benefit, then the risks can be controlled and can be tolerable.
- Dr Edward Obbard
"You shouldn't build a new power plant and subject that workforce to the risk of working with radiation if there is not a net benefit. That's the whole definition of a tolerable risk.
"You can have an acceptable risk, which you can discard. You can have an unacceptable risk, which you don't do.
"But in the middle you have a tolerable risk, which you do if it's worth it.
"So, if you're creating jobs, if you're creating electricity, if you're providing energy security, if you're sure of that benefit, then the risks can be controlled and can be tolerable."
What about the waste?
Spent fuel rods from a Hunter nuclear power station could be stored for years in steel cylinders in the plant's car park.
This is how the US handles it.
Dr Obbard said the "dry casks" of spent fuel would fill up an area roughly the size of a Bunnings car park in 10 years.
He said nuclear waste was "benign" and safe unless you took the lid off one of the casks and stared inside.
"If it's freshly discharged from the reactor, it has to be kept underwater because it's hot.
"After it's a few years old you can move it to what's called dry cask storage, which basically means putting it out in the parking lot.
"You can move from dry-cask storage to a kind of permanent disposal, but all of these steps are immeasurably safe."
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says dry casks are "designed to resist floods, tornadoes, projectiles, temperature extremes and other unusual scenarios".
"In the USA, that is what happens to most of their nuclear waste because they don't have a long-term solution for it," Dr Obbard said.
"I actually think that the interim solution, which is this dry cask storage, is actually quite acceptable."
Dr Obbard said dry cask stores could not be left forever.
"But provided there is an operating nuclear power station which is providing the resources for people to monitor it and look after it, it's entirely safe."
He said creating nuclear waste came with moral and political "baggage".
"You can have that discussion, right?
"Should we do genetic engineering? Should we produce radiation? Should we produce nuclear waste?
"I don't know. People have to decide themselves. But I can say that when it's managed professionally it's not dangerous."
The French government recycles its nuclear waste, separating out the uranium to use again.
"Then the actual volume of nuclear waste just becomes the very, very small volume of the really hazardous stuff, which is sort of hidden in there, and then they literally keep that in a room," Dr Obbard said.
"The whole of France has a room in which they keep the really nasty nuclear waste."
He said a large-scale accident, like a plane crashing into the dry casks, would lead to a "rotten clean-up job".
"If a plane crashed in the spent fuel parking lot, it would be a localised incident which would have to be responded to by hazmat people.
"It would be a big deal, but it would not be an evacuation of everybody sort of situation."