There have been more critical junctures recently, in terms of nuclear disasters, in which nuclear energy became stagnant in John Kingdon’s policy cycle. The cycle consists of policy formulation, legitimation, implementation, evaluation, and change. When the policy cycle stalls out because of natural disasters, it stagnates at the implementation phase. This is because the policy already went through the formulation stage, wherein it was simply a concept, and it was legitimized by being signed into law.
Finally, at the implementation phase, once the disaster has happened, the cycle stops. There are two factors contributing to the sluggishness. The first contributing factor revolves around the difficulty to evaluate the efficiency or positive effects nuclear energy gives when the nuclear disaster happens, and even more difficult to change them. That said, it can not be the only reason, because it is possible to still evaluate the failures and change the safety precautions the nuclear power plant must take in all of its steps.
Therefore, there must be societal outburst which causes political backlash. The societal uproar relates to John Zaller’s receive-acceptsample model. The model says that public opinion is shaped based on what media people take in, whether the information is accepted or not, and if accepted, the information becomes the top of a theoretical beaker of knowledge. The “beaker of knowledge” is simply all of the information in a person’s head, and when asked about current events, an individual’s opinion will be shaped by the most recent knowledge- or the knowledge on the top of the beaker.
Therefore, if there is a societal outburst due to the natural disaster, which could be theoretically expected, then there will be political backlash because politicians do not want to lose popularity by backing an issue that does not have public opinion behind it. Three Mile Island is a perfect example of this. This case study explains that in Middletown, PA in March of 1979, there was a nuclear disaster due to a mechanical failure.
The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission report that the failure prevented the main feedwater pumps to send water to the nuclear reactors to cool them down (Backgrounder on the Three Mile Island Accident 3). Due to this, the reactors began to overheat and eventually got to a point where there was an core nuclear meltdown. Thankfully for the U. S, the power plant containment walls remained mostly intact and wherein most of the radiation stayed, and the event did not become that relatable to Chernobyl or Fukushima (Backgrounder on the Three Mile Island Accident 3).
That said, it is still arguably the third worst nuclear disaster in global history, and the worst in U. S. history, and it cannot be argued that it did not reshaped public opinion on nuclear energy (Hultman 64). The societal outburst that was to be had due to Three Mile Island was definitely a negative one. It brought into concern a major question. “Three Mile Island was a pivotal event that fit into a developing public narrative of questionable nuclear safety” (Hultman 68) So, we now have both factors which would stall the policy cycle in relation to the Three Mile Island case study.
Firstly, a nuclear disaster happened from which we can not evaluate and improve on the efficiency or greenness of the policy, and then there was societal outburst in a negative manner. This outburst was calling into question the safety of nuclear energy. This, in turn causes politicians to not back nuclear energy, as to not lose public support and makes it difficult to pass policy for switching to nuclear energy. International incidents can also affect domestic policy. One possible way is by affecting cultural paradigms in the world. Paradigms are a set of beliefs in society that constrain the way we see the world.
So, if we have a nuclear disaster in a country that is considered nuclear power, it could change the way the entire world sees nuclear energy. One example of this, is Chernobyl. Chernobyl was the first major nuclear reactor failure, which originally stopped the nuclear energy movement in the mid-1980s. Chernobyl was a disastrous event in human history, and an area that is barely inhabited today. The backlash to this event was a complete review of nuclear energy, as it was considered a gift to mankind prior to 1986, when the event happened.
This catastrophe led to a large number of causalities and a barren wasteland in which the aftermath is seen for years to come (Sharma 1). Chernobyl stopped the nuclear energy movement that was sweeping the world at the time, it had become the new paradigm that nuclear power was the best source of electricity and energy. Following Chernobyl, every time countries look at nuclear power as an energy alternative, there was uncertainty due to the seriousness of the disaster. A third disaster, and more recent, was the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. The nuclear power plant was hit by an earthquake, and then a tsunami immediately after.
The Fukushima Report, done by the American Nuclear Society, claims that the operators did well in their attempts to stabilize the reactors after the earthquake. Most of them remaining were shut down or in use with some damage. Nonetheless, once the tsunami landed and there was imminent flooding of the batteries because of no floodprevention mechanism, and the inability to cope with both natural disasters at once due to the complexity of the situation (14). Furthermore, had just a single disaster hit the plant, it is expected that the power plant would not have been damaged nearly as badly.
Similarly to our Three Mile Island study, this caused outlash against nuclear power due to the question of the safety of nuclear power. All three of these major cases where nuclear power plants had major reactor meltdowns or shut downs come back to one main concern, the concern of safety. The importance of keeping the population safe is simply inarguable. That said, the causes of all three disasters were either human error or the lack of hindsight. Furthermore, looking at the case studies chronologically, we do make advancement in safety concerns. Originally with the Three Mile
Island Case, it was a mechanical error that causes the meltdown. This is a problem with the machines, which we have had almost 40 years to improve upon since then. Many nuclear power advocates have come out in recent times vouching for the safety in the design, manufacturing, and regulatory processes (Hultman 63). As we know, 7 years later the Chernobyl incident occurred. Barbara Goss Levi, journalist with a PhD in particle physics, states that there was a sequence of operator errors at Chernobyl, during a time period when the Chernobyl staff were conducting a test (17).
What this means is that the event would not have been as disastrous if the Chernobyl staff had done their job properly. The staff committed numerous violations of operating rules when trying to do damage control, which just agitated the situation even more. Then, when you look at the Fukushima case, you at least don’t see blatant violations in terms of following the rules, but improper planning. The Fukushima event could have been avoided with proper investment into safety of the plant and foresight. Meaning, in the development of plant, they needed to add extra measures of safety.
The reason one could assume why the did not add extra measures, is because they failed to realize that two natural disasters could hit the power plant within such a short period of time. The conclusion that all these case studies come down to is that safety is a concern when dealing with nuclear energy. Everyone knows that. But the important lesson to be learned from these situations is that the we’ve made great advancements between the two disasters in the late 70s and mid 80s, to the disaster in the 2010s.
The 2011 disaster was a direct result of poor building of the facility, it wasn’t an operator error or a mechanical error, it was simply an event that the builders did not foresee something that could happen. Furthermore, since this situation exists, the U. S. can only learn from this and put in safety measures in case an event would happen where we get hit by a hurricane and then an earthquake, or vice versa. There is now hindsight in building any more nuclear power plants and what safety measures to put in.
