Mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression have surfaced and are affecting many residents in Fukushima prefecture as a result of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent nuclear disaster. It has also been reported that such mental health problems appeared and persisted after large-scale nuclear accidents in the past, such as the Che...

Nuclear power is one of the ways that we can design an efficient sustainable future. Automation is the primary system used to assist operators in the task of monitoring and controlling nuclear power plants (NPP). Automation performs tasks such as assessing the status of the plant's operations as well as making real time life critical situational specific decisions. While the advantages and disa...

In the U.S., current protective-action strategies to safeguard the public following a nuclear power accident have remained largely unchanged since their implementation in the early 1980s. In the past thirty years, new technologies have been introduced, allowing faster computations, better modeling of predicted radiological consequences, and improved accident mapping using geographic information...

This paper introduces the concept of the VSM method being used to represent the organization of NPPs in responding to accidents. The Fukushima accident is addressed as a method for the examination of the VSM method and its utility is seeing the ‘big’ picture as far as the decision-making aspects of organizations are concerned. The impact of accidents upon the NPP management operations is covere...

-Some early reactor accidents are recalled together with their associated environmental consequences. One such consequence is the generation of radioactive aerosol. We describe the various physical processes that such an aerosol cloud undergoes within the secondary containment building. These physical processes are then brought together quantitatively in a balance equation for the aerosol size ...

The authors developed mathematical models to quantify the impact of accidents on the U.S. nuclear power industry radionuclide air emissions incidence risk. Additionally, sensitivity analysis was performed on the terms in those models. The number of accidents of a given size needed to equilibrate the nuclear power industry leukemia incidence risk with the coal power industry leukemia incidence r...

During the almost seven decades of use nuclear fission for electric energy production two major accidents took place, i.e., 1986 Chernobyl accident and 2011 Fukushima one. They were caused by reactor power-surge loss-of-coolant, respectively. Both occurred during hot power shutdown had identical root causes, poor safety culture management in industry state authorities. A brief comparison facili...