Hurricane Matthew is about to slam into an area of the East Coast with 11 nuclear reactors, but industry experts say it is ready for the Category 4 storm.
Hurricanes are relatively predictable events, for which relevant first responders regularly train, officials told The Daily Caller News Foundation. Nuclear reactors are resilient structures that can handle storm damage, they also said.
“Nuclear power plants are the most robust in the U.S. infrastructure, with reactor containment structures of steel-reinforced concrete engineered to withstand extreme natural events,” Meghan Miles, a spokesperson for Duke Energy, told TheDCNF. Duke owns the operating reactor in the path of the storm.
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Nuclear power, even with the two high-profile nuclear accidents, is statistically the safest way of generating electricity. Coal power in China kills 280,000 people for every trillion kilowatt hours it produces. Rooftop solar kills 440 for the same amount of electricity. Nuclear energy only kills 90, by this measure, including deaths from disasters. Deaths from nuclear power, are very rare relative to deaths from industrial accidents, mining accidents, or pollution.
Even before the Chernobyl meltdown in the former Soviet Union, U.S. reactors had already implemented safety procedures that would prevent a similar event from happening in the U.S. The reactor at Fukushima could not be cooled without electrical power, but American reactors elevate a reservoir of water to cool the reactor without back-up power in an emergency.
Read more at We Asked Nuclear Power Plants How They’ll Handle Hurricane Matthew
I understand that the number is relative, but the sentence like “Nuclear energy ONLY kills 90” read very unsettling.