expanded his work to others be places arld th around the world. the news continues here on al jazeera america. ♪ ♪ >> five years ago, the earth shook and a tidal wave stormed ashore on japan's coast. ability of a coastal power plant to withstand a tsunami made much worse. adding fukushima to three mile island or chernobyl and stopping or stalling nuclear projects in many places. we'll look at the situation five

years after fukushima , radio in activity, i radio-inactivity, it's the "inside story." welcome to "inside story." i'm ray suarez. the design failures of the nuclear power plant at fukushima are well-known and japan will be living with them for a lightning sometime. the area of so radio active five years after the tsunami that robots sent in to do work too dangerous for humans failed and decide soon after they entered the contaminated zones. register as radioactive on store shelves at the other end of the country. japan marked the anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami this week, al jazeera's harry fawcett reports. >> reporter: in

natarie, this is the closest thing ohigh ground. a mound built 96 years ago so the residents of this town could look out to sea. five years on from the tsunami, it is a place of remembrance. broadcast live it first showed the scale of disaster unfolding in japan. 950 people died here. nearly 18 and a half thousand across the country. all that's left of the densely packed houses are these walls. the wave came through this neighborhood scrubbing it out entirety. at its height, it was about two meters above that man made mound. it was there at 2:46 precisely that they gather to mark the time the ecialgh earthquake str. [ sirens ]

>> 150 kilometers north, another community marked the same moment the same way, sounding the tsunami sirens. >> translator: the reality is that we still feel the scars here. and there are still many who are struggling to restart their lives. [♪ singing ] >> reporter: at the facial national memorial, the similar sentiment from the nation's prime minister. >> efforts are being paid to improve the situation but my heart aches at the thought that there are still people who cannot return home. >> reporter: for all the reconstruction elsewhere, the prime minister is promising a revitalized effort to get it finished, things have changed little at fukushima. workers store and treat contaminated water each day. subcontractor says the efforts

are ham are period by a shortage of people willing to do the job, even if conditions are better than what he faced in the weeks after the melt downs. >> translator: i think what i felt most was anxiety. when i got there i thought my experience would be useful but all the rules i used to abide by became completely irrelevant. it was like a war zone. that astonished me. >> walls raised from reconstruction to minimize problems from future tsunamis. but, there's always a reminder of what has been lost. harry fawcett, al jazeera, japan. >> on this anniversary of the nuclear plant disaster we're looking at the nuclear power industry. you pay recall that the u.s. had just formulated a new policy during that time in the first

obama term and one of the sources for much needed power going forward was going to be nuclear plants. the fukushima disaster caingd changed that. germany stuck with its promise to demilitarize and replace energy in a fairly short time. nuclear plants in the u.s. are old with no new plants to replace that. radio-inactivity, joining me tyson slocom. and scott peterson. senior vice president of the nuclear energy institute. tyson slocum, take us back five years ago. there was and i don't think i'm recalling this incorrectly, a willingness to relook at nuclear power as a source of energy to run our homes and factories. the taint of earlier accidents was sort of fading and people

were getting used to the idea that a very electricity-hungry country was going to need nuclear. >> right. the obama administration has always been firmly in support of extending the life of existing reactors and trying to build new reactors. the obama administration put together loan guarantees to help subsidize the cost of new reactors under construction in georgia. the problem has been that the fukushima disaster exposed some fundamental problems in the way that we oversee and operate and maintain these nuclear reactors. at the same time that the nuclear power industry is undergoing serious financial pressures because the cost associated with operating and maintaining and trying to comply with the new regulatory regime that is required after the lessons learned from fukushima is just not happening. the problem is that nuclear power is not competing very well

against cheaper natural gas or against cheaper utility scale wind. and so at this point, i think we just need to start closing some of these older reactors, on a timely basis, and make way for the new emerging cheaper technologies that can very easily take nuclear power's place. >> scott, the energy that comes out of a nuclear reactor's presence is enormous. your ability to boil water and spin turbines very, very cheaply yet having plants is very, very expensive, why? >> the operating cost of a nuclear plant, the fuel itself is very, very cheap and as you said just tremendously powerful. the cost comes in in terms of the staffing, in terms of meeting regulations that we must abide by in today's climate. we have been operating our plants for more than 50 years, almost 4,000 combined years of operation.

so we've proven in this country we have a tremendous safety record in doing that. so what we're doing is stepping back and looking at what makes sense from a regulatory standpoint based on that operation over 50 years and what makes sense from an industry standpoint and how we can become more efficient. we are embarking on a major program right now to do that so we can be more cost-competitive in the future. as tyson said, we are competing against incredibly low prices for gas, wind that is coming on cheaper and heavily subsidized but that doesn't mean we're taking our eye off safety. we are going to take our investment we have to into safety to make these plants efficient. we've done so over the last five years since fukushima, we have put more than $4 billion of safety improvements into the plant so we can run them safely and efficiently. nuclear plants on average operate 92% of the time which is by far the industry leader in terms of efficiency and reliability.

>> you mentioned retrofitting old plants to make them evenly even more safe and compliant. when is the last time a brand-new from scratch turnkey plant opened in the united states? >> 1990ettes in tennessee but we are building four in south carolina and georgia that are about the midpoint of construction. so in the 2019 to 2020 time frame we expect those reactors to come online, brand-new designs with new safety features this them and they'll be really the stalwarts of power supply for those two states. >> anori rilio, how do you abide the concerns that abide by nuclear power? >> there is knowing cheap abou nothing ct nuclear power. even uranium mining. babies born near uranium mining areas are five times more likely

to have birth defects. if you look at the health impacts that scientists have found, bomb survivors and chernobyl survivors, multiple my mil mylo mil mieloma, costs have come down without cost to the health and environment. >> but you also heard scott peterson talk about the decades of incident-free operation. you are hanging your concerns on chernobyl which is a once in a century kind of incident. >> except here we are five years after the fukushima disaster as well. and as your reporter showed in japan, they're still having to cope with a site that is

devastated, 100,000 people can't go back to their homes. thousands of gallons of water are leak into the pacific ocean every single day so that's a closer-term example of the threats and the risk. and let's face it. these aging reactors in the united states are not safe. many have been shut down because of safety and cost concerns, and a recent associated press study showed that 75% of nuclear power plants in the united states are leaking radioactive water including just this week that the news that turkey point in florida is leaking radioactive water into biscayne bay. >> scott peterson i will give you a chance to respond just after our break, stay with us, it's "inside story." >> that harmony, that politeness and that equilibrium that japanese people call "wa".

at the other side of history, fukushima's heroes were not enough. people have lost their trust, especially in the authorities. the myth of nuclear energy, of it being economic, safe and clean has been swept away. >> "fukushima: a nuclear story," narrated by willem dafoe.

>> you're watching "inside story." i'm ray suarez. radio-inactivity this time on the program. we're looking at the challenges to a nuclear-powered future. in the five years since the catastrophic accident at the fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant on japan's coast, fought the industry to a standstill in many places, even in a world hungry for chief and plentiful and low-carbon electricity. scott peterson, anna

auriliio are with me. to the points anna was making. >> the nuclear watch dogs over our sites, they just recently released their assessments and 90 in the top safety categories. and that regulator has inspectors at each one of our sites with 24-7 access and they look over our shoulders every single day. that's who i would trust as the arbiter of safety. is i think most people in the neighborhoods around those plants are very comfortable with safety because they know the people who work there and they understand the upgrades that have been made and not just after fukushima. we have a continuance maintenance and parts replacements at those plants. so even though their name plate may say they're 30 or 40 years old, almost every piece of equipment has been replaced or refurbished in that plant. >> is there something different

about smoke coming out of a smokestack at a coal fired plant, someone that explodes and burns which is a once and done experience, you can see what happened, smell what happened, know what happened and then you're done. a gallon jug of radioactive water looks the same as a a gallon jug of regular water. it's there, it's not something they can measure or even measure their risk in dealing with. >> there definitely is a public mystery around radiation and it is our responsibility to operate our plant safely. it is our responsibility to keep the environments around those plants safe. the release of trilium, radioactive hydrogen which has been released into biscayne bay

in florida, even the release is 78% safer than the radio activity in drinking water. there is radiation all around us. our challenge and our promise is to monitor it, regulate it and keep it safe. >> tyson slocum, do we risk overstating how easy it is to do without nuclear power in 20th century america? >> nuclear power currently provides one fifth our power supply in america. we can't close all of our plants but we should start an aggressive time be tame phasing out these aging reactors, and replacing it with renewable energy. the fact of the matter is that there have been a number of safety problems that have been expose id as the nuclear regulator commission has adjusted to the postfukushima

world. in july 2011 just months after the fukushima incident, the nrc concluded an internal task force of its top engineers and scientists to say what are the lessons learned? we had a whole bump of assumptions how to safely operate these facilities and all of those lessons went wrong in japan. we have similar situations here, what do we need to fix it? they came up with 12 recommendations and most of them have not been acted on or watered down because of financial pressure exerted by the nuclear power industry. the nuclear power industry is under enormous strain as it struggles to compete against superior lower cost sources. nuclear power was cutting edge two generations ago. it is no longer. it is an albatross and can't be

done as safely and securely as competing source he such as renewables. >> the white house hosted a summit on advance nuclear technologies, one that we can put in place as the current fleet is retiring. now we need to run our current plants until about 2030 and we have a process in place to do that. but there is a lot of investment, there is a lot of interest, there is a lot of technology development into designs that can be used for not only electricity development but to desalinate water. which is necessary in the years to come. investors like bill gates and others who are developing these technologies for global use. >> anna aurelia i want you to respond when we cok com come ba. >> the difficulties of storing

spent fuel, does that neutralize the climate change argument? is nuclear done? radio-inactivity. stay with us, it's the "inside story." >> we're here to fully get into the nuances of everything that's going on, not just in this country, but around the world. getting the news from the people who are affected. >> people need to demand reform... >> ali velshi on target.

♪ ♪ >> welcome back to "inside story," i'm ray suarez. no matter where you land personally, on the future of nuclear power, it presents a fascinating public policy challenge. a technology with organized enemies and opponents, but one

it's hard to do without right now. nuclear power supplies as was mentioned about 20% of u.s. electricity. at the same time how much innovation can there be in the design of power plants no one's even sure would ever get built? my guests are still with me. anna, as we go back and forth in washington over the future of power we still haven't figured out what to do with the spent fuel and nobody wants it. >> that's totally right. our environment america's take is we don't need nuclear power for future. dollar for dollar you get five times as much wind solar and energy efficiency, nuclear waste needs to be separated from human beings in all living things. for about a quarter of a million years. that's a long time. that's a big problem to solve. and one of the problems

is, we don't know what to do with it in the long term and in the short term, in too muc much too much s being stored onsite. let's embrace 100% clean energy future. get there as quickly as we can. but for existing fuel at the nuclear reactors it needs to be put into hardened casks so we can figure out what to do with it in the long term. >> is there nothing we can do with it to reuse, continually refine, recycle? >> we've looked at this issue, ray. and what happens is as you start to, quote unquote, reuse or refine spent nuclear fuel, what you end up with is material that's closer and closer to what's being used in bombs. so that poses a nuclear proliferation threat. the other thing that happens is

every single thing that comes into contact with this highly radioactive spent at a fuel becomes a highly radioactive waste that needs to be dealt with. you are basically creating a longer term mess to clean up. economically speaking our research has found that you gets five times per dollar of investment in other than nuclear energy. >> scott peterson is this riskier capital because if you design a state of state-of-the-art ra plant, you can't make sure that the economics will make sense after that long time line. >> the challenge there is that you're is designing a plant that will be exeivet. to anna's point, a lot of these reactors will be able to reuse spent fuel already stored at our sites today.

we do have a new mechanism to be able to manage that fuel and reduce the storehouse of that. what we also need are really policies in place that recognize all the distinct values of nuclear energy. so there's no recognition for the carbon avoidance that we have, we produced 800 billion kilowatt hours. we feel there's no value being able to produce power in the coldest or hottest days of the year when other plants are going offline. there should be power -- there should be value for that. we need to reframe value proposition for nuclear energy and in many cases for all clean energy sources so you have clean energy standards instead of renewable portfolio energy standards. meet the climate change goals we have going forward. >> is scott peterson right the failure to set up a work carbon emissions trading market

undermine one key value of nuclear power? >> no, because the problem is that nuclear power presents a whole other set of additional safety and security challenges, that just aren't -- that don't exist with other competing fuel sources like renewables and investments in energy efficiency and even cheap are natural gas which we as public citizens still have problems with. but you're seeing now natural gas is replacing nuclear power and coal as a base load of power generation. we see that being we were a generation ago, using electricity at 7% a year now it's .7% a year. we're flat lining which makes us less liability on these large base loads of power and what the future grid is going to be looking more and more like is a

decentralized system located on your community, on your rooftop. so we've got to understand that these changes just don't seem to have a place for nuclear power in our energy future. >> i think this discussion really in a lot of ways sets up a false choice. you can't pick say two of these electricity sources and say we can go just with these. ihs did a study in 2014, instead of balancing that portfolio with many options like we would with our stock portfolios, focused on natural gas and renewables. it created a 50% swing in the variability of their bills because of the variability of renewable energy. so we need to look at this from a more wholesome perspective. let's take a look at all the sources we have because we have a tremendous appetite in this country that's only going to get larger. seconds.

where is all the public in this? >> we don't need nuclear power to solve global warming. time and money is the essence. the new plants being built in the southeast, the consumers in georgia are going to be paying $120 more a month on those bills to pay for those plants. that's outrageous. we don't need to risk the health and safety of our community for those melt downs. the public strongly supports wind and solar and globally the market has spoken. in 2014 there was more nuclear power than wind and solar for the first time. >> you're heard plenty for america's urban renaissance but those exciting places to live have become shockingly expensive. threatened by success?

i'm ray suarez, have a good weekend. good night. government forces take parts of the besieged city of taiz from houthi fighters a decision to label hezbollah as a terrorist organization. fighting breaks out at a rally for u.s. republican hopeful donald trump forci