China Syndrome

Source Jia H. China syndrome—a regulatory framework in meltdown, Nature Biotechnology 25 835-837 (2007). 

The battle over nuclear power waxed hot and heavy for several years, swaying back and forth as incidents unfolded. The publication of the government-sponsored Reactor Safety Study in 1975, which showed that there would be very modest consequences from nearly all reactor accidents, was a positive event. The report concluded that the average number of fatalities from a meltdown would be about 400 and that there might be one meltdown in every 20,000 years of plant operation, or 0.02 deaths per year versus about 25 deaths per year due to air pollution from a coal-burning plant.8 It received little notice outside the scientific community. The movie The China Syndrome (released in 1979), which implied that a reactor meltdown accident would have— not possibly might have—very horrible consequences, was an important negative event. 

Chernobyl in what was then the Soviet Union. Regulatory agencies took an even harder line on U.S. nuclear power plants, and the popular movie The China Syndrome highlighted the terrifying possibility of human error and hubris leading to a nuclear power plant meltdown on the California coast. 

The China syndrome is a phrase used to describe the overheated core melting through the reactor floor and into the ground (or all the way to China). 

The corpus of films concerning the nuclear industry corpus consists of two sets. The first includes works of fiction where the part of the action takes place in a power station The China Syndrome, Grand Central). The installation forms part of the scenery work situations are recreated and the balance of power between the operator and workers is explored. The second set includes films that address the issue of nuclear power but do not take place inside a plant, which may be confined to the background Mount Fuji in Red, Land of Oblivion, The Land of Hope). The operational and organizational dimension is neglected in favour of a description of the consequences of a nuclear disaster on man and the environment. 

A study of the themes that are explored in these two sets makes it possible to put into perspective the representations they convey—the interior of the installation, the operator, the nuclear risk, etc. However this poses a significant problem for researchers the corpus, at a national level, is insufficient to carry out an analysis. Given this situation, a thematic study must compare films from different countries and different eras. For example, it would lead to a comparison of an American film from 1979 The China Syndrome) and a French film from 2013 Grand Central). Under these conditions, it becomes difficult to contextualize representations, as they refer to different cultural objects. 

The nuclear power industry has also had its share of problems with cracks in pipes, and the potential for a nuclear plant accident harming thousands of people, as a film like The China Syndrome dramatizes, has threatened the shutdown of nuclear reactors even... 

In 1966, two issues called into question the assumption of containment as an independent barrier. These were the issue of reactor pressure vessel integrity and the so-called China syndrome. The net effect of these issues was to shift the focus of regulatory actions toward a strategy of accident prevention and away from reliance on containment. 

Thus, the China syndrome led to a shift in emphasis from containment to prevention. As time passed, accident initiators other than the traditional large pipe break were identified as potentially leading to core melt. In particular, scenarios involving anticipated transients without scram, station blackout, other transients, and containment bypass would be evaluated, and regulated to reduce the probability of core meltdown. However, over the next decade, the emphasis was on the traditional design-basis... 

The Brookhaven reexamination of WASH-740, which gave rise to the China Syndrome and to the shift in emphasis from containment to prevention, was never completed or published. An internal AEC summary of the project written in 1969 stated that an important factor in the decision not to produce a complete revision of WASH-740 along the lines proposed by the Brookhaven staff was the public relations considerations. In fact, it was the failure to release a final report of the Brookhaven study that became a public relations concern, because opponents of nuclear power argued convincingly that the AEC was covering up the real risk of reactor accidents. ... 

In September 1966, Advisory Committee,on Reactor Safeguards members expressed their concerns regarding the China syndrome in a meeting with the AEC commissioners. To avoid a letter from the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, which would have recommended the development and implementation of safety features to protect against LOCAs in which emergency core... 

CHINA SYNDROME. A term referring to a catastrophic accident in which a nuclear reactor core melts through the containment of a nuclear power plant and metaphorically burns its way downward through the Earth from the United States to China. American physicist Roger S. Boyd claimed to have coined the phrase in the early 1960s while he was working for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). See also MELTDOWN NUCLEAR PILE. 

MELTDOWN. Melting of the core materials in a nuclear reactor. Meltdown is of serious concern because its occurrence can lead to breaching of the reactor vessel and result in venting of radioactive materials into the atmosphere. See also CHINA SYNDROME. 

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