Time to rethink a nuclear Middle East

Three days after an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale critically damaged Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (NPP), the president of South Korea and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi attended a ground-breaking ceremony of the Braka NPP in the United Arab Emirates; it is the first of four to be built under a $20 billion contract inked in 2009 between the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation and a consortium of South Korean and American companies. The inauguration celebration could hardly have been more inopportune. In the course of a week the incident at the Fukushima NPP went from being rated four on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, “an accident with local consequences,” to level five, “an accident with wider consequences.” The Fukushima disaster is the only level five rating since the Three Mile Island meltdown in the United States in 1979.