bIoMEdICAL RESEARCH - North Carolina A&T State University

minutes later, the tsunami waves arrived and swamped
the generators.”
When the diesel generators stopped working, the third, and last,
safety option came on line: batteries. this source of power was
able to maintain water flow for the next eight hours, which was
their designated life span. At the end of that time, the pumps
fell silent for good and the situation really began to heat up.
“It’s obvious now that current safety features, those used on
plants that were constructed 30 years ago like fukushima, are
not enough,” Ahmidouch says. “much more has to be done.
And that’s an engineering problem. It’s not difficult—people
have to think of safeguards against the so-called very low
probability events. Can it be 100 percent safe? Probably not,
but one needs to push the safety limits further and further.”
As to the larger question of how to supply the nation’s energy
12 Evolution >> RESEARCH moVING forWArD
needs, Ahmidouch does not believe there is a singular solution
as to how we can eliminate the use of fossil fuels, reduce
greenhouse gases, improve air quality and stop contributing to
global warming.
“Probably you would solve it with contributions from a mix of
sources,” he says. “Definitely clean, green energy would be
a component. Would it be enough? the answer is no, not at
this time.
“you need to complement the green energy production with
some other sources, and most of those have greenhouse gas
problems. Nuclear power is the only source that is clean in that
sense, and it is the only one capable of providing energy at a
large enough scale without unwanted emissions. the quantity
of energy you can get out of a nuclear power plant is enormous
compared to solar or wind. And as the demand for energy keeps
on increasing, what are you going to do?” > SPRING 2011 13