9. The CRAC2 radiation releases were generally much greater than the SOARCA values: 67 percent of the cesium-137 and 45 percent of the iodine-131 in the core, compared with 2 percent and 12 percent, for example. And the CRAC2 release was assumed to begin one and a half hours after the station blackout occurred, while the SOARCA release occurred eight hours for the Peach Bottom short-term station blackout.
10. When the SOARCA study was finally released in January 2012, the grand “communications plan” that had been such a priority when the project was launched years earlier included its own type of numerical sleight of hand: the size of the type-face. The brochure detailing the results featured bar graphs including only the data from the ten-mile zone in its comparison to CRAC2. For the areas beyond, small print on the next page noted that “the difference diminishes when considering larger areas.”
11. 2012: “The Government Owes the Public a Clear and Convincing Answer”
Contemporaneous news accounts were used in this chapter.
1. In that regard, the limited, carefully scripted accident assumptions resembled the SOARCA study methodology used by the NRC, which disregarded accidents deemed too improbable and—at least in the mitigated models—assumed that all emergency actions were successful.
2. Meserve was likely reflecting on his own experience as NRC chairman. In late 2001, he presided over the agency when it made the near-disastrous decision to allow the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio to continue operating until the next scheduled refueling outage, despite accumulating evidence of a potentially serious problem at the plant’s single reactor. Based on circumstantial but compelling evidence, the NRC staff had drafted an order that would require the plant to be shut down for safety inspections, a step the NRC had not taken since March 1987. But senior NRC managers shelved the order for economic reasons. When the reactor was finally shut down, workers discovered a pineapple-sized hole in the reactor vessel head. The plant had come within months of an accident that could have exceeded the severity of Three Mile Island.
3. In Japan, utilities set their own rates in a complex formula that rewards spending; the more a utility spends, the more it can charge.
4. The company also asked for and received approval for additional funds totaling about $30 billion (2.4 trillion yen) to compensate the victims of the nuclear accident. (It was the third time TEPCO had come back for more money to help victims.)
5. One bright spot was that even with the increase in the use of fossil fuels, Japan was still on track to meet its carbon emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol.
6. The task force inadvertently sabotaged Recommendation 1 by its very wording: “The Task Force recommends establishing a logical, systematic, and coherent regulatory framework for adequate protection that appropriately balance defense-in-depth and risk considerations.” A commissioner agreeing with Recommendation 1 could be viewed as implicitly conceding that the agency had long taken an illogical, chaotic, and incoherent approach to protecting American lives. Had the task force phrased this recommendation more adroitly, it might have fared better.
7. Here’s a simple illustration of this point. Current probability risk assessments do not take into account the possibility that an accident at one reactor will trigger an accident in an adjacent unit. So a safety improvement that would reduce the risk of this happening by 50 percent—say, by controlling hydrogen explosions in the reactor building of a Mark I BWR so that debris could not damage safety equipment at a neighboring reactor—would register as having zero benefit in the cost-benefit calculation. There would be no benefit because the risk wasn’t included in the first place: 50 percent of zero is still zero.
8. Spent fuel pools typically do not have any drains or piping connections below the normal surface of the water to protect against inadvertent drainage. Water in a spent fuel pool flows into scuppers—similar to those in many swimming pools—that channel it into collection tanks. Pumps draw water from the collection tanks and route it through heat exchangers and filter demineralizer units. The cooled and cleaned water is poured back into the pools from above. A common arrangement monitors the level and temperature of the water in the collection tank—not in the pool itself. When the cooling system is operating, the tank and pool conditions match. But if cooling is impaired or lost, the tank and pool conditions can be vastly different. The NRC’s order required operators to provide a reliable and accurate means to monitor the level of the water inside the spent fuel pool under certain accident conditions.
9. The task force timelines themselves did not take into account what actually happened at Fukushima Daiichi. There it took workers fifteen hours to begin emergency coolant injection into the Unit 1 core, by which time the core had already melted. Even if the installed coolant systems had worked for eight hours, they would not have sufficed to prevent a meltdown. In short, if the order had been in place at Fukushima, it would have provided no guarantee that disaster could have been averted.
10. The call to phase out nuclear power placed some of Japan’s largest industries in an awkward position. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Toshiba, and Hitachi are among the world’s leading manufacturers of nuclear power components. Marketing technology abroad that was deemed unacceptably risky at home might have proven difficult. The U.S. nuclear industry also had a vested interest in the outcome of the phaseout debate. Since 2007, General Electric and Hitachi have been business partners. In 2006, Toshiba purchased Westinghouse Electric Company. Japanese media carried reports that additional, unidentified U.S. interests were lobbying to influence Tokyo to retain its nuclear generating commitment.
12. A Rapidly Closing Window of Opportunity
Documents utilized in this chapter include Forging a New Nuclear Safety Construct prepared for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Presidential Task Force on Response to Japan Nuclear Power Plant Events (New York: American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2012), files.asme.org/asmeorg/Publications/32419.pdf; the NRC’s “Briefing on the Task Force Review of NRC Processes and Regulations Following the Events in Japan: Transcript of Proceedings,” July 28, 2011, www.nrc.gov/japan/20110728.pdf; as well as hearing transcripts from the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Subject S. 512, the Nuclear Power 2021 Act, June 7, 2011, www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/hearings-and-business-meetings?ID=237c8727-802a-23ad-41f3-e4cfc52bc3a2.
1. Senator Franken could not be faulted for being unaware of this danger, for the NRC, citing security concerns, had concealed the agency’s growing worry about the threat from public view for more than a decade.
2. For example, the industry adopted, and the NRC approved, this less-than-helpful standard for protection of FLEX equipment from high temperatures: “the equipment should be maintained at a temperature within a range to ensure its likely function when called upon.”
3. In its comprehensive 2102 report on the Fukushima accident, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a professional engineering society with more than 127,000 members in 140 countries, noted that protecting the public from the health effects of radiological releases “continues to be the primary focus of nuclear safety.” In the case of Fukushima, radiation releases were low and not believed to pose a significant health threat. But the report identified long-lasting harm of another type: “The major consequences of severe accidents at nuclear plants have been socio-political and economic disruptions inflicting enormous cost to society.” Those costs, long overlooked, now also must be factored in to risk/benefit equations, the ASME concluded.
Appendix
Material for this section was drawn primarily from oral presentations and the proceedings of the American Nuclear Society’s International Meeting on Severe Accident Assessment and Management: Lessons Learned from Fukushima Dai-ichi, San Diego, California, November 11–15, 2012.
INDEX
Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations.
Abe, Shinzo, 50, 243, 277
accident management (AM) measures, 16, 202–3, 235, 245<
br />
accident simulation. See computer simulation and models
Act on Special Measures Concerning Nuclear Emergency Preparedness (Japan), 16, 38
acute radiation syndrome, 27, 190, 192, 208, 215, 219
“adequate protection,” 187, 188, 190, 194–95, 197, 234, 238, 257, 261; NTTF on, 252, 253, 260
Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, 153, 197–98, 214, 218, 269
aerial monitoring and mitigation, 69, 84, 90, 95–96, 97, 123
agriculture. See farmers and farming
Alaska, 99, 113, 114, 128, 129, 138
Amano, Yukiya, 105, 277
Ambassador Roos. See Roos, John V.
American Embassy, Tokyo. See U.S. Embassy, Tokyo
American Nuclear Society, 2012 meeting, 263–65
American Physical Society, 190, 205–6
Americans: helpful hints, 101–2; in Japan, 62, 68–69, 84–85, 87–89, 92–93, 108, 129, 132, 134, 138–39, 282n4; opinion of nuclear power, 146. See also evacuation of Americans; travelers, American
American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 290–91n3
americium-241, 128
antinuclear movement, 110, 146, 161, 205, 209–10, 211, 228
Aoki, Steven, 138, 277
Apostolakis, George, 182, 183, 277
Areva, 102, 164, 245
Asahi Shimbun, 35, 47, 228, 229, 240
Asseltine, James K., 193–94, 201, 278
Atomic Energy Act, 187, 193, 194
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 39, 153, 187, 192, 273
Atomic Energy Commission of Japan, 77, 101
Atomic Industrial Forum, 189
attitudes, complacent. See complacency and overconfidence
auxiliary systems. See backup systems
Babcock & Wilcox, 142
backfitting, 15, 191–200, 234, 241, 254, 255, 259, 268; definition, 287n2
backup generators, 8, 10, 12, 53, 167, 271; in FLEX plan, 173, 237, 238; malfunction/inoperability, 13, 22, 24, 42, 250–51, 282n6; U.S. use, 175–76, 217
backup systems, 8, 10, 175–76, 214, 255; battery-operated, 12, 13, 17, 18, 65, 66; destroyed by tsunami, 250; failure, 13, 65, 188, 218–19, 248. See also backup generators; B.5.b equipment/measures; “defense-in-depth”; emergency cooling systems; FLEX program; isolation condensers
bailouts, 178–79, 228, 289n4
Barrasso, John, 182, 185
batteries, 12, 18, 19, 30, 31, 67, 74; assumptions about, 237, 251; failure, 13, 65, 218; NRC views, 167
Beasley, Benjamin, 116
Bechtel Corporation, 98, 100
Beck, Glenn, 102
Bernero, Robert, 190, 208
“best-estimate” scenarios, 130, 139, 212, 213
beyond-design-basis accidents, 14, 153, 167, 169, 173, 188, 234, 235, 237, 269; assumptions about, viii, 16, 140; NRC views, 195, 202, 206, 208, 253; planning for, 20, 169–70, 188–91, 199–203, 218, 236, 237, 252, 253; Virginia, 175–76. See also Chernobyl nuclear accident, 1986; severe accident management guidelines (SAMGs); severe accident mitigation alternatives (SAMA); Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 1979; Tokaimura research center: nuclear accident, 1999
B.5.b equipment/measures, 95, 169, 173, 215, 218, 235, 269, 285n4
blackouts. See power outages
boiling water reactors (BWR), 5–6, 6, 70–71, 77, 84, 245, 269. See also cooling systems; Mark I containment; Mark II containment; Mark III containment
Bonaccorso, Amy, 101–2
Borchardt, Bill, 65, 86, 89–90, 91, 94, 139, 232–33, 278
boron and boric acid, 62, 88, 98, 283n2
Boxer, Barbara, 94, 95, 182
Bradford, Peter, 258
breeder reactors, 171, 286
Brenner, Eliot, 114, 116, 278
Bromet, Evelyn, 111
Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, 248, 249, 250, 261
Burnell, Scott, 112, 116, 278
Burns, Shawn, 217–18
California, 94, 134, 139, 164, 182. See also Diablo Canyon Power Station; San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station
cameras, remote, 12, 32, 90, 97, 266
cancer, 27–28, 84, 108; AEC risk study, 192; CRAC2 quantification, 207, 208, 216, 219; IDCOR projections, 190; NUREG-1738 study, 211; SOARCA projections, 213, 216, 219, 220; Yoshida’s, 284n1
Candris, Aris, 245, 246
Carney, Jay, 92
Casto, Charles “Chuck”, 86–90, 86, 93, 95–101, 124–25, 131–35, 155, 163, 278; attire, 284–85n2; shortchanged by Office of Research, 285n3; speech at RIC, 260–61
casualties. See fatalities
Center for Responsive Politics, 287n1
cesium, 60, 62, 82, 118, 146, 155, 156, 156, 268; in food, 178
cesium-134, 159
cesium-137, 71, 97, 126–27, 157, 159, 164, 211, 267, 288n9; aerial measuring, 97; in food, 157
Chernobyl nuclear accident, 1986, 20, 44, 45–46, 100, 104, 130, 164, 202, 209, 249, 261; casualties, 27, 90; considered irrelevant, 201, 205; Fukushima compared, 268, 272; INES rating, 104; mental health aspects, 111; mitigation, 90, 100; permanent exclusion zone, 178; population resettlement, 164–65
children, 58, 89, 109, 109, 139, 161, 162, 178, 179, 223; Alaska, 129; California and West Coast (U.S.), 134, 139; cancer risk, 28; evacuees, 120, 148, 160, 241, 242
China, 25, 38, 44, 100, 124, 160, 171
Chubu Electric, 41, 170
Citizen Scientist (von Hippel), 192
Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, 106
cladding, 5, 6, 7, 57, 66, 127; ignition of, 57, 71, 82, 91, 113, 127, 145; Three Mile Island, 14, 145
classified information, 209, 211
cleanup, 157, 159, 163, 164, 177–78, 179; by citizens, 162; in CRAC 2 modeling, 207; Three Mile Island, 146, 164
cleanup costs, 84, 165, 177–78, 179, 214, 226, 254, 289n4; ASME on, 290–91n3; CRAC2 model, 207; Three Mile Island, 146, 164
cobalt, 155
cold shutdown, 62, 163, 180, 222, 269
Cold War, 38, 39, 207
common-mode failure, 250, 269
communications, 16, 17, 22, 25, 26, 76–77, 86, 87; bungled, 21, 76; e-mail, 35–36, 46, 54, 101, 112, 115–16, 185, 217, 220; intra-industry, 151; Japanese government, 23, 26, 59, 103, 104–5, 108–9, 157; phone, 17, 148; Three Mile Island, 145, 147, 148; video, 25, 86. See also information sharing; information withholding; media; press conferences; press releases; public relations; secrecy
company uniforms, 23, 67, 285n1
compensation to victims, 165, 178–79, 226
complacency and overconfidence: fostered by defense-in-depth approach, 250; Franken’s, 247–48; Japanese, 12, 16, 44, 225, 226; noted after Three Mile Island accident, 150; NRC, 167, 168, 185–86, 200–201, 203, 208, 216, 221; in plant design and siting, 51; in reactor design, 70
computer simulation and modeling, 14, 79, 125, 136, 218; Casto view, 87–88; Exelon, 135; failure to explain Fukushima events, viii, 263, 264; NARAC, 126; post–Three Mile Island, 189; of radioactive exposure, 99; for SOARCA, 212, 215; by TEPCO, 179. See also CRAC2 study; MELCOR; RASCAL (Radiological Assessment System for Consequence Analysis)
concrete, 5–6, 7, 14, 70, 75, 113, 122, 123, 136, 145–46, 180, 188; reaction with molten fuel, 7, 179–80, 264; in storage casks, 7, 83
conflict of interest, 46
Congress. See U.S. Congress
consumer electricity rates. See electricity rates
contaminated food. See food contamination
contaminated homes, 206, 207, 220, 230. See also evacuation of residents
contaminated materials, disposal and storage of. See disposal and storage of contaminated materials
contaminated soil. See soil contamination
contaminated water. See radioactive water
contamination levels. See radiation levels
control rods, 5, 49, 269–70, 282n2, 283n2
control rooms, 5, 8, 49, 142, 150; blackouts, 13, 17–20, 25, 74, 124; Browns Ferry, 248; communications, 9, 17, 147–48; evacuation, 75,
85; radiation levels, 29, 85; remote operations from, 19–20, 25, 31, 32, 66, 241, 284n7; secondary, 241; stress level in, 144; Three Mile Island, 144, 147–48, 157; Units 1 and 2, 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 29, 29, 31, 32, 124; Units 3 and 4, 17–18, 66, 67, 73
cooling systems, 7–8, 12, 70, 84, 94, 98, 142, 164, 184, 218, 248, 250; effect on design, 51; Three Mile Island, 142–47. See also emergency cooling; spent fuel pools
“core catchers,” 188, 245
core meltdowns. See meltdowns
corruption and collusion, 46, 47, 48
cost-benefit analysis, 191–92, 193, 195, 196, 234, 256, 259, 268, 289n7; definition, 270; Fitzpatrick nuclear plant, 198; of “recombiners,” 202; terrorist attacks excluded from, 209
cost of cleanup. See cleanup costs
cost of human life. See fatalities; human life, monetary value
coveralls and uniforms, 23, 67, 285n1. See also protective clothing
cover-ups, 48, 184, 206–8
CRAC2 study, 207–9, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216, 219, 220
Cuomo, Andrew, 116
Curran, Diane, 194
Curtiss, James, 198
dairy industry. See milk contamination
Daley, William, 177
dam failure, 183–85, 248
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station, 143–44, 151, 289n2
deaths. See fatalities
DC power, 8, 32, 167, 237, 282n3; definition, 270; loss of, 13, 17, 26, 167, 202. See also batteries
decay heat, 7, 65, 189, 270
decontamination. See cleanup
Dedman, Bill, 115–17, 278
Deepwater Horizon oil spill, 2010, 102
Defense Department. See U.S. Department of Defense
“defense-in-depth,” 196, 248–51, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 270, 289n6
Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 97
demonstrations. See protests
Denton, Harold, 101–2, 148, 149
Department of Defense. See U.S. Department of Defense
Department of Energy (DOE). See U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
Department of Homeland Security. See U.S. Department of Homeland Security
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