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NRC Annual Assessment Pilgrim & Post Fukushima Talk- June 1st

When: June 1 at 6:00- 8:00

Where: Hilton Garden Inn, Plymouth – Exit 5 off Rt. 3, No. 4 Home Depot Drive

Join Pilgrim Watch on June 1 and tell the NRC in person what you think about Pilgrim. It’s the public’s chance to make sure the NRC, and our local elected officials, hear loud and clear about our concerns following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. If someone tells you that “it can’t happen here” they are either misinformed, or not telling you the truth. The NRC has gamed the system long enough! It’s time for us to turn up the pressure on the NRC at this critical time, and the best way to do that is to show up and speak out! It’s no time to put your head in the sand.

 

FORUM - JUNE 15th

NUCLEAR SAFETY AT PILGRIM - POST FUKUSHIMA

Duxbury Nuclear Advisory Committee and Duxbury Emergency Management Agency

 

When:  7:30 PM – 10:00 PM on Wednesday, June, 15, 2011

Where: Duxbury Senior Center, 10 Mayflower ST (Off 3A, Tremont St)

Why: Response to citizen’s concerns about safety at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in the aftermath of Fukushima

PANELISTS:  Will include a number of experts in the nuclear field:

David Lochbaum (confirmed): Director, Nuclear Safety Project, Union of Concerned Scientists and formerly with NRC and reactor operator.  Dave is one of the nation's top independent experts on nuclear power.

Arnold Gundersen (confirmed): Energy advisor with 39-years of nuclear power engineering experience.  A former nuclear industry senior vice president, he earned his Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in nuclear engineering, holds a nuclear safety patent, and was a licensed reactor operator. 

Paul Blanch (confirmed): Engineer with 45 Years of nuclear power experience beginning as a Navy Submarine Reactor operator and instructor. He has been employed by, and served as a consultant, to a long list of nuclear power plants and organizations.

Dr. Gordon Thompson (invited, waiting confirmation): Director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies. Gordon is an expert witness on Pilgrim’s spent fuel pool vulnerability for the Massachusetts Attorney General and similarly for the New York Attorney General and others across the country; he has a lengthy list of publications.

Dr. Edwin Lyman (invited, waiting confirmation): Physicist and Senior Staff Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists. He was the former Director of the Nuclear Control Institute, a Washington-based policy institute, focused on nuclear reactor security issues and nuclear weapons control. He has focused on security issues and consequence analyses and has a lengthy list of publications.

Entergy Representative (invited, waiting confirmation)

FORMAT:  Panel presentations followed by an audience question & answer period. Chief Kevin Nord (Duxbury’s Emergency Management Director, will be available to answer any questions regarding emergency planning.

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Take a Stand for Nuclear Safety!  

SAMPLE LETTER

 RE: A Post-Fukushima Program for Increased Nuclear Security & Safety.

Our focus is on reducing risk at reactors that directly impact the Commonwealth - Pilgrim, Seabrook and Vermont Yankee. Our concerns apply to all nuclear reactors across the country.

We urge you to take action to force the NRC not merely to review lessons learned from Fukushima, but to implement rapidly and enforce compliance with identified safety upgrades. Specific issues that are a priority for Massachusetts citizens include: 

1.  SPENT FUEL STORAGE:   The spent fuel pool at Pilgrim was designed to hold approximately 880 used fuel assemblies; it now contains over 4,000.  According to a report prepared by the Massachusetts Attorney General, any significant loss of water in a crowded pool will likely cause an uncontrolled fire that could cost up to $488 billion dollars, lead to 24,000 latent cancers, and contaminate hundreds of miles downwind.  

The NRC should require that the density of assemblies in a spent fuel pool be no more than the original design, and that all other spent fuel assemblies should be placed in hardened, dispersed dry casks onsite until an offsite solution becomes available.

2.  IMPROVE POWER RELIABILITY: The Fukushima disaster was caused primarily by the loss of external power.  Tsunamis are not the only cause of power loss.  The buried electric cables that supply power to key safety systems at Pilgrim, Seabrook and Vermont Yankee are not qualified to operate in the moist environment in which they are placed. There are only 7 days of fuel for backup generators, and 4- 8 hours of backup battery power.

All buried cables should be replaced with cables that are qualified for moist environments. Also, the aging management inspection program for such cables must be strengthened.  The nuclear power plants must be required to have supplemental, portable generators stored nearby to bring to the site by truck or barge if needed.  Congressman Markey’s proposed Nuclear Power Plant Safety Act of 2011 calls for emergency backup plans and systems that can withstand longer power outages (e.g., at least 14 days of generator fuel, and batteries that will provide power for at least 72 hours). 

3.   EXPAND EMERGENCY PLANNING ZONES.  Current Emergency Planning zones are only 10 miles in radius, and do not include Cape Cod, the Islands or Cape Ann.  The NRC recommended evacuating 50 miles around Fukushima.

Emergency Planning zones should be increased to a 25 mile minimum radius, and the outdated and inadequate plans and procedures must be upgraded.  Massachusetts has the authority to implement plans that are more conservative than those of the federal government. The Obama Administration should implement Congress’s 2002 Bioterrorism Act provision, blocked by the Bush administration, calling for a 20-mile distribution potassium iodide (KI).

4.    POSTPONE LICENSE EXTENSIONS: After the accident at Three Mile Island (TMI), the NRC placed a moratorium on license renewals until lessons learned had been implemented.  Pilgrim’s application to operate for an additional 20 years (2012-32) should be placed on hold. Vermont Yankee’s license renewal approval should be rescinded. Seabrook’s license renewal proceeding should be stopped.  Until lessons from Fukushima have been learned and appropriate fixes decided upon and put in place, all license extensions should be postponed.

Respectfully submitted, 

 

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Background - Keep Informed

We Recommend...  

• Daily news articles from around the world:

        http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/whatsnew.htm  

• Outstanding short and informative videos keeping you updated on what's going on:

      http://fairewinds.com/reports   

• Union of Concerned Scientists Post-Fukushima Blog

      http://allthingsnuclear.org/        http://markey.house.gov/          

• Congressman Markey's Website has valuable reports:

     Nuclear Reactor Safety, Security, and Emergency Response Preparedness       

 

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                                                   Fukushima - Could It Happen Here?

 

STATEMENT OF DR. EDWIN LYMAN,
SENIOR SCIENTIST, GLOBAL SECURITY PROGRAM

TO THE SENATE ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE

UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS

MARCH 16, 2011

Excerpts, for complete statement see http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/

 

While the ongoing situation in Japan should be a main focus of U.S. attention, we should not hesitate to ask ourselves whether we are doing all that we can do to prevent a Fukushima-like nuclear disaster from happening here.

Before proceeding, I would like to say that the Union of Concerned Scientists is neither pro nor anti-nuclear power, but has served as a nuclear power safety and security watchdog for over 40 years.

In the aftermath of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the NRC undertook a major overhaul of its rules to correct many of the regulatory weaknesses that the accident revealed.  In contrast, seven years later, the Commission and the industry avoided learning any lessons from the far more severe Chernobyl accident because of the misleading claim that such an extreme release of radioactivity could never happen at a plant of Western design. 

However, the NRC and the industry cannot hide this time behind the "it can't happen here" excuse. We have 23 plants of the same design. We have plants that are just as old. We have had station blackouts.

We have a regulatory system that is not clearly superior to that of the Japanese. We have had extreme weather events that exceeded our expectations and defeated our emergency planning measures (Katrina).

We have had close calls (e.g. Davis-Besse) that were only one additional failure away from becoming disasters. We have had full-blown disasters in other industries (e.g. BP). We have suffered a devastating terrorist air attack against our infrastructure for which we were completely unprepared.

I would ask the Committee to imagine for a moment that the crisis unfolding at Fukushima is taking place in their home states, and to consider whether this is something that Americans should ever have to endure under any circumstances. 

If the answer is no—the right answer, in our opinion—then it is incumbent on you to thoroughly investigate whether the risk of an American Fukushima is really as low as the NRC and the industry claim. 

But even though it will be a long time before we learn all the lessons from the still-evolving disaster in Japan, it is not premature to immediately take steps to reduce vulnerabilities that have long been known by regulators but have not been addressed. I will offer a few examples.

1. At least two spent fuel pools at the Fukushima plant have caught fire and are releasing radiation into the atmosphere.  These pools are on the upper floor of these Mark I boiling-water reactors and are now open to the air following explosions that breached the buildings around them.   The U.S. has 31 boiling-water reactors with similarly situated spent fuel pools that are far more densely packed than those at Fukushima and hence could pose far higher risks if damaged.  The U.S. should act quickly to remove spent fuel from these pools and place them in dry storage casks to reduce the heat load and radioactive inventories of the pools.
2. The Fukushima accident was precipitated by an earthquake and tsunami, but the direct cause appears to have been a loss of both off-site and on-site power supplies, a situation known as a station blackout.  There are many other types of initiating events that could cause such a situation, including terrorist attacks.  The NRC requires U.S. plants to have the capability to cope with a station blackout for no more than four to eight hours.  We need to re-evaluate the adequacy of these requirements and the effectiveness of their implementation.
3. Although the Japanese are engaged in truly heroic efforts to mitigate the worst effects of this accident and reduce radioactive releases that could harm the public, these efforts have only been partially effective, are already resulting in life-threatening conditions for the workers on site, and are likely to ultimately fail.   U.S. nuclear plants have severe accident management plans, but these plans are not required by regulations and do not have to be evaluated by the NRC and tested for their effectiveness.  In the case of aircraft attack on a nuclear plant, the NRC does require plants to have plans to cope with the loss of large areas of the plant due to explosion and fire.  These plans will have to be re-evaluated in light of Fukushima to judge whether they can be realistically carried out.  In the meantime, the NRC should place a far greater emphasis on preventing accidents and terrorist attacks rather than trying to control them afterward.
4. Elevated levels of radiation have already been detected more than one hundred miles from the release site.  While these levels remain low, if the accident continues to worsen then they could increase dramatically.  If there was a reactor accident in the United States, the emergency preparedness measures that would directly protect the public, including evacuation planning and potassium iodide distribution, are limited to a 10-mile radius.  Whether this distance should be increased will need to be reevaluated, as will the workability of emergency plans in the context of natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

There are many other areas where we believe the NRC has allowed safety margins to decrease too far.  Now, not after an accident, is the time to reconsider whether the NRC’s  position on “how safe is safe” is truly adequate to protect public health and safety.