First, an excellent new video has been released by Fairewinds Associates and Arnie Gundersen, which provides much of the underlying science to boiling water reactors such as those employed at Fukushima and at our own little liability,Vermont Yankee.
Nuclear Power 101: Fairewinds examines the fundamental advantages and disadvantages of splitting atoms to boil water. from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
Next, lest we forget the precarious nature of our domestic nuclear energy policy in the aftermath of a manufactured debt crisis, how about a look at what those merry pranksters at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been up to lately?
It was recently revealed that the NRC has lowered safety standards in response to industry failures to meet previously higher standards. The latest news is that the NRC plans to announce a lowering of the estimate of fatalities resulting from a nuclear meltdown.
That’s right. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, where ample evidence was provided that officials gravely underestimated both the vulnerability of the plant systems to failure and the appropriate scale of evacuations, the NRC is busy undermining its own safeguards.
When the Union of Concerned Scientists learned that the NRC had concluded a six year research project, the results of which seem to minimize risks associated with nuclear power, they used the Freedom of Information act to make sure that the New York Times was provided with a draft version of the report.
The conclusion, to be published in April after six years of work, is based largely on a radical revision of projections of how much and how quickly cesium 137, a radioactive material that is created when uranium is split, could escape from a nuclear plant after a core meltdown. In past studies, researchers estimated that 60 percent of a reactor core’s cesium inventory could escape; the new estimate is only 1 to 2 percent.
There are a number of problems with the data yielded by the research, including the small perimeter of assumed impact, and the decision imposed on the research to focus on the”best-estimate” rather than worst case scenario. Anyone who has followed the unfolding catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi will immediately see the fallacy of this approach, and it does little to dispel the overwhelming impression that the NRC’s relationship to the industry is entirely too cozy.
This is a prime example of how even factual data may be mined in such a way as to produce the desired results. It is not difficult to imagine the culture at the NRC that allowed regulatory failures at U.S. plants to be rationalized into lower standards rather than penalties and strict remedies.
Now we learn that that culture is not uniformly pliant, and that a sharp division exists within the NRC itself.
In the aftermath of Fukushima’s nuclear accidents, an NRC task force has produced twelve safety recommendations that it would like to see “aggressively” implemented at U.S. plants. NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko is among those advocating for immediate adoption of the recommendations, but not all commissioners agree on the urgency:
Some commissioners are not supportive of taking action on all 12 safety recommendations made by the task force within three months. Commissioners William Magwood, Kristine Svinicki and William Ostendorff have called for more study of at least some of the recommendations, while Commissioner George Apostolakis supports taking action in 90 days.
At today’s Senate hearing on the matter, Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders joined Chairman Jaczko in calling for immediate action:
“I applaud the recommendations made by the task force, but I am disturbed that a majority of the NRC does not want to move forward on all 12 recommendations within three months,” Sanders told the commissioners. “I know what delay means in this town, it means nothing is going to happen.”