AP IMPACT: US nuke regulators weaken safety rules

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UPDATE: Today the Free Press continues to run the AP IMPACT report. Today’s story: tritium leaks, like those found at Yankee, are present in 75% of all U.S. nuke plants.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress…

You have to wonder, though, how many of the plants lied about even having the pipes the way Vermont Yankee did.

If you've been following the stories about Vermont Yankee and Fukushima you will be interested in this story published in today's Burlington Free Press.  

LACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J. – Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation's aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.

Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according to records and interviews.

We have no information on whether specific changes have been made to the standards for Vermont Yankee, but given the age of the plant it seems quite likely that they have.

Due to space limitations the full story didn’t appear in the Free Press, but you should read it. The article discloses a series of failures in virtually every operational or safety system in nuclear plants across the country.

What’s our experience in Vermont: collapsing and leaking cooling towers, valve failures, leaks from pipes that the management claimed didn’t even exist, yet we are told that state regulators have no authority to even look at the safety of the plant that directly imperils residents of Vermont and New Hampshire.

Read the story, think about what’s happening in Japan, and think about what you want to see here in Vermont.

6 thoughts on “AP IMPACT: US nuke regulators weaken safety rules”

  1. means dulling the regulations

    Unprompted, several nuclear engineers and former regulators used nearly identical terminology to describe how industry and government research has frequently justified loosening safety standards to keep aging reactors within operating rules. They call the approach “sharpening the pencil” or “pencil engineering” – the fudging of calculations and assumptions to yield answers that enable plants with deteriorating conditions to remain in compliance.

    Here is a link to the entire AP piece: http://www.google.com/hostedne…

  2. I just heard on VPR that the NRC will be at the plant this week for its annual “inspection” (read, “paperwork review”). In conjunction with that visit, the NRC will hold a public presentation and invite comment from members of the public. Check VPR’s website later today (it’s not posted yet as of 8 a.m.).

    Or there’s a brief blurb in the Free Press from a week ago:

    The NRC gave the Vernon reactors good marks in a review issued in March, and is inviting public comment at a session set for June 22 from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Brattleboro Union High School.

    Hope they get an earful – not that NRC public hearings amount to much more than empty gestures to appease the locals.

    NanuqFC

    The human race has today the means for annihilating itself … by careless handling of atomic technology through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure. ~ Max Born (Nobel Prize winner for Physics, 1954; from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 1957)  

  3. I just did a diary on this–would’ve finished before you, but I had to take the non-radioactive tyke to daycare.

    Anyway, the NRC is bullshit.

  4. VT Yankee stores 3x as much spent fuel in its spent fuel pool as is was stored in the pool at Fukushima 4.

    VT Yankee has 7x as much total radioactive material on site than is present in the entire Fukushima complex.

    As out-of-control Fukushima continues to pump out hot particles, and appears to be creating ongoing criticality events; the greedy bastards who run Vermont’s little Fukushma-in-training are more than happy to jeopardize us all for a few extra dinero.

    It’s time to get our fightin’ shoes on, and show those evil f***ers the door.

  5. …should make us all reflect on the effects of nuclear contamination.  It doesn’t seem to bother them that we are continually exposed to ‘private sector’ fallout.  Regulations hurt the economy, they say.  Shit, let’s deregulate everything, including capital crimes…oh, they’ve already done that.  It will be curious to see if this issue is taken up by a candidate not beholdin’ to the Corporate Beast.  I’m also curious about what’s in our ObamaCare that covers nuclear related sicknesses, like leukemia, genetic defects, etc.???  Profit in making people sick, and bailouts for corporations to help pay their lawyers and lobbyists to keep people sick.  Sick.

    The Japanese jet stream hits Vermont.  It also hits Alaska.  Sarah Palin-Brian Dubie-Tom Salmon.  There’s a fifties movie in this.  

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