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Are Nuclear Plants Safe ?Ronald Porep, Republished from SafetyIssues.com Issue 27 |
Volume 4 Issue 43June 2005 |
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Live in an area with a nuclear plant? While the nuclear industry would
like you to feel safe, recent events indicate that you could be the victim
of a nuclear disaster without even getting a moment's warning. A recent
test of the warning sirens at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power |
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Backup plans to notify the public in case of an emergency include
street-to-street notification by public safety personnel and news alerts. "Right now, what do we depend upon?" asked Mary Lampert, chairwoman of the Duxbury Nuclear Advisory Committee. "The media or, if you're within (a 10-mile emergency zone), the sirens -- if the alarms happen to work, if you happen to hear them and if you happen to be outside." Add to those conditions of being warned about a nuclear disaster that the disaster may move too fast for any warning to be effective or that nuclear power plant personnel may not even be aware that anything is wrong until disaster strikes. That can not happen with all the safeguards in place in a nuclear facility? Last February, Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant shut down after workers discovered that boric acid had eaten away at 70 pounds of steel, leaving a 6-by-5-inch hole in its reactor head. Only a thin, 3/8-inch strip of stainless steel lining protected the reactor from rupturing and causing what could have been the most devastating nuclear accident since Three Mile Island. "We could have had the worst nuclear catastrophe this nation had ever
experienced," describes Amy Ryder, who leads the campaign to permanently
close the plant for environmental advocacy group Ohio Citizen Action. Currently, there are 103 commercial nuclear power plants in the United States, which account for more than 20% of the nation's total electricity energy output. Critics call the plants disasters waiting to happen. Like incidents to the one Davis-Besse may back that opinion. Workers found coolant leaks at the Sequoyah 2 plant in Tennessee and the Comanche Peak 1 plant in Texas. Both plants had leaked boric acid, which is an additive in reactor coolant that is highly corrosive to carbon steel. "There's been a lengthy list of these near-misses. "It's a growing problem. For an aging fleet of nuclear reactors, it's not unexpected," points out David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Now to the credit of government nuclear regulators and the nuclear power industry, there hasn't been a major nuclear accident in the United States in 20 years but the consequences of one such event could be devastating - an aging reactor could leak radiation, which would contaminate the water supply and cause life-threatening diseases and infections. Such a disaster would make 911 look like a fender bender car accident with both its higher death and injury toll and its decades or even centuries long aftereffects. Such a disaster could come without significant warning due to neither government regulators nor nuclear plant employees even recognizing symptoms of a disaster in the making. That is almost what happened at the Davis-Beese nuclear power plant. Davis-Besse started leaking boric acid in 1996. Between 1998 and 2000, the leakage began causing problems for other equipment. In 1999, FirstEnergy, the corporation that operates Davis-Besse, found traces of rust particles in the filters of radiation monitors. These filters, which sample the air inside the reactor's containment structure, are normally replaced every two to three months. When the leakage began, the filters had to be replaced every day. Experts stress that this symptom should have been a warning that something was seriously wrong. FirstEnergy, however, ignored photographic evidence documenting rust seeping from the reactor head as early as April 2000. In August, FirstEnergy admitted to NRC investigators that it placed production before public safety by deferring inspections and corrective action programs. FirstEnergy is spending more than $400 million on repairs. Remember only 3/8th of an inch of protection was left when the nuclear plant owner finally took action to prevent a breech of the reactor and a disaster that could have been magnitudes worse than even Chernobyl. Just one cause of near incidents that nuclear industry critics claim are punching huge holes in the safety net that the public thinks protects it from nuclear disaster. There are many other disasters in the making and not all of them are even on the sites of nuclear plants. There is what is happening to used nuclear fuel to worry about. Used nuclear fuel - still radioactive enough to create a disaster - is being transported through our communities on unmarked trains. How many times have freights derailed across the nation? One such derailment of cars carrying nuclear fuel could create a disaster as bad as a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. And, when considering the safety of nuclear fuel, there is the storage of the used fuel to consider. If a huge amount of such supposedly heavily contained used fuel breaks open due to disaster or sabotage, the resultant contamination could devastate the United States if not the world. The 1986 meltdown of Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear reactor spewed radiation across Europe. Since the accident, thousands of people in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia have died from radiation-related illnesses. Almost 2,000 cases of thyroid cancer have resulted from the reactor explosion. Which makes the question of whether nuclear power is safe a critical one. The answer, according to the nuclear industry, is nuclear power is safe. The answer, according to critics including many experts in nuclear physics, is that nuclear power is a disaster risk we can not afford. The wrong answer could kill you and your family. |
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