Nuke Industry: We Don’t Plan for Disasters as Big as Fukushima

/in /by

I’m headed out to Lansing shortly–hopefully I’ll be posting updates from the biggest protest MI’s capital has seen in a long time.

But I wanted to point out something funny (as in, “oh jeebus we’re all going to die” funny) about the American Nuclear Society’s talking points to try to convince Americans that nukes are still safe.

Here’s how those talking points start:

It is premature for the technical community to draw conclusions from the earthquake and tsunami tragedy in Japan with regard to the U.S. nuclear energy program. Many opposed to nuclear power will try to use this event to call for changes in the U.S. Japan is facing beyond a “worst case” disaster since we, the technical community, did not hypotheses an event of this magnitude. Thus far, even the most seriously damaged of Japan’s 54 reactors have not released radiation at levels that would harm the public. [my emphasis]

Aside from the false claim that none of the reactors have released radiation at levels that can hurt people (tell that to the Fukushima workers who are being treated) and the already-tired claim that we should wait to assess the damage, note the admission that the technical community doesn’t “hypotheses” events of this magnitude.

That’s an admission that the nuke industry doesn’t account for worse case scenario when they plan reactors: you know–things like 100 year floods and earthquakes and whatnot?

And that’s precisely the danger with nuclear power.

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  1. Deep Harm says:

    Industry’s definition of “harm,” in practice, equates to “visible, substantial and immediate.” Of course, the most likely harm from radiation exposure is long-term, i.e., cancer, except at extreme levels such as emergency workers currently face at Fukushima. Notably, as a result of the demands of the current emergency, Japanese authorities just raised the legal maximum radiation dose for emergency workers from 100 mSv to 250 mSv (equivalent to 25 rem). [Miami Herald]

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      That’s also in other media, including the NYT. Increasing the permitted exposure limits helps keep the same tired crew on site and working. But its likely, given Japanese understanding of honor, duty and face that those workers would stay on the job until taken off it by superiors.

      They know what’s at stake more than anyone, and almost no one but those workers know enough about these specific systems to attempt make-shift fixes real time, in the face of constantly changing site conditions. They also know the health risks they’re taking. All that changing the limit accomplishes is to let the government and TEP lower their liability. It’s likely to be a drop in a big ocean.

      • hotdog says:

        One has to wonder how many of those workers are saying to themselves right now, “I knew when I signed up for this, I committed myself to this kind of scenerio. I argued to myself, the technology is sound and the risk is low, but if something goes wrong I’ll give my life to minimize harm to others. I really fucked up. I’m sorry world. Here’s my life in exchange for my stupidity. Damn, I was hoping I could live to see my kids grow up.”

        To them I’d like to say thank you, I forgive you even though you were just bamboozled like the rest of us, and I promise I’ll try to prevent the possibility of this ever happening again.

  2. prostratedragon says:

    Do I understand them correctly that the failure to plan for disasters outside some parameter space (which nevertheless can and ultimately does occur) is supposed to be defensible? That we are to find the professionalism of the engineers and planners to be exemplary despite the lapse?

    Here’s the next sentence after that canard about public harm:

    That is testament to the way professionals in our profession operate: our philosophy of defense in-depth, excellent designs, high standards of construction, conduct of operations, and most important the effectiveness of employees in following emergency preparedness planning.

    Even if we believe that no members of the public have been harmed by the making of this debacle, the best that could be claimed for their engineering “professionalism” is that they got off damn lucky by not considering events that, actually, have happened in places similar to the Japanese fault system. (Chile, Alaska)

  3. earlofhuntingdon says:

    If that’s an attempt to justify the appropriateness of assuming away significant multiple system failures, it’s a dog that won’t hunt. Its nose and the rest of it will have been burned off by radiation. Or by the fire, insurrection, sabotage, earthquake, weather, power grid failure, mechanical pump failures, or epidemic that incapacitates essential workers. It’s a way of claiming the industry and any individual designer, operator or government should be let off the hook. Who could have predicted that from an industry that taught tobacco lobbyists everything they know?

  4. Deep Harm says:

    I read that the nuclear lobbyists were all over Capitol Hill this week. No details, but it seems fair to suppose that they were passing out talking points like those and promising bigger campaign donations.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      I’m sure they had the lobbyist’s equivalent of a suitcase full of Ben Franklins, a magnum of whisky and a case of Cubans. ‘Cause they know the cost of good relations on the Hill just went up an order of magnitude. Congressional chiefs of staff are counting their luck all the way to the electoral bank.

  5. harpie says:

    Lobbying:

    Nuclear Power Industry Primed for Political Fight if Officials Sour on Plant Expansion Plans; Dave Levinthal; 3/14/11

    http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2011/03/nuclear-primed-for-fight.html

    U.S. politicians are this week renewing debate over the merits of a decades-long freeze on domestic nuclear plant construction as half a world away, Japan faces a potential meltdown of reactors at its Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

    And if a political fight over new plant construction materializes, advocates of nuclear power in the United States are primed for it, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of federal lobbying and campaign finance data indicates. [more]

    And/or go to http://www.opensecrets.org and type “nuclear energy” into their search engine. Interesting reading.

  6. harpie says:

    Safety on the Cheap; Robert Reich; 3/15/11

    http://www.truth-out.org/safety-cheap68492

    Can we please agree that in the real world corporations exist for one purpose, and one purpose only — to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?

    […]

    Here’s the problem. Profit-making corporations have every incentive to underestimate these probabilities and lowball the likely harms.

    This is why it’s necessary to have such things as government regulators, why regulators must be independent of the industries they regulate, and why regulators need enough resources to enforce the regulations.

    It’s also why the public in every nation is endangered if the political clout of its biggest corporations — BP, Halliburton, Massey, G.E., or TEPCO — grows too large.

  7. Jeff Kaye says:

    UK Telegraph:

    Japan earthquake: Japan warned over nuclear plants, WikiLeaks cables show

    Japan was warned more than two years ago by the international nuclear watchdog that its nuclear power plants were not capable of withstanding powerful earthquakes, leaked diplomatic cables reveal.

    …. A US embassy cable obtained by the WikiLeaks website and seen by The Daily Telegraph quoted an unnamed expert who expressed concern that guidance on how to protect nuclear power stations from earthquakes had only been updated three times in the past 35 years.

    The document states: “He [the IAEA official] explained that safety guides for seismic safety have only been revised three times in the last 35 years and that the IAEA is now re-examining them.

    “Also, the presenter noted recent earthquakes in some cases have exceeded the design basis for some nuclear plants, and that this is a serious problem that is now driving seismic safety work.”

    The cables also disclose how the Japanese government opposed a court order to shut down another nuclear power plant in western Japan because of concerns it could not withstand powerful earthquakes….

  8. rkilowatt says:

    re: Japan meltdowns and failed back-up electric generators

    pls see Greg Palast on this.[and TEPCO as partner in 2 new Texas nukes]

    “Stone & Webster, now the Shaw nuclear division, was also the firm that conspired to fake the EDG tests in New York. (The company’s other exploits have been exposed by their former consultant, John Perkins, in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.)”…

    http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/

  9. JohnLopresti says:

    Obama gave a recent speech alluding to US petrol trade with the north Africa rim countries, and middle east region nations broadly; the president*s comments professed the aspiration that his presidency would see a policy-making turning point that would provide an enduring pathway toward resolution of *US foreign oil dependence*; though, the rhetoric was abstract rather than explicit. Part of my impression of the president*s intention was revisiting the post-Three-Mile-Island, post-Chernobyl, world of nuclear-reactor-produced electricity.

    An excellent source of readable and scientist written news about the unfolding events at three reactors at Daiichi is available at a website of an organization founded at MIT a long time ago with the purpose of infusing some conscientious management ideals into modern science engendered products. Reactors fit that aim, and the Union of Concerned Scientists is doing a laudable job of keeping its nuke news site current, there.

    A recent blogpost there explains the spent fuel rods from a December 2010 swap-out in one reactor likely have gotten so overheated that a worker at the doorway would receive a lethal dose of radiation in 60 seconds.

  10. Deep Harm says:

    Apparently, the National Review received an advance copy of industry talking points for the nuclear power plant crisis.

    [N]othing could be more scandalous than the current campaign by much of the international press to spread panic over trivial emissions of radiological material from several disabled nuclear power stations.

    Sorry, guys. Not going to erase the worldwide trauma of this one with cheap propaganda.

  11. Arbusto says:

    We now have reactors routinely operating at 120% of rated power and with 25 year useful life extensions when originally licensed for a maximum of 40 years. These authorizations issued by the NRC, even when radiation leaks reach the ground water. The industry is plagued by operators, including TEPCO, using paper inspections, shoddy repairs, deferred maintenance and failing systems with no effective government oversight. The answer of course is to build newer systems paid for and insured by taxpayers, since AIG and Co. wont insure reactors.

  14. Bleeding Heart of Texas says:

    Thus far, even the most seriously damaged of Japan’s 54 reactors have not released radiation at levels that would harm the public.

    I think the loophole in that statement is the focus on the reactors, which, other than the controlled steam releases, are claimed to be still intact and containing the radiation. The unmentioned part are the storage pools for the spent fuel rods. These are being reported as the source of the fires/explosions/elevated radiation readings. I think that’s a ommission by design. In this country, the federal government is tasked with nuclear waste disposal. But since they have no where to put the stuff (ie Yucca Mountain in Nevada) each facility has been tasked with holding the waste on-site, often for decades in sub-standard, ‘temporary’ facilities. I don’t know what the private/government arrangement is in Japan regarding waste disposal, but this may be a play to foist responsibility for the accumulation of so much radioactive waste onto the government taxpayer.

  15. dustbunny44 says:

    The danger with nuclear power is the subsidy and use of corrosive, toxic, and unstable substances in a technically complex environment where billions of dollars are at stake and consequences remain unstable and toxic for many lifetimes. We are not sufficiently mature as a society to handle this challenge, a combination of technical and ethical with severe and persistent consequences.

  16. Professor Foland says:

    I think if you define “the public” as excluding people on site, and focus on “thus far”, the press release is reasonably accurate in its description of the harm to date. It will be out of date in that respect quite soon.

    But an admission that “we did not plan for this kind of event” is not exactly confidence-inspiring in terms of why nuclear energy is safe and we don’t need to “shut down all the trash compacters” right now.

    If you operate a power plant for 40 years, there’s a 4% chance of encountering a “thousand-year event”.

    • JohnLopresti says:

      Thanx for the actuarial views. One issue with Japan and a **1,000-year** nuke statistical probability of [catastrophic] failure is the quake even only is being depicted as a 100-year event, given the structure of the tectonic plates subduction zone in that region. One of the remarkable aspects of the GE Mark 1 design is the assertion that containment is only doubly guaranteed for used **spent** rod events. Although enlisting a 40-50-year memory of the ebullient times during which many reactors were constructed in Japan, and elsewhere, might produce a depiction that that antique GE design was marginally less than cavalier; still, it seems foolhardy to have only double containment when hydrogen, a highly combustible gaseous product of accidental open-air contact of spent rods, is nearly guaranteed to destroy the primary containment structure. It is, indeed lame, to assume coolant need not have backup generator supplied electric power during a catastrophe.

      Footnoting. Even though Europe Low Countries residents saw milk and salads banned because of the Chernobyl offsite drift of radiation entrained on prevailing winds, a close monitor of US Pacific northwest radio transmitted news immediately after the Kiev event also showed a not widely reported increase in radiation measured in Washington state. My thought, and question, being: if Daiichi loses 3 reactors to meltdown, what are the wind patterns? what is the anticipated radiation level in the US when that occurs? Currently the jet stream is directing weather at the central coast of CA.

  17. melior says:

    The key mistake typically made in their probabilistic risk assessments is the simplifying assumption that risks are independent. They’re not, of course, reference the earthquake+tsnami+loss of electrical power in this case. But the problem is either very difficult or intractable without making that assumption, so they do anyway. And of course, it’s the answer that their bosses are paid enormous amounts of cash in exchange for them finding.

  18. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Private industry won’t incur such costs unless the govt mandates it, checks their work, and penalizes non-compliance. Politicians of all stripes seem to have caught the virus that labels such normal regulatory oversight as overkill or the nanny state. Yet the first thing private banks did when their greed and mismanagement threatened to bring down the global financial system was run for help from Nanny McPhee Uncle Sam.

    Watch them repeat that trick if actionable levels of radiation reach this country from Japan. Imagine the subsidies businesses of all stripes will cry out for. And watch them complain that the govt can’t possibly afford to provide medical services and treatment therapies to under- and uninsured Americans. We all have to share the sacrifice you know.

    And BTW, if you read most medical insurance contracts, like life insurance contracts, even the best of them exclude all sorts of things normal people with a conscience would never imagine they exclude.

  19. Disgusteddan says:

    Putting all the operational technical issues with nuclear power; until someone comes up with a way to make the “waste” inert, it should be stopped. All the nuclear waste created up to this point in time and continuing into the future; will have to be baby sat by humanity FOREVER. How much does that cost? Who is going to pay for it?

    The waste we have created will still be dangerous tens of thousands of years from now and no storage solution designed by man will stand up to the test of time.

    • dakine01 says:

      Yep. The waste has a toxic half life thousands of years longer than currently recorded human history yet folks seem to think it can just be buried in a mountain and all will magically resolve itself