NRC Whistleblowers: Risk of Nuclear Melt-Down in U.S. Is Even HIGHER
Than It Was at Fukushima
by George Washington
Washington's
Blog
Massive Cover-Up
of Risks from Flooding to Numerous U.S. Nuclear Facilities
Numerous American
nuclear reactors are built within flood zones:
As one example,
on the following map (showing U.S. nuclear power plants built within
earthquake zones), the red lines indicate the
Mississippi and Missouri rivers:
Numerous dam
failures have occurred within the U.S.:
Reactors in
Nebraska and elsewhere were flooded by swollen rivers and almost
melted down. See this,
this,
this
and this.
The Huntsville
Times wrote
in an editorial last year:
A tornado
or a ravaging flood could just as easily be like the tsunami that
unleashed the final blow [at Fukushima as an earthquake].
An engineer
with the NRC says that a reactor meltdown is an “absolute certainty”
if a dam upstream of a nuclear plant fails … and that such a scenario
is hundreds
of times more likely than the tsunami that hit Fukushima
:
An engineer
with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) … Richard Perkins,
an NRC reliability and risk engineer, was the lead author on a
July 2011 NRC report detailing flood preparedness. He said the
NRC blocked information from the public regarding the potential
for upstream dam failures to damage nuclear sites.
Perkins,
in a letter
submitted Friday with the NRC Office of Inspector General, said
that the NRC “intentionally mischaracterized relevant and noteworthy
safety information as sensitive, security information in an effort
to conceal the information from the public.” The
Huffington Post first obtained the letter.
***
The report
in question was completed four months after … Fukushima.
The report
concluded that, “Failure of one or more dams upstream from a nuclear
power plant may result in flood levels at a site that render essential
safety systems inoperable.”
Huffington
Post reported
last month:
These charges
were echoed in separate conversations with another risk
engineer inside the agencywho suggested that the vulnerability
at one plant in particular – the three-reactor Oconee Nuclear
Station near Seneca, S.C. – put it at risk of a flood and subsequent
systems failure, should an upstream dam completely fail, that
would be similar to the tsunami that hobbled the Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear facility in Japan last year.***
The engineer
is among several nuclear experts who remain particularly
concerned about the Oconee plant in South Carolina, which sits
on Lake Keowee, 11 miles downstream from the Jocassee Reservoir.
Among the redacted findings in the July 2011 report – and what
has been known at the NRC for years, the engineer said – is that
the Oconee facility, which is operated by Duke Energy, would suffer
almost certain core damage if the Jocassee dam were to
fail. And the odds of it failing sometime over the next
20 years, the engineer said, are far greater than the
odds of a freak tsunami taking out the defenses of a nuclear plant
in Japan.
“The probability
of Jocassee Dam catastrophically failing is hundreds
of times
greater than
a 51 foot wall of water hitting Fukushima Daiichi,” the
engineer said. “And, like the tsunami in Japan, the man-made ‘tsunami’
resulting from the failure of the Jocassee Dam will –-
with absolute certainty –- result in the failure of three reactor
plants along with their containment structures.
“Although
it is not a given that Jocassee Dam will fail in the next 20 years,”
the engineer added, “it is a given that if it does fail, the three
reactor plants will melt down and release their radionuclides
into the environment.”
***
In the letter,
a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, Richard H.
Perkins, a reliability and risk engineer with the agency’s division
of risk analysis, alleged that NRC officials falsely invoked
security concerns in redacting large portions of a report
detailing the agency’s preliminary investigation into the potential
for dangerous and damaging flooding at U.S. nuclear power plants
due to upstream dam failure.
Perkins,
along with at least one other employee inside NRC, also an engineer,
suggested that the real motive for redacting certain information
was to prevent the public from learning the full extent of these
vulnerabilities, and to obscure just how much the NRC has known
about the problem, and for how long.
Read
the rest of the article
October
23, 2012
George
Washington blogs at Washington's
Blog.
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© 2012 Washington's
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