Kevin Hurley talks with Arnie and Maggie Gundersen about the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board’s (ASLB) decision to hold public hearings about restarting the San Onofre Nuclear Plant.  ”This whole issue is about the public’s right to know. The nuclear industry and the NRC have developed a process to keep the public out,” Arnie says. “Was there a safety risk? Yes,” Maggie says, “There was a significant safety risk to the 8 million people in that area of southern California. Was there a radiation release? Yes. It was minor, but it could have been so much more.”

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Bad things happen when regulators do not enforce nuclear power plant regulations.  This week’s podcast discusses secret, closed-door meetings between top regulators in Japan, as well as the failure of regulation much closer to home: in Michigan.  Kevin and Arnie are joined by Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist with Beyond Nuclear.  Finally, surprising radioactive discoveries at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi site call into question the key assumptions regulators use when trying to decide just how well the public is protected from nuclear power plant accidents.

Click here to check out Kevin Kamp’s organization Beyond Nuclear

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On today’s podcast, Arnie and Kevin talk about international nuclear contamination with Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.  They discuss the differences between American and Canadian nuclear plants in design and regulatory philosophy.  They also discuss Fairewinds Associates recent report on the relicensing of the Pickering Station on the Canadian coast of Lake Ontario, just a 30 minute drive from Toronto.  Fukushima Daiichi may have taught us that nuclear contamination knows no borders, but are the industry and its regulators applying this lesson?

Fairewinds Associates, Inc - Analysis of the Relicensing Application for Pickering Nuclear Generating Station

Dr. Edwards report on Pickering Reactors - Don’t Push Your Luck!

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The US and Japan are trying to raise acceptable radiation exposure limits. “If you can’t decrease the water level, you elevate the bridge,” says pediatrician and author Dr. Helen Caldicott. On today’s podcast, Arnie and Helen discuss the associated health risks of various types of radioactive releases, how regulators and the nuclear industry are downplaying those releases, and the current state of the Fukushima clean up. “The recovery of the site will go nowhere as long as Tokyo Electric is in charge,” says Arnie.

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More about Dr. Helen Caldicott

Podcast Transcript

Kevin Hurley:  It is Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 and this is the Energy Education podcast.  I’m Kevin Hurley.  Today on the show we are joined by special guest and Nobel Prize Nominee, Dr. Helen Caldicott and Arnie Gundersen to discuss a multitude of issues, including various types of radioactive releases, their associated health risks, and how regulators in the nuclear industry are downplaying those releases.  Radiation contamination is very difficult to clean up.  And rather than working to lower radiation exposure to the public, government officials and industry promoters around the world are pushing to raise the standard of maximum allowable radiation concentration levels to the public.  Finally, we will share some details about the Fukushima clean up and how the people of Japan will be best served if the Tokyo Electric Power Company is removed from oversight of the Fukushima clean up and an independent company replaces them to deal with the problem head on.  Today I would like to welcome Dr. Helen Caldicott to the show.  Dr. Caldicott, thanks for coming on.

Dr. Helen Caldicott:  Pleasure.

KH:  And of course, Arnie Gundersen.  Thanks for joining us.

AG:  Hey Kevin, thanks again for having me.

KH:  Helen, the last time we spoke was before the New York City Symposium.  How did that go?

HC:  Yes, I was particularly pleased with how it went.  It was really flawless.  Everyone turned up.  The papers were absolutely excellent and it was not boring at all.  Each paper had a different aspect about nuclear power radiation and the damages to the environment and to health.  And people were absolutely thrilled.  We had about 300 people there.  Not as much media as I wanted to because I put it on to educate the media.  However, it is available online at the Helen Caldicott Foundation.org    It is now being translated into Japanese because the Japanese really want to be able to access it.  And also it is presently being transcribed to be published in a book by the New Press.  I hope fairly shortly.

KH:  In addition, there were 4,000 people connected on YouStream.

KH:  That is right.  And I think about 360 cities logged in to watch it, so it did get a fairly wide exposure.  It was the latest in the science related to radiation, nuclear accidents and the like.  And so it gives people ammunition who are fighting local reactors to take on bodies like the NRC, etc. because then they will know what they are talking about and will have lots of facts at their fingertips.

KH:  Speaking about ammunition and fighting the government, the Environmental Protection Agency is now talking about raising the radiation limits, the maximum allowable radiation limits after a nuclear accident.  To me, and probably many others, this really seems like just one more way of making the Fukushima Daiichi problem go away.

HC:  That is right.  If you cannot decrease the water level, you elevate the bridge.  So the truth is that if there is a nuclear accident, it does not matter what your standard to exposure to radiation to human beings is.  After a nuclear accident like Fukushima, the large contiguous areas become extremely radioactive and will be so for hundreds of years.  So it is really just putting the icing on the cake so to speak.  The cake is already there, and they are admitting that they can do nothing about it.  It gave everyone a shock, but the truth is that once an area has been contaminated, that is it.   And I suppose they are just coming to terms with reality.  But it is very, very scary and it makes people understand what a nuclear accident would really mean.

AG:  Now a nuclear plant releases a bunch of different types of radiation.  In my report, I spent a lot of time talking about the nobel gasses that were released.  Enormous concentrations for 5 or 6 days of nobel gasses came out of Fukushima Daiichi.  Now they are inside the fuel and as soon as the fuel cracks, we do not need a meltdown, as soon as the fuel cracks, the gasses escape into the containment.  But I think what Daiichi showed us is that the containments failed as well.  So the last barrier of defense failed, releasing huge amounts of nobel gasses.

KH:  Can you talk a little bit about some of the medical consequences?

HC:  I think you said, Arnie, 3 times more nobel gasses were released at Fukushima than at Chernobyl, is that correct?

AG:  Yes, that is right.

HC:  Nobel gasses, or nobel elements, are those that do not combine chemically with anything in the body.   They are sort of kind of neutral.  Because carbon 14 actually combines with the DNA molecule, so does tritium and strontium as a calcium analog gets into the body, etc.  But nobel gasses do not go specifically to anywhere in the body because of their chemical makeup.  However, nobel gasses are very high energy gamma emitters, like X-rays.  And so if you are immersed in a cloud of nobel gasses, you are going to get a big dose of radiation, external radiation, like an X-ray.  However, if you inhale the nobel gasses, and they are xenon, krypton and argon, xenon being the worst, you inhale the gasses and, in fact, they readily pass through the alveoli, the little air sacs in the lungs, into the blood where they circulate.  And they are fat soluble so they deposit in the fatty tissues of the body, which are the abdominal fat pad and the upper thighs where there is a lot of fat.  And they there irradiate very important cells with gamma radiation:  the ovaries and testicles.  And so people who are immersed in a cloud of radioactive gasses, like at Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, get a hell of a dose of radiation, not just to the ovaries and testicles which are very important, but to other organs of the body.  I used to use xenon 133 in my patients to estimate their lung function.  Patients with cystic fibrosis have their lungs clogged up with mucus, very thick mucus.  So areas of the lung become totally non-functional.  So we would do ventilation fusion scans to see what areas of the lung are in truth being ventilated and what areas are being perfused by the blood.  And we are now using xenon 133 to look at fatty tumors in the body, to isolate them because as I said, they are very fat soluble, these nobel gasses.

AG:  Let me refer our listeners to the presentation I gave at the conference where I spent a large amount of time talking about the nobel gas releases.  So if you want to learn more about the quantities that were released, and like I said, they are 3 times what was released after Chernobyl, go over to the Fairewinds website and there is a separate video on the presentation that I made through the Caldicott Foundation in New York City back in March.

HC:  Arnie, I have got a question.  Can you extrapolate from the fact that there were 3 times more nobel gasses released at Fukushima than Chernobyl, to other isotopes?  Would you therefore say that most of the other isotopes will be 3 times the release at Chernobyl or not?

AG:  Yes, I talk about that in the presentation.  Some of the isotopes do plate out.  I think the cesium concentration is going to be comparable to what was released at Chernobyl.  There was some plate out in chemical reactions but I think the IAEA and the Japanese are grossly downplaying the cesium releases.  If you go back to what Steve Wing said in Harrisburg 4 years ago, there were noticeable increases in lung cancer for the people that lived within 30 miles of Three Mile Island in the first 10 days of the accident.  So 5 years after the accident, people began to get lung cancer.  And that is the only thing Steve could measure, but I attribute that to breathing enormous amounts of nobel gasses.

HC:  I think, yes, you might be right about that.  In fact, I see that lung cancer starts to appear 2 years after Three Mile Island, which is extremely early.   You would not expect lung cancers to arrive for probably 15 years, but they appeared very early which would indicate therefore that the people at Three Mile Island got a hell of a dose of gamma radiation to their lungs from the nobel gasses if they inhaled them.  And so we would expect to see that around Fukushima now.  We are just sitting on a powder keg of cancers.

AG:  And where it goes in your body and what it does to your body.

HC:  There are 3 isotopes:  one is 137, 134 and I cannot remember the other one, Arnie?  But cesium 137 has a half life of 30 years which you multiply by 10 to get its total radiological life, its total radioactive life and so that is 300 years.  Some multiply it by 20 to say 600 years.  It is a very high energy gamma emitter but also it emits beta radiation which is just an electron emitted from the unstable nucleus and it does not do any damage to you unless you get cesium inside your body.  Now cesium lands on the soil and it is a potassium analog.  It is very much like the element potassium and our bodies are very rich with potassium, all cells contain potassium.  And therefore, the cesium lands on the soil and concentrates by orders of magnitude ten to hundreds of thousands of times of each step of the food chain:  the grass, the meat, the milk, and then into our bodies or into wheat or into rice or into vegetables or into green tea or into fish.  And it really concentrates in fish because they are various levels:  there are algae, then crustaceans, then little fish, then big fish.  So the bio-concentration in the food chain and the sea is pretty high.  Now when you eat food with cesium in it, you cannot taste it, you cannot smell it and you cannot see it.  It is invisible to our senses and it is absorbed from the bowel because the body thinks it is potassium.  And it goes to many organs in the body, like the brain where it can cause brain cancer.  It is concentrated in muscles because they are rich in potassium, where it can form a very rare form of cancer, rhabdomyosarcoma.  And that is a very nasty cancer that spreads incredibly fast.  And in fact, I lived on Long Island near the Brookhaven National Labs where there had been a meltdown some years before and there were 19 children at the time who developed rhabdomyosarcoma.  And over time, that is just extremely rare and would indicate that the area was contaminated with cesium 137.  It also can concentrate in the ovaries and the testicles where it can damage the eggs and the sperm, causing genetic disease in future generations, and it concentrates in heart muscle and it can cause gross abnormalities in the conduction system of the heart causing sudden death or cardiac irregularities, and it also concentrates in the endocrine system, in the thyroid, and in the pancreas where insulin is produced.  So it is a very nasty poison and will remain active in the food around Fukushima for hundreds of years.

AG:  I think you said something really important there.  We worry about radiation and cancer, but in fact there are non-cancer problems associated with cesium as well.

HC:  Yes.  If you read the reports from Chernobyl published by the New York Academy of Sciences which was put together by Alexei Yablokov from Russia.  There are many diseases caused by exposure to radiation.  One is cataracts of the lenses so people can go relatively blind.  One is premature aging of children, that is called Progeria; they age very fast.  Diabetes is virtually an epidemic around Chernobyl now.  Thyroid abnormalities, hypothyroidism where the thyroid does not pump out enough hormones so you get what is called Myxedema, very slow, you put on weight, your hair falls out, your mental capacities decline and your appetite goes away and your periods stop.  And that is a nasty disease.  Also of course, it causes thyroid cancer and lots of other abnormalities.  Babies who were in utero at the time of the accident were exposed to radiation which damages the developing nervous system.  So in Sweden, they have done a survey of babies who were in utero at the time of Chernobyl and they have lower than normal IQ’s.  There are towns around Chernobyl full of the most grossly deformed children because they were damaged in the first 3 months of intrauterine life where limbs grow and brain grows and heart grows and so radiation can damage the cell that is going to form the left half of the brain for instance or the right arm, like Thalidomide did.  We have never seen so many grossly deformed children as you see in those towns in Chernobyl.  There is a film made about it called “Chernobyl Heart”.  If you read that book from the New York Academy of Sciences, it is called Chernobyl, it is I think the most alarming medical survey that I have ever read in my medical existence.  Radiation can just do a whole lot of just dreadful things.

AG:  We seem to focus on the cesium concentrations, but scientifically, the cesium is easy to detect.  So everyone is saying so the cesium concentration is, but it does not mean that cesium is the only isotope out there.  It is just sort of the canary in the mine shaft if you will.  I am sure that there is strontium, which is very difficult to detect, and that is a problem because that goes to the bone.

HC:  Yes.  Strontium 90, it has a half life of 28 years, so it is around for 300 years as well in the food.  And it is a calcium analog.  It is a beta emitter, so it is very hard to . . .  you cannot detect it really with a geiger counter.  And it gets into the food, concentrates, as I said, especially in milk and cheese and yogurt and the like.  When it gets into the gut, the body says, oh, calcium, and so it is transported through the blood to the bone and the teeth where it is laid down.  And the beta particle can damage a regulatory gene in the bone cell and the bone sits quietly for incubation times cancer, anytime from 5 to 80 years.  And one day that cell divides in an unregulated way and that is a bone cancer, osteogenic sarcoma.  Senator Kennedy’s son had that and had his leg amputated.  Little Edward.  It also causes leukemia because the white blood cells are made in the bone marrows.  So if you radiate a white blood cell and the regulatory gene is damaged, the white blood cell begins to proliferate in the trillions.  Leukemia means white blood and the blood fills up with immature white blood cells which cannot fight infection and the bone marrow gets packed with white blood cells so there is no room for platelets to grow which cause clotting.  So patients with leukemia die either of massive hemorrhage and/or massive infection, a bit like the way AIDS patients die.

AG:  Here in the United States when we detect strontium in fish, the nuclear industry’s position, well it is in the bone and nobody eats the bone.  We always eat the meat.  But the problem in Japan is that frequently there are a lot of fish stews created.  And when you boil the fish bone, the strontium does not stay in the bone, again, it goes into the stew and can be re-ingested by the people that eat the fish stew.

HC:  That is right.  And also a lot of Japanese eat the bones of the fish if the fish are small and the bones are small.

KH:  So moving along now.  Let’s talk a little bit about iodine.

HC:  O.K.  There are 2 iodine isotopes.  One is iodine 131 which has a half life of 8 days, meaning it lasts only for about 10 weeks before it decays away to nothing.   It is a very high energy gamma emitter like that X-ray that I talked about, and also a beta emitter, the electrons. And iodine only goes to one gland in the body which is the thyroid gland which sucks it up.  But particularly in children, their thyroids are like a little sponge and they suck up iodine, particularly in areas where iodine is sparse in the environment, like around Chernobyl.  So they have low iodine levels and so the thyroid particularly concentrates it.  And so the iodine can change a regulatory gene in the thyroid gland, in a cell and cause cancer.  Now already in Fukushima we have seen about 10 thyroid cancers developing in children.  That is extremely rare because it took 5 years for thyroid cancers to start manifesting after Chernobyl.  So this is very early, it is only 2 years, indicating to me as a pediatrician that these children got a hell of a dose of radioactive iodine.  But also, they got a big dose of everything else.  And as Arnie knows, nuclear reactors contain several hundred of these poisons.  Some only last seconds but some last millions of years.  So there is a whole cocktail of radioactive elements that people will have inhaled and eaten.  The other iodine is iodine 129 which has a half life of 17 million years.  It is around forever.  It is not as potently radioactive as iodine 131, but it is still carcinogenic and that is around forever.

KH:  We have talked a little bit about potassium iodine pills in the past and how they might be helpful to people in a nuclear accident.  How exactly do they work?  My understanding is that they go to the thyroid and somehow protect the thyroid from radiation exposure.

HC:  Potassium iodine is just an inert substance.  It is not radioactive.  But there is a catch.  You have to take your potassium iodine tablets before the radioactive cloud reaches you, before you inhale the iodine which is absorbed from the lung.  And mostly, well, in the major accidents, Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, people did not know about it till days after the accidents occurred because the authorities do not let them know whereby and by which time they have already inhaled radioactive iodine.  That is too late.  You have to take it before the cloud of radioactive iodine reaches you.  What it does is saturate the thyroid with normal iodine so the thyroid will reject it.  I think 70% of the radioactive iodine, but I think 30% still gets incorporated into the thyroid.  The other thing is of course, radioactive iodine is concentrated readily in food and particularly in milk.  So children drinking milk that comes from cows or goats or sheep that have been contaminated from the reactor accident, are drinking radioactive iodine.  So you might have potassium iodine tablets in your medicine cabinet if you live near a reactor or far from a reactor, in fact, but you probably will not know in time to take the iodine anyway.  And it only protects the thyroid, not totally as I have said 70% not 100% and it does not protect any other organs.

KH:  So clearly potassium iodine pills or tablets can help people in the event of a nuclear accident if they are dispensed quickly.  However we see during the Three Mile Island accident and now the Fukushima accident, that they were withheld, they were not dispensed quickly.  Why is that?

HC:  Yes, that is right.  They do not want to give it a bad name.  So if the health authorities say look you have got to have these tablets in case there is a meltdown, everyone gets very panicked and so you do not want to create panic.  The Japanese government in fact stated that.  They did not tell the people where the very highly radioactive cloud was moving across the country northwest because they did not want to create panic and the people evacuated right into the path of that radioactive plume.  That is obscene.  So it is the government officials in fact protecting, and a part of, the nuclear industry.   They are not there to protect the people although we elect them and we pay for them.

AG:  All these isotopes indicate a couple of things to me.  They indicate that nuclear fuel failed.  And we know that.  There is a meltdown and a melt through of the nuclear reactor vessels.  But that would not be enough unless the containment failed too.  The containment is that last line of defense.  That we are seeing cesium in the environment and that we are seeing heavy isotopes like plutonium out at 20 and 30 kilometers.  So when you see these transuranics, these things that are heavier than uranium out there, all these are signs of gross containment failure.

KH:  Let’s shift gears now and talk about the one isotope that has probably been ignored more than any other by the nuclear industry.  And that is tritium.  Helen, can you tell us a bit about tritium?

HC:  Tritium is radioactive hydrogen; instead of being H2 it is H3.  And tritium cannot be contained in anything except gold.  So you cannot operate a nuclear reactor without it continuously releasing the air and the water that is used to cool the tritium.  Tritium, it is a tiny, tiny, tiny particle and if you are enveloped and it combines with oxygen to form tritiating water, H3O.  So if you are near a reactor and there is an inversion system and there is fog and you go outside and the fog lands on your skin and the tritium can get right through the skin.  Now the skin lets nothing through.  It is the most important organ in the body which is why it is so serious if you get bad 3rd degree burns on your body.  You lose your integument.  Tritium gets through.  Tritium also concentrates in food and it is in the water and it combines in the DNA molecule which is the gene.  It is incredibly carcinogenic.  And although the nuclear industry pooh-poohs anyone who worries about it, if you look at the Journal of Health Physics, there is a huge number of articles about the toxicity of tritium.  And there has been testing on mice and rats for years and years and years.  And so it induces brain tumors, muscle tumors, all sorts of cancers all over the body and mind you, every cancer can be caused by radiation.  Every cancer we describe in medicine can be induced by radiation.  It also causes very gross fetal abnormalities and birth deformities.  So tritium is a very, very scary element.  It is used in exit signs and of course it is leaking out of them.  It is used on watch dials and it leaks out of the watches, it leaks out of everything you put it into.  And I think the Germans did a study to look at children under the age of 5 years living within 2 miles of 16 reactors and found that those children had double the incidence of leukemia and a high incidence of solid cancers.  And the French verified that study by doing a study of their own around their reactors.  So it is very dangerous to live near a reactor and children are 10 – 20 times more sensitive to radiation than adults.  They get cancer much more readily.  And fetuses are thousands of times more so.  So no women of childbearing age or children should live near a reactor.  That is never talked about and it is partly because of the tritium that gets in.  It also gets into the leaves and transpires through the leaves with water that comes down at night and lands on the ground, etc.  The one thing though we have not talked about Arnie, is the toxicity of plutonium.  And I would like to talk about that.

Plutonium is an alpha emitter, so it is like an electron emitted from a nucleus, only it is bigger, much bigger.  And if it hits a gene, bang, it usually destroys the cell but if it does not, the cell is damaged and almost certainly later you will get cancer.  So plutonium, named after Pluto, is so toxic that a millionth of a gram, if inhaled into the lung will give you lung cancer.  Each reactor makes 250 kilograms of plutonium a year.  Kilograms.  You need only 5 kilograms to make yourself an atomic bomb.  Plutonium has a half life of 24,400 years, so it is around and toxic for a quarter of a million years.  The body thinks that plutonium is iron so it can cause lung cancer, it goes to the bone where the hemoglobin is made where it can cause bone cancer or leukemia or multiple myeloma or other such cancers.  It is stored in the liver where it can cause liver cancer.  It crosses the placenta.  The placenta lets nothing through to protect the fetus.  But plutonium gets through because it is an iron analog where it can kill a cell that’s is going to form the left half of the brain or the right arm.  That is called teratogenesis, damage of a genetically chromosomally normal fetus.  It also has a predilection to testicles and tends to concentrate in the testicles next to the cells that are forming the sperm.  So it can produce genetic mutations in the sperm to induce genetic diseases passed on generation to generation for the rest of time and there are 2,600 genetic diseases now described like diabetes and cystic fibrosis and hemophilia and many, many others.  So plutonium is nasty but there is something nastier.  And that is americium 241 which is a decay product, I think, of plutonium 241 which has a fairly short half life.  So americium 241 is a potent gamma emitter as well as an alpha emitter.  They are extremely worried in Europe because 40% of Europe is contaminated with fallout from Chernobyl and will remain so for hundreds of years.  But the americium is now starting to build up as the plutonium 241 decays, and it is very, very toxic and radioactive.  So it seems it is going to get worse in Europe over time, not better.  And that is described vividly in the book, “On Chernoby” by the New York Academy of Sciences.

AG:  Wow Helen, I do not know how you go to sleep at night.

HC:  Well, I go to sleep by doing this work which makes me feel more comfortable and that I might make a difference.  But in truth, Arnie, we are not making a lot of difference, are we?

AG:  I think we are in Japan.  I think the Japanese are listening to people like you and the people that went to the symposium more and more and listening to their own government and Tokyo Electric less and less.

HC:  Yes, but you know that I just woke up this morning reading more about Fukushima.  It is an absolute mess.  A total disaster mess.  And they will never clean it up.  Never.  I mean the I.A.E.A. says it will take 40 or 50 years, but they will never clean it up.  Let’s be frank.  They will not.  It is an unmitigated disaster which will remain in perpetuity for the rest of time and a lot of the Japanese may become more and more aware of this situation.  There is nothing anyone can do about it.  Human beings cannot cope with such an atomic nuclear accident.

AG:  I talked about the recovery of Fukushima Daiichi when I was over in Japan at the end of August.  And I was at the Independent Press Association and the video is up on the site.  But the recovery of the site will go nowhere as long as Tokyo Electric is in charge.  The solution to begin improving the condition of the site is to get Tokyo Electric out of the management of the clean-up and put a competent engineering organization reporting right to Japan.  The nation of Japan, being funded by the nation of Japan and being overseen by independent experts, as opposed to the closed little club that Tokyo Electric likes to keep the site.  Until we do that, that site is going to continue to have leaks and rats eating wires and on and on and on.  We have got to get TEPCO out of the picture if we ever expect to make improvements.

HC:  Think of the number of people.  There are 3,000 men there all the time I think.  And they bring homeless men in from Tokyo.  Yakuza, who was a Japanese mafia, are subcontracted to provide a lot of the workers.  How many people are going to die?  You know, being exposed to very high levels of radiation externally, but also inhaling and ingesting radioactive materials.  I mean the figures are just . . . a medical disaster beyond compare.

KH:  Dr. Caldicott, thanks for coming on the show.

HC:  That is a pleasure.

KH:  And Arnie, as always.

AG:  Thanks again, Kevin.

KH:  That about does it for this week’s edition of the Energy Education podcast.  You can catch us back here next Wednesday and every Wednesday for more on what is happening in the world of nuclear news and more technical nuclear discussion.  Also, don’t forget to “like” us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.  For Fairewinds Energy Education, I am Kevin Hurley.  Thanks for listening.

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The most striking thing about seeing any nuclear power plant up close is their sheer size. They are such impressive feats of construction and design, and it’s hard to imagine that something so robust could fail. In this week’s podcast, find out why nuclear power plants fail, and why failure is a fact of life that the industry refuses to acknowledge.

Video Transcript

KH:     It’s April 17, 2013, and this is the Energy Education Podcast. I’m Kevin Hurley. This week, we’re talking about nuclear power plants that are too big to fail. It’s common public perception that the sheer size of a nuclear power plant means that it must be safe. How could something so big and so heavy possibly budge? Of course, regardless of size, nuclear plants require tremendous quality assurance, upkeep and maintenance, and despite the industry’s best efforts, a number of plants have suffered catastrophic failures. We’ll talk about several of these plant failures. Joining us to discuss is Arnie Gundersen. Arnie, welcome to the show.

AG:     Hey, Kevin. Thanks for having me again.

KH:     So today we’re talking about nuclear power plants that are too big to fail. There’s an illusion that nuclear power plants and their size and all of the quality assurance that goes into keeping them up – how could these things fail? They’re so maintained and so large.

AG:     Yeah, you know, there’s actually two illusions there. The first is the sheer size. I’ve been on tours with people. We used to deliberately take people on tours because they’re so big and so impressive. And frankly, that your ego as a human being could create something so huge creates a sense of invincibility. There’s a hubris that sets in in the nuclear industry that these things are too big to fail. The second misconception there is all this high quality. Years ago, back in the 80’s, I had dinner with a guy named W. Edwards Deming, and Deming is the guy that invented modern quality assurance and he’s – there’s a Deming prize that the Japanese give for people that do high quality work. And so I was talking to Doctor Deming about nuclear and he laughed, and he said, you know, you’re right, he says, these nuclear plants think they have quality assurance programs, but they really don’t know anything about it. The reason these power plants are so big is because the forces they have to contain are so big. The reactor core at Fukushima would have about 2,500 megawatts and that’s a mind-numbing number. It means nothing to the average person. But if you convert that over, that works out to be about 3.3 million horses – million horsepower. So if you put 3.3 million horsepower in something about the size of your bedroom, you get the feel for the enormous amount of power that has to be constrained. We used to take farmers on tours of our nuclear plants and they’d probably be thinking in the back of their mind, wow, this is a lot stronger than my barn. But their barn didn’t have to hold 3.3 million horses, either. And when we look at the size and we forget the magnitude of what we have constrained, the hubris sets in and we get to the point where we think we can conquer Mother Nature.

KH:     So we’re looking at reactor containments that have walls that are – what? – 12 inches think? 2 feet thick? I mean how could that possibly give?

AG:     Well, just this year a nuclear reactor was permanently shut down – Crystal River – and no, it’s not one or two feet, it was actually 40 inches thick – 3-1/2 feet thick.

KH:     The wall of the containment.

AG:     Yes. The wall of the containment. And the people that built the reactor were in the process of upgrading its power. And they had to cut a hole in the side of this and put in a new steam generator because they were engaged in something called an EPU – Extended Power Upright. Dave Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists calls those “experimental” power uprights because we really never know what’s going to happen. Well, in the process of cutting the hole in this containment, it cracked, and it cracked big time. 60 feet around the containment and 20 feet high. And you could hear it. It was like a gunshot. Then they tried to fix it. And again, all this massive quality assurance and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was involved and they started to tighten this containment back up after fixing it, and it cracked in two other places. So all the king’s horses and all the king’s men sometimes can’t put together a nuclear containment once it cracks. We sort of have a deep-in-our-soul understanding that things fail. I mean it can be the Titanic. It can be Bophal, which was a chemical explosion years ago. It can be Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. We know it has happened before. But yet our policy makers moving forward look at these plants and they say how can something so robust fail again. We have to have learned all the lessons there are to learn. And I really think Chairman Jaczko’s comments last week really touched on that; that big things fail in big ways. Just like the banks and Wall Street. They are not too big to fail. We learned it on Wall Street. And it’s a lesson that Americans think happened in Japan but can’t happen here.

KH:     So we’re talking about why big things fail. Now I should think that it’s not only due to the way that these big things are operated but due to the way – you know, human error in the way that they’re operated – but due possibly also to human error during design and construction.

AG:     Yeah, I think there’s four ways that these things fail. First is, they’re getting old. I know I’m getting old and I’m breaking down more often. So why shouldn’t we expect a power plant to do that? And some of the more recent failures have been because of aging. The second thing is that engineers make design calculations errors, and despite quality assurance overviews, they don’t get caught. The third is operators make mistakes. And I really don’t like to second guess operators, but with all the information that’s going into their brains, they’re bound to make a mistake periodically. And the last is, we can’t forget that these things are built with a profit motive in mind, so that there’s an increasing emphasis on squeezing more power out for less money.

KH:     Cutting corners.

AG:     Yeah. Cutting corners.

KH:     So anyway, if we’re talking about a 1970 Volkswagen and trying to replace the parts in it as it ages or keep it up to date as it ages, it’s a tough thing. Can you just give us some idea of the enormity of trying to keep up an aging power plant, something that’s this big.

AG:     Well, the average nuclear power plant has six guys on ebay trying to buy old parts and the reason for that is that if they put a new part in and it isn’t a like-for-like replacement, they have to go to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and ask permission. So they literally have a staff at every nuclear power plant of people scouring ebay looking for old parts so they can put those old parts in their warehouse so when one of their parts breaks, now they can replace in kind as opposed to going out and getting something better or newer.

KH:     What we’re talking about is really how big these plants are and the perception that they can’t fail, being as big as they are. But as they age and considering that they are so enormous, I would imagine it can’t be just as easy as having your 1970 Volvo tuned up.

AG:     Yeah. There’s very few people on the planet who can move the kinds of weight that are involved in building a nuclear power plant. And example, forget the old reactors, there’s a brand new reactor being built in Georgia at Vogel. And the nuclear reactor vessel was built in China or Japan and came over on a boat and made it to Savannah. And they put it on a railroad car that had hundreds of wheels. And the plan was they would pull it by rail the last hundred miles to the site. Well, wouldn’t you know it – now this thing is enormous. You may have seen pictures of them. They’re called Schnabel cars. And the track collapsed from the weight. Engineers had gone over that track with a fine-toothed comb expecting that this could happen and they missed it. Now that’s not safety related. It’s not built yet. But it’s not necessarily something because they’re old. I mean here’s something brand new. And literally, the nuclear renaissance was derailed in Georgia.

KH:     So how about some other examples of large nuclear equipment failures?

AG:     Well, in the last two months, we’ve got the two down south. The one was this Schnabel car at the Port of Savannah that’s gone off its rails. But the other one tragically was in Arkansas, Arkansas Nuclear One Unit One and there a heavy component not associated with the nuclear side but the electric generating side, weighed 500 tons – that’s a million pounds – was being lifted and the crane failed. Now if you look at pictures of the crane, it doesn’t look like it buckled from the weight. It looks like it toppled sideways. There was some kind of a lateral force on the crane that caused it to collapse sideways. And tragically there was somebody under it when it fell and so we have one fatality and 8 injuries. So there’s two examples of non-nuclear, non-safety related, but still components within the nuclear plant that people just didn’t analyze correctly.

KH:     So of course the nuclear industry is saying that this is an accident that was not a nuclear accident. It wasn’t on the nuclear side of the power plant and it’s not safety related. So what does that mean? How are we to interpret or take an accident like this happening at a large plant? Should we be worried about it if it’s really just not a nuclear accident?

AG:     You know I’ve heard people tell me that, too, and I say you know, the same people that did that design calculation for the crane that collapsed at Arkansas are the same people doing the other calculations within the nuclear safety-related stuff. So if they can screw up on the non-nuclear side of the plant, they can certainly screw up on the nuclear plant. So I think failures like this, certainly they’re tragic, but they also show the weakness in that we’ve got teams of engineers reviewing everybody’s calculations 3 times to Sunday and they are still missing critical flaws.

KH:     But I would think the NRC reviews all of these calculations.

AG:     In Congressional testimony back in ’07, the NRC admitted that they look at less than 5 percent of all the calculations that go into a nuclear plant. And there’s numerous cases of when they did review, they missed it, too. There was a failure in ’01 at Quad Cities, which is in Illinois, where a steam dryer – it’s as big as a house and it’s made of stainless steel and beautifully welded – cracked in an Extended Power Upright. There were indications that it had cracked, but they ran it and then they opened the nuclear reactor up and they said oh, my God, look, it’s cracked. So they shut down. They hired every expert available. And they came up with what caused it to crack and the repair scheme. And then they contacted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission signed off, saying you did a great job. Well, they started Quad Cities back up and it failed again. So they opened it up and it failed worse. This time it sent a piece of steel about the size of a man down a main steam line and it hit a reactor isolation valve. So the concept that the NRC has looked at this, it’s good enough is just not true. And we’ve seen that elsewhere, too. We’ve seen that at San Onofre where the steam generators failed catastrophically. In 2009, the NRC claims that they reviewed those calculations and couldn’t find anything wrong. Well, if we’re counting on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to catch these, our faith is misplaced. There’s only two inspectors at each nuclear plant. And there’s 700 employees. So 700 employees can do a lot more calculating than 2 inspectors can check.

KH:     So Arnie, you’ve talked a lot about design bases and whether or not the world’s nuclear power plants are actually built to withstand the most that Mother Nature can throw at them. But doesn’t this all rely on the quality assurance and the maintenance of these plants really being up to what they should be anyway?

AG:     Yeah, you know, that’s a really good question. First, the point is that if a nuclear plant went out and contacted independent experts about what the worst earthquake was or what the worst storm was or whatever, it’s likely those independent experts would pick a number that was too high and too costly. So there’s always in the back of management’s mind, what’s this going to cost. So there’s a downward pressure from a cost standpoint to minimize what Mother Nature can thrown at you. But then once that number is picked, we call that the design bases. Now you’re counting on engineers to do the calculations correctly. And the example that’s ongoing right now was out at Fort Calhoun, which is on the Missouri River. Well, the Missouri River flooded and the plant’s been shut down for two years. And when they got into looking at their calculations that are 40 years old, they found they were missing, they found they were incomplete, and the ones that they could get their hands on were wrong. So for 40 years, this plant’s been running with missing, incomplete and wrong calculations. And that holds for all of these plants. They’re all designed in the 60’s and 70’s and built in the 70’s and 80’s. So we’re counting on engineers with slide rules in the 70’s and I was one of them, having done the calculations correctly. And it’s critically important that they don’t go back and look at those. Once the book is closed, utilities don’t want to go back and revisit that. Because if they find an error, that opens up a can of worms that nobody wants to get involved in because then it calls into question everything else. So they call that grandfathering. And once these calculations have been done and signed off, then you’re not allowed to go back and look at them again. It turned out at Fort Calhoun they had to because there were some structural changes they wanted to make and they had to find out the original design bases. They said, oh, my God, these things are wrong. How many other plants around the country have that problem and are either –haven’t found it or have found it and are ignoring it? The people at Fort Calhoun knew these calculations were wrong for 10 or 15 years, and because they never needed to access the calculation, they could pretend that problem didn’t exist.

KH:     So in a way, the Fort Calhoun plant is sort of like the too-big-to-fail death star. Just people have perceived it as so big and not able to withstand any kind of problem or attack.

AG:     You, you know, in fiction we all have the example of Star Wars and the death star. And it had a critical vulnerability that Luke Skywalker was able to exploit. Well, any system has a critical vulnerability. It doesn’t have to be fiction. We learned that or we should have learned it at Fukushima Daiichi. And as I’ve been saying all along, sooner or later in any fool-proof system, the fools are going to exceed the proofs.

KH:     Well, Arnie Gundersen, thanks for joining us again.

AG:     Thanks for having me, Kevin.

The post Too Big to Fail appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education » Podcast Feed.

Former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko was forced out of the NRC by Congress for not adequately supporting the nuclear industry. The NRC claims all nuclear plants are still safe, but how are they doing their math?

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Podcast Transcript

KH:     It’s Wednesday, April 10, 2013 and this is the Energy Education podcast. I’m Kevin Hurley. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission evaluates the risks and benefits of a nuclear power plant based on a complex set of formulas, calculations and computer codes called SAMA.  In this week’s show, we’ll take a closer look at how these SAMA codes work. In particular, we’ll discuss how the formulas themselves are not the problem, but rather what’s wrong with the numbers being fed into the formula? Even the perfect formula can’t yield perfect results without good input data. Joining us today are Arnie and Maggie Gundersen.

MG:    Thank you, Kevin.    AG: Hey, Kevin. Thanks for having us.

KH:     So I want to start out today’s show talking about a recent New York Times article and several articles that have been quoting former NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko extensively. Jaczko is saying now that old nuclear power plants – that some old nuclear power plants should be shut down. Can you give us the details?

AG:     The NRC had a Chairman, Gregory Jaczko, until the summer of last year. And the industry wanted unanimous votes from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And he was always a dissenting vote on many significant issues. So instead of being able to tell the world the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was unanimous in their approval of nuclear issues, there was essentially a 4-to-1 vote almost all the time on critical safety things. Pressure was placed on him through congress and he was forced to leave. Well, just last week he was quoted as saying several things. First, that these old nuclear plants should not run beyond 40 years. Now a deal is a deal. He said we had a 40-year license; we should not extend their licenses. And that, of course, upset the nuclear industry and they went after him, especially in the New York Times story. The other thing Chairman Jaczko talked about was the fact that the safety analyses for these plants don’t take into account land contamination and massive social disruptions that were caused after Fukushima Daiichi and that’s not factored into anybody’s cost benefit analysis on whether or not nuclear plants should go forward. So he was very blunt that the cost/benefit analysis is flawed and that old plants should be retired and not have their licenses extended.

KH:     So Arnie, how do these cost/benefit analyses work?

AG:     Well, the industry term for them is SAMA – S-A-M-A. And it stands for Severe Accident Mitigation Analysis. And they have costs that they attribute to radiation releases. And when they do one of these SAMA analyses, they assume very little radiation is released. They don’t assume a Fukushima level release that requires evacuating the State of Connecticut, essentially. So when you do a SAMA analysis, if you don’t release much radiation, there’s no cost to society. So when they weigh the benefits of nuclear power against the cost, they understate the cost so that it always tips the scale in favor of continuing the operation of these nuclear plants.

MG:    And in that rebuttal that the pro-nuclear New York Times and Matt Wald have given to former Chairman Jaczko’s statement is from Nuclear Energy Institute, which is the chief lobbyist for the industry. So of course the industry is going to say, oh, it’s terrible; everything’s accurate. They said they’ve had this special task force and it’s evidenced by a multitude of safety and performance indicators and that’s still the case today. And that’s definitely not the case today. I mean we can see that in many nuclear plants in the U.S. and throughout the world.

KH:     So when they are calculating what the cost of a radiological release would be or some type of accident, what factors do they look at?

AG:     What the nuclear industry has developed is a computer code that calculates how much radiation is released and where it is released to. But then, let’s take the west coast for example, the San Onofre nuclear plant. The San Clemente community is nearby and there’s a couple ten’s of thousands of people in that town. Now out at 50 miles is Los Angeles and there’s 8 million people out that far. But let’s just look close in. If the San Onofre plant were to have an accident, the radiation contamination in San Clemente would be huge, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t assume that houses will lose their property value. There’s tens of billions of dollars of property losses if there were to be an accident at San Onofre that isn’t factored into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s SAMA analysis.

KH:     So does the SAMA analysis take into account the cost of a human life?

AG:     Well, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s costs of a human life are about half to one-third of what other regulators use for the cost of a human life. EPA and other agencies say a human life is worth 2 to 3 times more than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does. So whenever they do these analyses and they show that statistically one or two people might die from the radiation, they value a human life at around 2 to 3 million dollars where EPA is over 5. So when you do that, the net effect is you never have to make a modification because the cost of the modification isn’t justified by saving human lives in the NRC’s model.

KH:     So this is just another number that they feed into their computer code that makes the end result say wow, this is worth it.

AG:     That’s right. You know, when you take into account the fact that we’re also subsidizing the insurance, that nuclear plants don’t have to pay for their liability insurance – it’s all done under this thing called Price Anderson – so citizens have to pay in the event of a nuclear accident. They’ll raise our taxes. Whereas if you’re an oil company or whatever, you’ve got insurance that pays for the cost of an accident. The nuclear industry is unique in that the regulator – the NRC, in conjunction with the people that are supposed to be regulating the utilities, deliberately and knowingly downplay the risks and at the same time they lobby congress extensively to have citizens pay for their insurance policy. So they get it both ways. They claim there’s no risk instead of trying to insure these plants themselves; we’re on the hook if there’s an accident.

KH:     So you’ve said many times that the secret is in the assumptions. And that was in technical discussion. But again, this seems to be sort of the same vibe: garbage in, garbage out. If you put bad numbers in, you’re going to come to a bad result or a bad conclusion. Same thing?

MG:    Definitely.

AG:     Yeah. It’s exactly the same thing, Kevin. The industry and the national labs work together to crank out these elaborate computer codes, and the computer codes do exactly what they’re programmed to do. So if you put in a high cost, it’ll show a liability. And the input data into these computer codes always puts in low costs so that the nuclear industry can continue to perpetuate the myth that these things are clean, safe and reliable.

KH:     This sounds like me doing a monthly budget. I set up the Excel spreadsheet, get everything working and calculating and then I put in imaginary numbers to just pretend.

MG:    It’s similar to that. Mary Lampart with Pilgrim Watch has launched an ongoing case with the – against the NRC showing that the SAMDA analysis and the SAMA analysis are entirely flawed and that the code is entirely wrong. And yet the NRC continues to look the other way and support the industry lobbyists.

KH:     So what now is former Chairman Gregory Jaczko saying about the SAMA analysis?

AG:     You know, he’s not saying anything that he didn’t say when he was Chairman. I was at the RIC – Regulatory Information Conference – last year, which was one year after Fukushima Daiichi accident, and you’ll recall, because you shot the video of him presenting to the nuclear industry that there is a severe problem with the SAMA analysis. And the audience just sat there and snickered. I was appalled that there was no respect for the Chairman’s position, that we need to realize that a nuclear accident is going to disrupt lives and it’s going to disrupt communities. None of that is factored into the SAMA, and Chairman Jaczko didn’t have to retire before he said that. The industry ignored him when he was Chairman, and now they’re trying to bury him after he’s a former Chairman.

MG:    That’s pretty true Kevin, in that any commissioners, there’s only 2 commissioners prior to Chairman Jazcko, who have not gone back into the industry to be rehired at exorbitant rates, and work for the industry. So it’s a vicious circle, of they come from the industry, or they are appointed and they have some kind of huge donation like one chairman that we knew had donated many millions to an election campaign, and they get these appointments, and then they go out and they get hired by utilities and energy companies, and Peter Bradford, Victor Gilinsky, those are the only two commissioners previously who didn’t not do this, and Jazcko has not gone to work for the industry either, you know? So these are truth sayers.

AG:     I hope Jazcko has a plan B, because if plan A was to get re-hired by the nuclear industry, he just destroyed plan A right there.

KH:     And no one would know better than you, right?

AG:     That’s right. My experiences were parallel his in that regard.

KH:     So, now we’ve talked a lot about the sort-of, let’s say cherry-picked numbers, the bad numbers that get fed into a formula like this, but on the other end of that formula is what’s really coming out. Arnie, can you talk a little bit about the comparison between what the SAMA analysis believes might pop out on the other end, versus what’s really happening, and perhaps Japan is a good place to start.

AG:     Well, if you look at what happened after Fukushima Daiichi, you know, we have contamination two hundred miles over.  Let’s look at Tokyo. When I was in Tokyo, I took five samples, and those five samples would qualify as nuclear waste here in the United States, and would have to be shipped to Texas for long term storage. Well, the SAMA analysis doesn’t assume that any contamination gets out beyond essentially a mile or two. So what Daiichi told us is that we have societal risks out to several hundred miles, and we have massive contamination out to 50 to 100 miles. Well the SAMA doesn’t include decontamination. It assumes the soil remains in place, there’s no power-washing of homes, there’s no decontamination of farms, there’s no decontamination of vacant lots, none of that is in the SAMA analysis. In close, let alone out at 100 miles or more. So the net effect here is that what Daiichi should have taught us is that if you have a nuclear accident, society is going to be severely disrupted, not just within five miles of these nuclear plants, but out to a couple hundred miles. And the cost to displace people, and essentially ruin their lives, is not factored into the SAMA analysis. And I think that’s what Chairman Jazcko said when he was a chairman, when we recorded him at the regulatory information conference, and that’s what he’s saying now. He hasn’t changed his tune one bit.  The industry just doesn’t want to face the fact that a nuclear accident can disrupt lives.

KH:     Because right now their formula is telling them that it’s all worth it.

AG:     The secret’s in the assumptions, Kevin.

KH:     I would think we must have known that more could be affected than the most immediate area around the nuclear plant. Why wasn’t the SAMA analysis updated following any historical nuclear events?

AG:     Well, the party line on Three Mile Island is that nobody was killed, and the containment withstood the accident. The Three Mile Island presentation that’s on our website that I made back in Harrisburg four years ago clearly shows that the containment did crack from the hydrogen explosion at Three Mile Island, and that enormous amounts of radiation were released. But, the industry didn’t want to admit that, and it managed to avoid it. And of course, Chernobyl had communists running that plant; if capitalists ran it, it would be run better. So, the net effect is that the industry just ignored Three Mile Island, and they ignored Chernobyl, and continued to move forward. And now we’ve got Daiichi, which is run by capitalists, and is a modern reactor, and the containment did blow up, and yet we’re still not facing the reality here in the United States, that the costs of an accident are a lot more severe than what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is willing to admit in their SAMA analysis.

KH:     Final question, for both you and Maggie. If we were to put accurate, well-represented numbers into the input of this computer code, this formula, the SAMA analysis, how do you think that would change the way nuclear power is done today?

MG:    I think it would dramatically change it, especially all of these aging nukes, like the Mark 1 BWRs that have such huge risk associated with their spent fuel pools and the amount of radiation they would release, I think that economically they’d all have to be shut down immediately.

KH:     Arnie?

AG:     Yes, I made this argument to the committee on reactor safeguards for the new plant at Vogel, and I went into their, it’s called a SAMDA analysis because it’s in the design phase, and I made the argument that you’re assuming the containment doesn’t leak, and the NRC said to the project committee on reactor safeguards, and said yes, containments do not leak. Well, we just blew three of them up at Fukushima Daiichi, and yet the NRC has not gone back in to re-evaluate that assumption. The net effect would be that plants would not get re-licensed, and the new ones would not get built if we properly included these costs in the cost-benefit analysis.

KH:     So it just wouldn’t be worth it.

AG:     It would clearly show that the risks outweigh the benefits, and that’s not what the nuclear regulator, nor the nuclear industry, wants the public to hear.

KH:     Arnie, Maggie, thanks so much.

MG:    Thank you for having us, Kevin.

KH:     And that about does it for this week’s edition of the Energy Education Podcast. Remember, you can find us back here next week, and every week, for more of what’s happening in the world of nuclear news. Also, don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on twitter. For Fairewinds Energy Education, I’m Kevin Hurley. Thanks for listening.

The post Tipping the Scale: The 3/11 Formula appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education » Podcast Feed.

Why is a geologist interested in nuclear plants?  Listen to Fairewinds Board member geologist Dr. Les Kanat talk with nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen and show host Kevin Hurley about seismological events in relation to nuclear power.  Why do east coast nuclear plants have higher Core Damage Frequencies and are more likely to be damaged from an earthquake than those in California?  Do corporate economic concerns mean that nuclear plants are not designed to handle the worst ‘quake? Tune in and discover what the NRC has identified as the most dangerous plant in America.

Podcast Transcript

KH:     Well, today, I’d like to welcome to the show Dr. Leslie Kanat. Doctor Kanat is a geologist and he’s also on the Fairewinds Board of Directors. Doctor Kanat, welcome to the show.

LK:      Thank you very much.

KH:     And of course, Arnie, welcome to the show.

AG:     Yeah, Hi, Kevin. Hi, Les.

LK:      Hi, Arnie.

KH:     So we’ve had a lot of reader questions about earthquakes. What are the differences between earthquakes on the west coast, which we all know about, and earthquakes on the east coast, which are less frequent? How does that all fit into the nuclear power plant paradigm.

LK:      So earthquakes are a result of earth movement. There are stresses in earth crusts that when they exceed the rock strength, then the rock breaks and we get an earthquake. And there are a number of scales that we use to measure. One is the magnitude of the earthquake and the other is the effects of an earthquake. Now earthquakes occur all over the planet, yet seem to be most common along plate boundaries. So the west coast of the United States is a plate boundary and there are numerous earthquakes that occur on the west coast. Yet the eastern seaboard of the U.S. used to be a plate boundary and there are some seismic zones there that are quite active. What we find that the intensity of the earthquake – that is, what one feels, the amount of ground motion – depend on a number of factors. And one is the rock type. So when earthquakes occur on the east coast, because of the rock type, it’s felt for quite great distances, probably 10 times farther than a similar sized earthquake on the west coast. As Arnie well knows, of the 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S., most of them – I think all but 8 of them are what we consider on the east coast or the eastern seaboard of the United States. And only 8 of them are on the west coast. It’s important to distinguish the magnitude of an event versus what one feels. So the magnitude of an earthquake is determined by seismographic observations. That means the technology that we have in the ground measure how much energy is released by an earthquake. But what one feels, the reactions, the surface expression of these earthquakes, are what we call the intensity. By analogy, you can think of the power of a radio station being a magnitude and the strength of the received signal being the intensity. So depending on where you are and atmospheric conditions, you’ll have different signal strength in the radio. With regard to the earth, there’s one magnitude for every earthquake, but there are a variety of intensities based upon distance and rock type and depth of focus. The difference between a magnitude 6 and a magnitude 7 means that there are 31 times more energy released in a 7 than a 6. Often people think that there’s a difference of 10 times between a 6 and 7, but the amount of energy released goes up by a factor of 31.

KH:     So that’s 5.8 versus the 6.0 in Virginia makes a great deal of difference.

LK:      That’s about – roughly it’s a log rhythmic scale, but roughly it’s about 6 times more energy released in a 6.0 versus a 5.8. Remember, for every unit, every increment between 5 or 6 or 6 or 7 or 7 or 8, the amount of energy released goes up 31 times and it takes energy to do work, and the work that’s being done is we’re moving rock. We’re moving large pieces of real estate. Hopefully, we’re not moving large nuclear power plants.

KH:     People are very aware of earthquakes on the west coast and the potential problems of putting a nuclear power plant on a seismically active area. And really when we think about it, we think about nuclear power plants on the west coast. But who’s looking at seismicity with nuclear power plants on the east coast?

LK:      There’s a group called the Central Eastern U.S. Seismic Source Characterization. It’s a group that’s put out a really significant, well-thought-out publication back in December of 2011. And the idea there was to look at the relationship of the – a new understanding of the seismicity in the United States and the presence of nuclear facilities. So I would think that the NRC – the Nuclear Regulatory Commission – and the U.S. Geological Survey are aware of these issues. And indeed, what’s happened as a result of this study is we’ve found that the likelihood of some problem has gone up many times, several fold. Indeed, I think the report that the estimated risk of a problem in a nuclear power plant on the east coast has tripled based upon our new understanding of seismicity along the east coast.

AG:     So Les, as an engineer, what I want to know is what’s the worst earthquake I have to design against? And let’s take a look at the one in Virginia. That was designed for a 6 and the quake that actually hit was a 5.8. So to my way of thinking, that was close but it survived. But when you build a nuclear power plant, you don’t want to build for the earthquake that is going to happen because you’ve got the low probability, high consequence events like the tsunami at Fukushima you have to worry about. So when engineers are told by geologists that a 6 is the worst you can expect in Virginia and all at once a 5.8 actually happens, does that make you question whether or not you could actually have an earthquake more than the 6?

LK:      There are several issues you raise there. One is, again, just because it is a certain magnitude doesn’t mean that that is what one is going to feel. The difference between how big an earthquake is and the intensity depends on a lot of issues. So if the magnitude 6 event was closer to the power plant or the rock type or just transmitted through the rocks in a different way, then a magnitude 6 could do a lot of damage where another time a magnitude 6 a little farther away, a little deeper, on a different fault, even on a different fault the same distance away might do no damage. So it’s more than just looking at the size of the seismic event. It has to do with the location and the long-term history. What we’ve done in this recent work on reviewing the seismic risk on the east coast is we have chosen a time period for which we’re going to look at the seismic events. The Virginia quake of August of 2011 – the 5.8 quake which is probably the second largest in this region, wasn’t included in the dataset. So if it was included, I would think that the risks of accidents or damage to facilities on the east coast would have been greater. So I think, Arnie, in answer to your question is, all of us are short sighted and all of us have deadlines. So how far back in time do we want to look? As well as at what point do we say we have enough data to make our choices? And it’s risk assessment.

AG:     Now I can remember pictures of the spent fuel casks at North Anna, which was the power plant nearest to the earthquake. And these casks weigh more than 100 tons. You could see where the cask had been on the pad, the concrete pad. And you could see where the cask had moved. And these 100-ton casks were displaced by 4 or 5 inches. Now the press reported that as the cask moved, but for the physicist out there listening, really it’s like sliding a tablecloth out from underneath a plate on your table. The cask didn’t move at all. The ground moved 6 inches sideways.

LK:      Yeah, well, that’s the basis behind these seismometers that we use is that we fix – we no longer use a pendulum, but if we had a pendulum fixed on an apparatus and the ground moved, the pendulum would remain motionless and the ground beneath it would move. So sure, what you said is a good way to think about it. The acceleration of the ground is what we measure when we think about earthquakes, is how fast is the ground moving relative to a stable object and having massive dry casks would certainly want to stay in place as the ground shifts beneath it.

AG:     When you build a nuclear power plant, you have to worry about how fast the ground moves, but then you have to move that wave up in the building. The higher up in the building you are, the more sway you get in the building. And that’s something called the amplified response vector. The higher up you go, the more the building wiggles. Well, on plants that are this Mark 1 boiling water reactor design, they’ve got this enormous weight, the nuclear reactor, and the other enormous weight, the spent fuel pool, way up high in the building. So these Mark 1 reactors actually pose more of a seismic risk. They’re harder to build than other designs where the weight is lower.

KH:     So Arnie, are power plants on the west coast designed any differently than the power plants on the east coast because of different seismic circumstances?

AG:     Well, the nuclear reactors themselves are essentially identical. But the more serious the earthquake, the more serious the bracing that goes around the nuclear reactor, like shock absorbers on a car. But the question is not are they built stronger on the west coast, but have they anticipated the worst earthquake imaginable as opposed to the worst earthquake that happened in the last 100 years. I think what Les said is really important; that you have to go back in history long enough so that you get a proper risk assessment. As a design engineer, I don’t care what happened in the last hundred years. I care about what happened in the last 10,000 years, because I’m building against a low probability but high consequence event.

LK:      Correct. And I think in addition to what you said about the resonance frequency with regard to the height of the building, when an earthquake occurs, it releases different types of seismic waves and different types of vibrations, some – and they have different periods, different vibrational frequencies. Some affect low-rise buildings more; some affect high-rise buildings more. It also depends upon the distance as to what taller or shorter buildings are affected. As structures age, they become weaker. I think about my automobile, my car, that the older it gets, the more work I need to put into it and the less likely I am to run over a bump in the road and feel it’ll be okay when I come out the other side. So as our nuclear power plants age, the effects of the same magnitude event might be a little more damaging.

AG:     You know we see that at the Seabrook plant where the concrete is degrading very rapidly because there’s salt in the underlying soil that the plant is built upon, so that the margin that it used to have 20 years ago when it was built is dramatically reduced now. So we wind up eating into design margin as a plant gets older. Any plant can be made to withstand any earthquake, but it boils down to money. And if you believe a 7 is possible on the east coast, you’re going to build a plant much stronger than the east coast plants are presently built to withstand. The plant in Virginia that was right next to the earthquake was built for a 6 and it had a 5.8, and of course it survived because that’s what the engineers designed it for. But the real issue is, is the 6 the worst that can be expected on the east coast and should we really have designed the plant for a much more rigorous standard. And that’s where, in my mind, the east coast plants are in jeopardy. They’re built for these Richter 6’s that we know can happen now with Virginia. And if a Richter 6 can happen in 20 or 30 years of a nuclear plant’s life, then a Richter 6.5 might happen over the duration all these plants are designed to operate.

KH:     So Les, have we ever seen anything 7 or greater on the eastern seaboard?

LK:      In the eastern part of the United States, there’s a high – really high risk area that has the potential for lots of ground motion in the New Madrid Charleston area. Back in 1811 – late December of 1811, there was a 7.7 event, followed a few weeks later by a 7.5 and a few weeks later by another 7.7. So these events in the New Madrid seismic zone are common. Indeed, they occur every few hundred years. The last significant event in that area was May of last year – May of 2011, I think it was. There was a 7.7 earthquake again. There are a large network of faults there from a rift that formed 500 million years ago. If you look at the location of the current nuclear power plants, both the commercial reactors and the research reactors, there aren’t any that are on the New Madrid seismic zone. You can see they almost make a circle around it because we do recognize that as an area of high risk. But what we don’t do is we don’t go back far enough in the geological record and take the long view of what might happen. If you think about a business plan, when businesses make a plan for their future, they plan maybe 5 years out, 10 years at the most. Geologically, it’s meaningless. We’ve got to take a much longer view and look at worst case scenarios because indeed, they will occur. Just the probability is low.

AG:     You know I think that’s important is that people think 30 years is a long time or of the 40-year life of a plant. So if a plant is designed for 40 years and we look at the worst in a 100-year flood, for instance, or the worst in 100-year earthquake, we come up with one number. But when you look at the longer stand, the once in 10,000 year flood or the once in 10,000 year earthquake, suddenly that changes the picture. And we’re not – as a society, we really have a very hard time grasping that low probability events do happen. It’s not zero. And Fukushima Daiichi should have taught us that. I mean the magnitude of the quake and the magnitude of the tsunami both were not a once in 10-year, once in 50-year phenomenon. But it happens.

KH:     So Arnie, even if we’re talking about a once-in-a-thousand-year event, for one location, for one power plant, that still might not seem like a very high risk. But when you multiply that out by all of the power plants in all of the different locations, does that change things?

AG:     Yes. It absolutely does. You know, there’s 440 nuclear plants in the world right now. And if you believe in what the nuclear renaissance suggests, there could be two or three thousand in 10 or 20 years. So the probability of an event hasn’t changed, but the number of targets that the event could hit has increased dramatically. So the probability of a plant somewhere having an earthquake that disables it – we call that, that damages the nuclear core – goes up significantly. As a matter of fact, the worst plant in the country as far as what we call core damage frequency from an earthquake is just 26 miles north of New York City. It’s the Indian Point plants. After the plants were built, they discovered a fault that’s a mile or two north of the plant, and if that fault were to create a seismic event, the nuclear core would be damaged.

LK:      Are you talking about the Indian Point 3 plant, Arnie?

AG:     Yes. It’s Indian Point 2 and 3 are on the same site.

LK:      Right. From the new seismic analyses that were conducted, we’ve now increased the possibility of risk for the area. It increased by 72 percent. So now it looks like there’s a one-in-ten-thousand chance of that plant being a problem. And 10,000 – for some reason, one in ten thousand – those odds seem to be the action stage for the NRC and I don’t know why that is. So it’s right there on the border as to what – that that plant has the greatest risk in the country. When we talk about risk, it all has to do with probabilities and statistics. We’ve used the same idea when we think about flooding. For example, when you look at probability statistics, although the hundred-year flood doesn’t mean that you can have one flood every hundred years, it says there’s a small percentage, a one percent chance of that flood occurring in any given year. And when you look at probability statistics, the hundred-year flood, we have an 18 percent chance of two 100-year floods occurring within that time period. So statistics can be funny, how we look at them, but just because the numbers seem small doesn’t mean that we’re safe.

KH:     So when we’re talking about a one-in-ten-thousand chance, what time period are we talking about? We’re saying that some event may occur and the chance is one out of ten thousand. Is that per year? Is that per decade? When does the clock reset?

AG:     It’s a one-in-ten-thousand chance every year. And these plants, of course, run for 60 years. So the probability of the event occurring sometime during the 60 years is a lot higher than one in ten thousand.

LK:      The new chairperson for the NRC, Allison McFarland, a geologist, realizes that the industry’s evaluation of earthquake vulnerability is inadequate. So I think that the NRC is waking up to this problem, but I would be a very – it’s going to be an interesting argument as to what we do about it.

KH:     So let’s go to Arnie. Arnie, what is your number one criticism of the NRC and their planning for earthquakes?

AG:     You know, it basically boils down to the secret is in the assumptions. I’ve said that before on a number of matters. What do they assume is the worst earthquake that can happen? If we look at the Virginia earthquake, for instance, the plant was built for a 6 and it withstood a 5.8 and everybody’s happy about that. As an engineer, it survived what it was designed to survive. That proves nothing. The bigger question is, if it had a 5.8, that tells me that there’s a chance it could have a 6.5 in its lifetime. A low probability, high consequence. So I don’t think the NRC is looking at these low probability/high consequence events, whether it be tsunami risks or earthquake risks or storm surges from severe Atlantic hurricanes. Their blinders are on. As humans, we have a hard time thinking about, what’s the worst thing that can happen beyond about a ten-year horizon. And the NRC is in that trap as well.

KH:     So we’ve been receiving a lot of emails about fracking or hydrofracking and questions about whether or not that can be connected to earthquakes. If fracking can cause earthquakes, which I don’t know, do we have to be careful about doing it around nuclear power plants less.

LK:      Fracking, also known as hydraulic fracturing, does cause earthquakes. It’s used by industry to increase the porosity and permeability of tight formations so we can extract the resources. It’s been used also to dispose of toxic liquid waste that we bury, that we drill deep into the earth and we pump the fluids down there to get rid of it. We know that also causes earthquake. It’s been – a recent paper published in the Journal of Geology just last month looked at a link between wastewater injection and earthquakes. Indeed, it produced a 5.7 earthquake from wastewater injection. So hydro fracking does cause seismic events. The issue with drilling is we can use directional drilling. So we might go down several hundred meters and then go laterally for several kilometers and therefore, just because the wellhead is at some distance from the – in this case we’re concerned about nuclear power plants, it could be that the earthquakes could occur closer to the power plant depending on where the liquids are. These liquids are not just water that we’re putting down there, but there are a number of chemicals and also sand is added to keep these fractures open. So certainly, fracking causes earthquakes. We have to be – we are aware of that. We’ve known this for many years.

AG:     We’ve got the history on that recently is in Ohio. It’s had a whole series of fracking-induced earthquakes in the Richter 3 to Richter 4 range. But there was one in Nebraska at 5.7. So a 5.7 is awfully similar to that 5.8 in Virginia.

LK:      That one, Arnie, was not fracking in the sense of extraction of fuels, which is why fracking is so common now in this country. That was a wastewater injection well that produced a 5.7 out there. It’s a little bit different. It’s the same idea in the sense that the one in Oklahoma – the 5.7 is wastewater injection. I guess the only difference is the purpose of pumping fluids into the ground. Are we pumping fluids into the ground because they’re too toxic to have near the surface? Are we pumping fluids into the ground to fracture the rock in order to extract some resources? So in either case, high-pressure injection of fluids and chemicals will cause earthquakes.

KH:     So we’ve been talking about earthquake risk around nuclear plants and how to protect the reactor and the building and whatnot. But what about earthquake risk around spent fuel storage. How do we store the old fuel? We’re talking about a nuclear power plant which may run from 40 to 60 years, but of course, the spent fuel will need to be stored and protected for much longer. What is the earthquake risk when it comes to storing spent fuel?

LK:      The fact that the spent fuel will be in a given area for long periods of time – tens of thousands of years, makes it more likely that a seismic event will occur in that area. We can’t build a building that lasts reliably for 100 years let alone tens of thousands of years. So the issue of the storage of nuclear waste is an ongoing problem that nowhere in the world have we solved.

AG:     You know, that’s where Doctor MacFarland’s expertise really comes in with the NRC. She’s been pretty clear that the choice of Yucca Mountain from a seismic standpoint was a really bad choice and hopefully, Doctor MacFarland will push the agency to consider more stable areas. That’s our problem, the United States waste. But here’s Japan with 50 plants, half the number the United States has, in the most seismically active piece of real estate on the planet. And the Japanese seem to think they can develop a waste disposal site, yet they haven’t even begun the process yet. It concerns me that they continue to generate enormous amount of waste and they haven’t (a) found a site; and (b) recognized that maybe they’ll have to ship it to Mongolia or something like that. Because on the island of Japan, there’s essentially no piece of real estate that’s not seismically active.

LK:      The chairwoman, Dr. MacFarland of the NRC believes – she’s on record saying that she believes that permanent repository can be set up eventually. I’m not so sure about that. I know that Finland is working on a project, but the issue of nuclear waste storage and safety, we could talk about this for several hours.

KH:     Well, I’m sure we’ll have you back on the show in the near future to do that. Dr. Leslie Kanat, thanks for joining us.

LK:      It’s been my pleasure.

KH:     And Arnie, thanks for coming on.

AG:     Thank you, Kevin, and thank you, Les.

KH:     Well, that does it for this week’s edition of the Energy Education Podcast. You can catch us back here next week and every week for more of what’s happening in the world of nuclear news, and for more technical discussion. Also, don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For Fairewinds Energy Education, I’m Kevin Hurley. Thanks for listening.

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The Exxon-operated “Pegasus” oil pipeline ruptured in Mayflower, Ark. over the weekend, threatening local lakes and rivers with heavy “dilbit” crude from Canadian tar sands.

Meanwhile, in Russelville, Ark., a million-pound turbine component at Arkansas Nuclear One fell during a power disruption, killing one worker and seriously wounding four others.

[UPDATE: "Entergy" plant operators now admit EIGHT workers were injured, not four.]

An additional surge sent Unit Two into emergency shutdown, with steam releases to dissipate remanent heat in the reactor core.

ARNIE GUNDERSEN, a former nuclear plant operator and expert witness with Fairewinds Associates, analyses the fatal incident and the vulnerability of aging atomic facilities; and

DAVID LOCHBAUM of the Union of Concerned Scientists provides a national overview of American nuclear policy during his recent address to the NY Academy of Medicine on the consequences of the Fukushima disaster.

The post Arkansas: Nuclear plant fatality and tar sands oil pipeline spill appeared first on Fairewinds Energy Education » Podcast Feed.

TEPCO claims water around Fukushima reactors filtered out the cesium.  Could water really exist at these high temperatures or is it just a bunch of hot air?

Related Content

Fairewinds Speech at the New York Academy of Medicine

Podcast Transcript

KH:   It’s Wednesday, March 27^th, 2013. And this is the Energy Education Podcast. I’m Kevin Hurley. Following the Fukushima Daiichi accident, Tokyo Electric made estimates of cesium releases. Cesium is one of the most dangerous and long-lived radioactive isotopes that can be released in a nuclear accident. TEPCO’s estimation of the cesium releases were based on the assumption that the radioactivity was filtered out by water. We’ll discuss why cesium release calculations are important and why TEPCO’s incorrect assumptions have led to incorrect personal dose calculations. Today we’re joined by Fairewind’s chief nuclear engineer, Arnie Gundersen, for a technical discussion on the Fukushima cesium releases. Arnie, welcome to the show.

AG:     Hi, Kevin. It’s good to be back after a bout with the flu.

KH:     Well, about 2 weeks ago, just before you had the flu, you were in New York City for a presentation being put on by Dr. Helen Caldicott. It was the second anniversary of the Fukushimi Daiichi disaster. The event was titled – the event was the Medical & Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

AG:     Yeah. It was within a med school in New York City and was also simulcast. So we had an auditorium full of people, 400, 500 people in the auditorium. But more importantly, we had 4,000 people on line watching this thing as it was being live streamed. The experts that the Caldicott Foundation was able to get together were really impressive. They had the former Prime Minister of Japan started the conference off. That’s Naoto Kan. He was in charge of Japan during the accident. And he’s the guy who forced Tokyo Electric to stay on site. I spoke – Dave Lochbaum spoke from Union of Concerned Scientists. And then Akio Matsumura, the former Japanese ambassador. But then a group of scientists spoke extensively. Tim Mousseau from the University of South Carolina, who specializes in the effect of radiation on animals. Dr. Steve Wing from NC State spoke about the problems in doing dose assessments the way the Japanese were trying to do them. On and on and on, there was a list of heavy hitters that are recorded and all of them are available on line.

KH:     So Arnie, today on the Fairewinds website, we’re publishing your presentation in video format. Any of our viewers can go on the website, download the video and actually watch the Powerpoint presentation next to it. Can you talk a little bit about your presentation?

AG:     Yeah. If you were to watch what’s on the Caldicott Foundation website, all they have is the slides and my voice somewhere in the background. What you were able to do is really cool. You’ve got the camera that was trained on me so I’m on half of the video presentation, and the other half is the slides. And we’ve been able to synchronize them so that they work. So it makes a little more sense if you haven’t gone through them already. It’s a really important presentation and they held me to half an hour, which was tough. But there’s a lot of new information about the consequences of this accident to the Japanese that I don’t believe have been out there in – certainly not mainstream media. I don’t believe any media is aware of the information that I was trying to put out there.

KH:     Well, given all the time in the world, how long would your presentation really be?

AG:     Oh, I could have easily taken another 20 minutes.

KH:     So Arnie, I’ve obviously watched the presentation. And I know that there’s one slide that you – one Powerpoint slide that you really want to focus on. Slide 67. What is on slide 67?

AG:     Well, that’s I think the most important new information to come out of the entire conference. And it revolves around the issue of how much cesium was released from the Fukushima Daiichi accident. The nuclear industry wants everybody to believe that all the water inside the containment absorbed all that cesium, but slide 67 clearly shows that that couldn’t have happened. It’s a really blurry shot and it’s an infrared photograph looking down on Fukushima unit 3. And there’s a big spot on the corner that shows the fuel pool. That’s not where the action is. The action is a little spot more toward the center of the photograph. And that spot is 128 degrees centigrade. That’s above the boiling point of water. So I’ve got to get into a little bit about boiling water here to make this really understandable. The Tokyo Electric and the present Japanese government and the entire nuclear community are trying to say that only 1 percent of all the cesium that could have gotten out, did get out. And the secret is in the assumptions that they’re using right there. Cesium is the nastiest of the elements that was released – not the only one, but the nastiest. And it’s of course what I detected on the ground in Tokyo and what people have found all over the world now. It’s the most pervasive element. And I think perhaps as much as 10 to 20 percent of the cesium was released. And I’ve got the proof.

KH:     So you have a disagreement with TEPCO about just how much cesium was released.

AG:     Yes. Absolutely. And it ties right back into public health and what was the exposure to the people in Japan and how many people are going to die.

KH:     What argument is TEPCO using to justify their cesium release figures?

AG:     Well, there’s a lot of old scientific evidence that shows that if you take hot cesium gases and you bubble them through steam, only 1 percent of the cesium will get out. It’s essentially scrubbed. We call that a DF – a decontamination factor of 100. So Tokyo Electric is hiding behind all this old science that talks about well, when you release radioactive cesium into water, the water traps it and therefore, the people in the surroundings were safe and it really didn’t matter that the containment was leaking.

KH:     So Tokyo Electric is arguing that the containment was submerged in water when the accident happened.

AG:     Yes. Tokyo Electric believes that there was always water inside the containment. But slide 67 shows that that can’t happen. And it’s not a matter of opinion. It’s raw science here.

KH:     Why can’t it happen?

AG:     Well if you take a frying pan and heat it up and watch the little bubbles on the bottom of the pan, that’s called nucleate boiling. And then when the bubbles get bigger, that’s called departure from nucleate boiling. And then when the whole pan starts just violently bubbling, that’s called bulk boiling. But all of them occur when the water is 212, at boiling. And water can’t get over 212 on this planet unless you have extraordinary pressures on it. So if you have a boiling hot frying pan that’s red hot and you pour water on it, the water is only going to get to 212 before it flashes to steam. And that’s where slide 67 comes in. 212 is the same as 100 centigrade. Well, slide 67 shows this thermal flare right where the containment should be, and it’s releasing gases at 128 degrees centigrade. That means that can’t be steam squirting out that hole because if it was steam, it would be at 100 degrees centigrade. The extra heat means that it’s hot, radioactive cesium gas squirting out directly from the containment 9 days after the accident.

KH:     So you’ve been saying water boils at 212, but that is 100 degrees centigrade, just to be clear.

AG:     Yes, correct.

KH:     So water boils at 100 degrees centigrade. Water can’t exist as steam at anything above that. And you’re saying that the TEPCO data shows that the temperature of the gases escaping the containment were in fact above that.

AG:     Right. And now what that means is that there could be no liquid water inside the containment. When there’s no liquid water inside the containment, there’s no capture of the cesium. So whatever cesium was inside that containment was leaking out of the containment. There’s another slide in the presentation that says that TEPCO estimates the containment leak rate was 300 percent a day. So whatever radioactive gases were inside that containment, every 8 hours were being released out that thermal flare. Well, that changes the game dramatically. Instead of 1 percent of the cesium, it’s likely that 20 or 30 percent of the cesium were released. And at that point, that’s very similar to what we say at Chernobyl. So I’ve been saying that the Fukushima Daiichi accident was very comparable to the Chernobyl accident. In fact, we know for sure the noble gases were 3 times higher at Fukushima than they were at Chernobyl. That’s covered extensively in my talk and I don’t have to go there today. But the Japanese didn’t measure that and it blew away. So they’re not worried about that exposure to their people. They’re looking at the cesium now and trying to claim that only 1 percent of the cesium got out because that’s what the old tests showed. Well, the old tests showed – don’t match this slide 67, the infrared picture. And the infrared picture shows hot, radioactive gases being released directly out into the atmosphere 9 days after the atmosphere. It’s a really important discovery and I hope that people doing dose assessments will understand that they’re not dealing with a reactor containment that had water in it. They’re dealing with a reactor containment that had hot gas in it.

KH:     So Arnie, this is all about steam bubbles. And you’re an expert, I understand, in steam bubbles.

AG:     Well, when you’re a nuclear engineer, you have to take a course in steam bubbles. Yeah, I took a 3-credit course watching steam bubble – the nucleate boiling departure from nucleate boiling and bulk boiling are driven into my thick skull. The other thing I could bore you to death about is cooling power plumes. That was my masters thesis.

KH:     So you know when and where steam can and can’t exist basically.

AG:     That’s right. So we are not talking about an area that can be in scientific dispute. This is raw physics. This is the stuff they teach kids in freshman and sophomore physics in college. And water doesn’t exist over 100 degrees centigrade – 212 Fahrenheit. And yet that picture that we’re bringing up on slide 67 clearly shows something hot is leaking out of that containment. This is hot, radioactive cesium gas.

KH:     But TEPCO is making the argument that the water that was in and around the reactor filtered out the cesium.

AG:     That’s right. And they’re arguing, too, that everything you see coming off the top of that nuclear reactor was steam. It can’t be steam and it had to be cesium.

KH:     So we’re talking about the percentage, the amount of cesium that escaped the reactor. Of course, you have a different opinion than TEPCO, but in the end, if you’re right, what does that mean to the people? What kind of difference in dose can the people of Japan expect?

AG:     Yeah. I can understand where the average Japanese doesn’t care what the decontamination factor was, but he very much cares what the exposure was to his son or daughter. So what this means is that the cesium dose that the IAEA – the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Japanese government is calculating, is way low. We had a call last – a couple of weeks ago, from a scientist who talked about his work with Japanese scientists and they were deliberately under calculating the amount of radiation that they were measuring tenfold. His instrument was reading ten times higher than the guy standing right next to him. And when he caught them at it, they said they had a loose wire. Well, they didn’t have a loose wire. It’s systemic within the Japanese nuclear establishment right now that they’re underestimating dose. And when you underestimate what you measure, you need the theoretical foundation to support that. And the Japanese, in order to do that, needed to say well, all the cesium’s inside that nuclear reactor – only 1 percent leaked out. In fact, much more leaked out. And I think my leak rate and the amount of cesium that is in that leak rate match up a lot better with the exposures that the people in Japan really got. You know, the IAEA says 100 people are going to die from this. Well, I think it’s going to be a thousand times higher than that. And the difference is in the assumptions. And I think my assumptions are supported a lot more by the data from the field than the IAEA’s, hiding behind some old studies.

KH:     Arnie, my favorite slide is slide #75 on the presentation, a picture of Tokyo. Tell me about that. Why is that in there?

AG:     Yeah. It’s a glorious picture of Tokyo at night. And over to the right, by the way, is the Tokyo Electric tower. We won’t go there. It’s a beautiful photograph, first off. But secondly, it shows the vibrancy of Tokyo city. Tokyo city, including the greater metropolitan area, is 35 million people. And here’s Naoto Kan at the beginning of the conference saying that the existence of Japan as a sovereign nation was jeopardized. Well, my point in this entire presentation is at some point the risks of a technology become untenable. And I think that’s what the Daiichi accident showed us. If the next time we risk another city the size of Tokyo, sooner or later you’re going to roll snake eyes here. And if we just missed it with Fukushima Daiichi, there’ll be another one coming unless we change horses.

KH:     Arnie Gundersen, thanks for joining.

AG:     Oh, thanks for having me, Kevin.

KH:     Well, that does it for this week’s show. You can catch us back here next Wednesday and every Wednesday for more technical discussion on what’s happening in the world of nuclear news. Also, don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For Fairewinds Energy Education, I’m Kevin Hurley. Thanks for listening.

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Critical safety documents are continuously withheld from the public with a total lack of openness and transparency.

Fairewinds founder Maggie Gundersen and Enformable’s Editor Lucas Hixson meet with Kevin Hurley to discuss the difficulties the public has in obtaining information from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and from reactor owners.  The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been a failure in allowing the public to have access to information that affects the safety of their communities.

Podcast Transcript

KH:     It’s Thursday, March 21^st and this is the Energy Education podcast. I’m Kevin Hurley. On today’s show, we’re talking about information and how difficult it can be for the public to access it. Concerned citizens and nuclear watchdog groups have a very difficult time trying to access critical safety documents relating to nuclear power. We’ll talk about how the Freedom of Information Act request might not be as helpful as it could when trying to obtain documents. My guests this week are Fairewinds’ Maggie Gundersen and Enformable.com editor Lucas Hixson. Welcome to the show, guys.

MG:    Thank you, Kevin. Fun to be here.

LH:      Thank you for inviting me, Kevin.

KH:     Lucas, let’s start with you. You spend a good deal of your time researching information on nuclear power plants. Of course, this involves government Freedom of Information Act requests and lots of on-line research. Can you just talk a little bit about that process?

LH:      Well, yeah, I’d be happy to. And it is something that you have to pick up the nuances and the details to. It’s not like any other industry or any other research I’ve ever been involved in. The difficulty in retrieving information is astounding. I’ve never had such problems with contention over what appeared to be just such minor detail documents, and then the way that the information, you receive it, it’s not always the clearest picture of the situation. It’s more or less a forward-looking marketing statement which is meant to attract investors or insure market stability. So it’s been a very interesting experience for me and it’s something that over years, you learn to pick up the little nuances and the ways in which information is disclosed or not disclosed. Sometimes the best information that you find is inferred by what you don’t find rather than what you do, because what you do is often very few and far between and scattered throughout a huge haystack.

KH:     So you’re telling me that when you research documents and you’re looking for nuclear information on line that a lot of what you’re finding are forward-looking sort of promotional documents. Now I want to bring Maggie in on this one, too. Can you give me an example of some of the language you might find when you’re looking for technical documents on nuclear information?

LH:      I would say there’s been a trend moving from releasing more data-oriented information to more marketing-oriented information. And the data is being hid behind proprietary information, even though that’s probably in most cases not the most accurate depiction.

MG:    For me as a paralegal, one of the issues is actually getting what we ask for. So we would ask for specific documents and sometimes we get boxes and boxes of documents that have nothing to do with what we’ve requested. And then all the papers are shuffled. I’ll give you an example.

KH:     So you’re talking about a Freedom of Information Act request.

MG:    Well, I’m talking about documents in a legal case where we requested documents as part of the discovery process. So it’s similar to a Freedom of Information Act request in that the parties are entitled to see all the documents that each side has. And we – the plaintiffs ask the defendant for the particular documents and they don’t get them and they don’t get them. And finally they come in very close to time of reports due or the time a deposition is coming up, so that there’s almost no time for the team to look at the documents. And they come – boxes; literally, boxes. And in one case, we’ve been asking for the document – a particular logbook – a nuclear control room logbook and we ask for it for a year. And finally got it right before a deposition and filing that was due. And I hired somebody else to come in who specialized in putting things in order numerically. And we had asked – as Lucas could verify for you, there are times you ask for a specific item, and if you don’t phrase it exactly right, you don’t get that item. Well, we had asked for specific dates when nuclear accident had happened and radiation had gotten out of a nuclear plant, and we wanted to see the documents for those dates. We wanted to see the control room logbook. We wanted to look at all the stuff. We finally got this and it was narrowed down to one box. And everything was out of order. The logbook had been all torn apart while it was copied. So I had someone come in and she catalogued every single document and order. And guess what? All the pages we asked for were missing. The specific dates were missing out of this year of control room logbook.

KH:     So I’m reminded of the scene from Miracle on 34^th Street where the judge is just about to find that Kris Kringle is in fact Santa Claus and they come in and they dump all the envelopes on his desk – just envelopes and envelopes, you can’t even sort through them all.

MG:    That’s a very, very good analogy. There’s also a film, a legal film that was made with Gene Hackman. I can’t remember the name of the film but it was about the Pinto – Ford Pinto case, where they finally got the documents and a whole tractor trailer load of papers is delivered. That’s based on – it’s a fictionalized account in the film, but it is based on a true story.

KH:     It’s based on one of Lucas’ FOIA requests.

LH:      Have you ever played laser tag?

KH:     I have.

LH:      The very process of tagging someone is very short and – but what you end up doing is arguing over hits and misses because the entire purpose of the game is smoke and mirrors. And that’s a lot of the ways how getting information is. It’s (a) a game of smoke and mirrors; and (b) the majority of your time you spend arguing about hits and misses. So there’s two or three main ways which information is released. And I know in the last podcast, because I listened to it, that Arnie had been talking about releasing information on Friday afternoon at the end of business so that by Monday morning, it’s old news, and I completely concur with that analysis. But there’s two other ways specifically with FOIA information and Maggie has alluded to both, how they frequently handle this release. And I call the first one the pump and dump, where you find as much irrelevant data as possible and you hide the few needles of true information amidst the haystack and you release this entire pile of information and hope to God that they don’t have enough time to process all of it before they have to respond; or (b) more or less a feed-and-bleed type situation, meaning you’re going to get really ticky tacky with all of the semantic nuances of the request. And if they requested a document, well, does a document mean email or memo or phone call. That’s up for anybody’s contention. And what we find is rather than finding a reason for the justification of release, we find that often officials are bogged down trying to find justification for the omission of information.

MG:    Exactly.

KH:     So what you’re saying is you have a problem from the get go getting the information and narrowing it down to what’s relevant, but also you can count on information being excluded from the mountain of papers you receive – relevant information.

LH:      Very true. I guess the way that I would put it is we have many public agencies that pretend or promote the fact that they protect the public interest, but when you look at how they handle the information process specifically, you begin to see very clearly who they are protecting and whose interesting they are acting in behalf of.

MG:    That’s true. We are currently working on two cases. The NRC Atomic Safety & Licensing Board – ASLB – have had us sign the most onerous nondisclosures that I’ve ever had to sign in my career, and I’m just stunned that material is being called proprietary that should be open and accessible to the public.

KH:     Just to make sure our viewers understand, when you say the material is proprietary, you’re telling us that it’s information that’s not being released because it involves the company’s trade secrets, the technology that belongs just to that company. They want to protect that information, and that’s proprietary information.

MG:    That’s the correct term for proprietary information and that is how it’s supposed to be used, but this process is being abused – terribly abused. One example is with San Onofre. And we’ve talked about San Onofre several times on our podcasts and you specifically had an interview with Arnie about information that was withheld and just recently released. And that’s the one I’d like to talk about. We prepared testimony for the Petition Review Board, 2.206 Petition Review Board. And testimony for the ASLB both referred to documents that we knew existed and breaches that we believed that Edison made, that we as Fairewinds believed that Edison made. And weeks and weeks of research was done, analysis was done and then a live presentation was done before the ASLB in Washington, D.C. And all of a sudden, Senator Boxer and Congressman Marke received a document from a whistle blower that verified exactly what we had brought forward. And that’s called the MHI document, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industry document. And it talks about how the decisions were made at San Onofre. And it turns out that the NRC had that document in their possession. They had it beginning in September or October – for sure in October. They knew about it. FOIA’s had been requested of them, information had been asked for. They had not responded to our client, Friends of the Earth. So much of our case material from the very beginning, the things that we had presented alluded to that very document and that this had happened. And this verified every single thing that Fairewinds had brought forward, and yet the NRC withheld that document from the parties involved in the case and from the general public.

LH:      Whose best interest is that in? I’ll add to what Maggie is saying here. Look at the original intend of the Freedom of Information Act. It is meant to be a process – a process which protects the public interest. But in reality today it’s now a roadblock and being used to subvert that attempt. Now this is nothing new. This has been happening since the beginning of the AEC. And instead of using the Freedom of Information Act to withhold certain proprietary information, we have seen the industry and the regulation bodies use it to attempt to hide science, which is just an impossibility in the first place. You cannot hide science.

MG:    When Arnie and I worked in the industry and we would go into technical meetings and both of us – he had his whole career was technical and part of mine was before I went into nuclear public relations – when we’d go into meetings and the NRC would be there, the utilities would hold the documents so they’d belong to them. So the NRC would look at them in the meeting and then they’d slide them back across the table to the utility or the energy company. And the NRC could honestly say, oh, we don’t have those documents. Oh, they don’t belong to us so we can’t let the public see them because the utility, the company, the corporation is claiming that they’re proprietary and who are we to judge that. It’s really a nasty sleight of hand.

LH:      The public might see that as a small issue, but when you remember the fact that due to the information withheld from the public at Fukushima Daiichi, they did not up their tsunami wave predictions. They did not know that they were going to have issues with having the diesel generators down below ground, because specifically they had been downplaying and hiding reports that had been released before the event. So it is a significant problem.

MG:    Why is information being restricted?

LH:      Because all of our actions in society are based on perception; not always the reality of what’s happening but what we want others to think is happening or what we predict will happen. So when you’re dealing in those types of areas, you don’t talk about what is as much as what will be in the way that you want it to be. I call that a forward-looking statement. It’s essentially a marketing slogan meant to incite interest, to attract investors, but it is not an accurate representation of the events as they are in reality. And so we have seen this recent shift – I would say recent, within the last 20 years most viciously, where instead of releasing data oriented to back up the predictions and assumptions, we have seen reliance on forward-looking marketing statements instead to assure the public rather than confirm the assumption that’s being made.

MG:    Right. The documents are being misused and the NRC knew for six months. So Friends of the Earth spent money on attorneys and experts and we spent hours and hours preparing testimony when the NRC had the answers in their hand – answers that senators were asking for, congressmen were asking for, representatives in California were asking for, the interveners wanted. And they knew it all was there and they didn’t give it forward. They purposefully chose to withhold it. And that shell game benefitted who? It benefitted Edison. And there’s all this discussion still going on that Edison can possible restart and yet there are many, many, many more documents that prove it’s entirely not safe to restart. So where are we looking at the public good? Is that the public good for California and the people living and commuting near that plant? Or LA being the busiest port in the US and one of the busiest ports in the world? What does that mean for all of us if the NRC, which is supposed to be the public’s advocate is instead playing sleight of hand and protecting a corporation?

LH:      And if we’re going to talk about San Onofre, let’s put the whole thing in perspective here. Here’s how it started. It started when Southern California Edison decided that going through a proper vetting process was too much work and would take too much time. So they created a special contract with Mitsubishi which restricted or set predetermined standings for the contract of how these steam generators were going to be created, which in turn led to the advance degradation, despite the fact that at the time of installation, both Mitsubishi and Southern California Edison made multiple – quote – forward-looking statements – about how long these steam generators would serve the people of California. They might even attempt to relicense these reactors because these steam generators were so good. Yet not even outside of one full refueling cycle we have seen the fact that both of them have been out of operation for a year because you cannot reverse this damage and you cannot stop this damage.

MG:    At a cost of 1 billion dollars to the California rate payers. They have lost 1 billion dollars in this process.

LH:      How many megawatts of solar energy could we put in California for 1 billion dollars? I’d love to have somebody tell me.

MG:    Yeah. Let’s look at another case, though. Currently, Fairewinds is working on another case and we’re right in the middle of preparing our testimony and looking at data and answering questions from the attorneys for the interveners so that this can be presented to the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board – NRC again – for hearings. Now going back 2-1/2 years, we were experts and brought forward a contention, and the contention is part of the process in which a group says that they have a problem with the process and they want the NRC to take another look. And our contention was accepted. Finally. And that was 2-1/2 years later. Now we’re finally looking at the additional evidence and bringing things forward.

LH:      I want to refer back to something that Maggie was talking about a minute ago when she talked about who holds possession of the documents and how that can be used to prevent information from being released. Because this happened during the Fukushima response here in the United States. In the United States, all of our licensing stations were collecting data. They have ongoing radiological environmental analysis at each of these stations, and they were collecting information data that showed that radiation from Fukushima was in fact traveling over the United States and being deposited on the ground with rain and any other type of deposition. But I have emails which we’ll be providing in links for this podcast where the NRC admits that they are not authorized to share the results of those measurements from, in particular, San Onofre and Diablo Canyon specifically because of the fact that they do not belong to the NRC. They belong to the plants. And that because the NRC does not have those documents, they were not in a position to share them with the state or local counties. So this is just reaffirming the fact that there are multiple ways to get around this. And the question is, is enough pressure being put onto all these officials accountable for the job that they have been appointed to do?

MG:    I agree with that. In this case we’re working on now, we brought these contentions forward, we’re looking at the new data, and what they’re calling proprietary is how a company that’s trying to build a new nuclear plant prepared its quality assurance procedures and department. And did they adhere to the standards that are in the regulations. And they did not. We’ve already shown that. And now as we go back to work on this case, we signed this nondisclosure and they are calling everything that’s new since the contention was filed and accepted – they’re calling it all proprietary. That’s unbelievable. The public has a right to know whether or not this utility, to which they are a rate payer, is meeting critical standards of quality assurance for building, designing, fabricating and constructing a nuclear power plant. It’s an outrageous abuse of power.

LH:      But it’s not just about information you’re withholding. When you do release information, it’s all about the messaging, the way that it’s put in forward-looking statements. And another PDF which we’re going to provide is from the California State Department of Health where they are talking about how to take the data which showed the increased levels of radiation in California due to the Fukushima event, and how they squashed it effectively by adding in the levels of public health limits. And we have shared this data with a couple of different experts and they have all replied back to us, saying that if you’re going to do this – in essence, if you’re going to take a graph and squash it down to look like a line due to the public health limit that you’re incorporating in there, then you use semi-log graphing and any other type of display is an unethical approach for a public agency. But yet that’s exactly what they’re doing. So it’s not just what information are we withholding but the messaging and the forward-looking twist that is put on all of this data, which to the casual observer, gives you a misperception of reality.

KH:     So not only are they withholding the data for a number of reasons and using a number of methods, but when it does finally come out, it’s sort of repackaged in a way that misleads the public.

MG:    Exactly.

LH:      All nice and neat with a wrapping and bow.

KH:     So we’ve talked about the industry and the nuclear corporations withholding data if they say it contains proprietary information. Another reason for withholding data is that it contains security information. Can you talk about that, Maggie?

MG:    I’ve seen very little information that’s been withheld that contains actual security information. I think, again, that is a guise by the energy companies and by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to participate in facilitating these corporations keeping things under wrap. It says oh, this item is a security risk and therefore you cannot discuss it. That’s just not true in almost every case. And even when there are security risks – for example, guards who fell asleep at the Peach Bottom Nuclear Plant or barriers to intake structures that aren’t secure and there’s a security risk, it’s interveners who bring those risks forward to the NRC, and the NRC still has done nothing to correct these security risks. But they claim it can’t be discussed because they are a security risk. So it becomes this vicious circle and who’s hidden the shell under the cover.

KH:     So, Maggie and Lucas, I presume that your quest for information and pressuring industry and the government to release more of it will continue.

MG:    Yes, definitely.

LH:      It is a never-ending struggle.

KH:     Well, Maggie, Lucas, thank you both for coming on today.

LH:      Thank you very much for having me, Kevin.

MG:    You’re welcome, Kevin, thank you for having us.

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