Dial "M" for Meltdown - by Brian Rich

About This Video

Long time Fairewinds viewer and filmmaker Brian Rich has created a moving and high energy chronology of nuclear power and its impact upon the world.

Video Transcript

Our website has transitioned in a manner Arnie and I never imagined when I started setting it up several years ago.  We have received incredible public acknowledgement and support since we first began putting up videos about Fukushima, nuclear power, and answering questions sent to us by viewers.  Thanks to all of our viewers for their emails, questions, data, and report information.  We also could not do any of our work without the ongoing professional dialogue with scientists around the world.  As time progresses, I will be using this column to feature frequently asked questions and some of the material that I receive daily from the 250 emails we receive and from the professional dialogue we have throughout the world.  Together, we all can fill the void the main stream media and various world governments have left.

In that vein, I want to share this high energy video created by the young and dynamic filmmaker Brian Rich, a long-time viewer of our site.  Please watch it and share it with your friends.  I think you will be as moved as I was.

Only two days after publication, Brian's video has already been viewed more than 5,000 times around the world!  You may also see footage you have never seen, and certainly this mini-film puts images in context in a manner that has never been done before.

The people of Japan need our attention and support.  My friends in Japan are asking for this opportunity.  To this end Fairewinds Energy Education Corp will continue our analytical analysis, outreach, and my commentary.

Fairewinds Report for Southern Alliance for Clean Energy on TVA Bellefonte Plant

Today the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and Fairewinds Associates issued a report to the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority regarding numerous concerns with the Bellefonte Unit 1 nuclear project. First designed with slide rules back in 1968, Bellefonte Unit 1 is America's oldest nuclear power plant that has yet to generate any electricity. TVA began construction in 1974, mothballed the plant in 1988, and cannibalized the plant for scrap metal between 2006 and 2008. Alarmingly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently allowed construction of Bellefonte Unit 1 by TVA to start again with its 1968 design and its 40-year old weakened foundation and containment. In the video and in its report, Fairewinds identifies seven areas of substantial risk for TVA if it continues to construct this aged facility.

 

You can view the Full Report Here

and the Report Attachment Here


Transcript: 

English

Arnie Gundersen: Hi, I'm Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds Associates. I was hired by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy to write a report to the Tennessee Valley Authority Board of Directors concerning a power plant they are planning to construct in Alabama. I have some really serious concerns about the power plant and if it can ever be constructed, let alone operated, that I would like to share with you today. This plant was designed in 1968, that is at the height of the Vietnam War. Engineers used slide rules back then; I know, I was one of them. It was authorized to begin construction in 1974 and between 1974 and 1988, in fits and starts, the Tennessee Valley Authority began to build it. It was 80% complete in 1988 and Tennessee Valley Authority decided to put it in mothballs. What that means in a nuclear plant is that it is put in a protective environment so that rodents do not eat the wires, and so that gasses are maintained to prevent rust, and also, equally important, that the paperwork, the quality of the plant is assured. In 2005, Tennessee Valley Authority said they did not want to do that anymore, they wanted to destroy this plant, cannibalize it, sell it for scrap and move on. They went to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said sure that's OK. About two years later in 2008, the Tennessee Valley Authority had a change of heart. And they said, we made a mistake; we really should be attempting to build this plant and they went to the NRC. Incredibly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said, sure no problem you can construct it again, even though you have cannibalized it for the last two years. This month in August, Tennessee Valley Authority is going to make the decision if they can build this plant. If they do, it will go on line in about 2018. That is 50 years from the time it was initially designed. The plant will be 50 years old before it begins to generate one electron. If it runs for 60 years beyond that, as most nuclear power plants are proposed to do, it will be 110 years old at the time it will be shut down. I think there are some grave concerns that the Tennessee Valley Authority's board of directors needs to look at. I have identified 7 of them in the report that I have presented today. I would like to share those 7 ideas with you in this short video. The first thing I have looked at was this unique design of the Bellafonte unit. It was built by a company called Babcock and Wilcox. Babcock and Wilcox built 8 nuclear reactors worldwide. There are 440 nuclear plants, so 8 divided by 440 means that only 2% of all the power plants in the world are of a design like being proposed for Bellafonte. But it is even more unique than that. The existing 8 Babcock and Wilcox reactors are all what is called a 177 design; it is smaller. This is called the 205 design. It is bigger. This will be the only plant of that design in the entire world. And, oh by the way, the Babcock and Wilcox design is the design that was constructed and operated at Three Mile Island. The second issue is ground water. When this plant was being built in the 1970's, they discovered there was an awful lot of ground water. And anybody who has every put concrete in the ground knows that water sucks out the calcium from concrete and makes it weak. At Bellefonte, they put in pumps. Sump pumps continually pull that water out of the ground and keep the foundation strong. In 2005, when the Tennessee Valley Authority decided to cancel this plant and cannibalize it, they turned the sump pumps off. So for a period of years, ground water has been in contact with that foundation and has weakened the foundation. It is an impossible area to evaluate because you cannot dig underneath a nuclear plant to see how bad the ground water has occurred. But ground water has been eating away at the foundation of that plant because Tennessee Valley Authority made the decision to turn the pumps off. The third area is quality assurance records. A nuclear power plant is only as good as the paperwork that supports whether or not the welds are any good, whether or not the components are any good, whether or not they can be traced to something that is built by a quality assurance vendor. In 2005, that entire system was destroyed. The quality assurance staff was laid off. The records were left in disarray. Without records, the quality assured nuclear plant does not exist. Now that may sound like a small thing, but in fact, that is what makes a nuclear plant, a nuclear plant. It is a little bit like having an AKC dog. You have paperwork to prove that it is an AKC dog. But what if you let your AKC dog loose in the dog park for 6 hours? Could you be sure that the puppies are really AKC? The answer is no.  Similarly, when Bellefonte lost control of it's records, it is very, very difficult to go back and determine what is, and what is not, a quality assured piece of material. The fourth area is that the Bellefonte plant was cannibalized. Demolition crews were allowed in, in 2006 and 2007, to rip out major components, nuclear pipe, nuclear valves, and to cut the nuclear steam generators in order to sell the copper on the scrap market. Tennessee Valley Authority recognized after about 2009, that they had a problem. They filed what is called an LER, License Event Report, that said they have lost control of the configuration. That means that they have no idea what is in that power plant anymore. It is a little bit like the book that goes with an airplane. Every airplane has a book and in that book is every single change to that airplane. When Tennessee Valley Authority decided to cannibalize the plant, they threw the book out. And now, as they are looking back and trying to determine exactly what is in that power plant, they have discovered they cannot. This is a serious problem. Construction crews have been ripping the plant apart for years. Controls in the environment, mice eating the pipes, eating the wires, causing electrical short circuits, the wrong material inside the containment, all of these problems have occurred as a result of the unit being cannibalized. The fifth area of concern is the containment vessel itself. It looks substantial from the outside, but in fact, the steel tendons that hold it together have begun to rot. Workers were inside the plant and they heard what they thought was a shotgun. It turned out that it was a steel tendon snapping. As they evaluated that, they determined that other steel tendons had things called sulfites on them and others had water, which was causing rust. Now this containment at Bellefonte is really similar to the containment at Crystal River. We have talked about Crystal River before. A 60 foot long by 20 foot wide crack has developed in the Crystal River containment. It is possible that when they try to fix the Bellefonte containment, they try to retighten it a result of this exploded tendon, that it too, could develop a 60 foot long crack, just like at Crystal River. The Crystal River reactors will be shut down for 5 years to correct that crack and it won't be til 2014 til we know we have got it right. So to move forward on Bellefonte now, is a grave risk, financial risk, to Tennessee Valley Authority because they won't know for sure if that containment can be fixed until Crystal River gets it right and that is not going to be at least until 2014. The sixth area is that there are historical precedents of people trying to start up a nuclear power plant and failing. And Tennessee Valley Authority does not seem to be paying attention to the fact that history is not on their side. The first reactor is Zimmer. Zimmer was built in Ohio, was 98% complete when the utility decided the paperwork, the quality assurance records to make sure that the welds were really nuclear grade welds, were not adequate. The plant was mothballed and then destroyed and turned into a coal plant. The other plant was Washington Public Power Unit 1. That is identical to the Bellefonte Unit. About 8 years ago, the Board of Directors at Washington Public Power faced the same decision that Bellefonte did. And they said, whoa, this is way too risky. As a matter of fact, it was an easier decision to make for the Washington Public Power District because that plant had never been cannibalized. So Washington Public Power and Zimmer threw in the towel because of quality problems in trying to start up a nuclear plant that was long delayed. Bellefonte has been delayed even longer. It will be 50 years old before it ever goes on line. And yet, the Board of Directors at Tennessee Valley Authority is being told by management that it is a prudent expenditure to move forward on the design. I do not think so. The final point I made to the Board of Directors at the Tennessee Valley Authority is that 5 nuclear accidents have occurred after this plant got it's construction permit in 1974. There are lots of lessons that have to be learned and the lessons from Fukushima will not be learned immediately. They will be 4 or 5 or 6 years in the making. Containment issues at Fukushima though, should be known to everybody. Three out of three of the containments have blown up. But yet, the Bellefonte containment has problems already. Tendons have been known to explode. The reactor very similar to it at Crystal River has a crack in it. How can we move forward on the Bellefonte reactors until we have completely learned the lessons from Fukushima? To sum up the report, this plant was built by men and women with slide rules in 1968. The first dirt was moved in 1974. It was mothballed in 1988. It was cannibalized in 2006. And yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Tennessee Valley Authority think it would be a good idea to put it back together and operate it beginning in 2018. It will be 50 years old if it can be constructed on the schedule that Tennessee Valley Authority claims. Then Tennessee Valley Authority proposes to run it for another 60 years. It will be 110 years old, the oldest plant in the world by a long shot, if this plant is allowed to go forward. I recommend to the Tennessee Valley Authority's Board of Directors that they have another look at this. I think there are too many risks, and too many schedule delays, cost overruns and the likelihood of serious operating problems in the future if they continue to build the Bellefonte plant. The full report I have written is on the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy's website. Thank you very much.

Lethal Levels of Radiation at Fukushima: What Are the Implications?

Fairewinds-Energy-Lethal-levels-of-radiation-at-Fukushima-Daiichi.jpg

https://vimeo.com/27306360

About This Video

TEPCO has discovered locations on the Fukushima plant site with lethal levels of external gamma radiation. Fairewinds takes a close look at how this radiation might have been deposited and how similar radioactive material would have been released offsite.

Video Transcript

[tabgroup][tab title="English"]

Arnie Gundersen: Hi, I'm Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds and it is Thursday, August 4th.

Two days ago, Tokyo Electric announced some really high radiation levels on the Fukushima site and I wanted to put that into perspective and let you know what I think is happening.

First, Tokyo Electric discovered very, very high radiation in a stack which is used to vent radiation out of the plant and up into the air. The quantity of that radiation was really, really high exposure. It was 10 Sieverts and to convert that over to rems, which I am used to, is a thousand rem. Now, what does that mean?

A thousand rem or more, because the instrument went off scale, a thousand rems, if you were there for less than half an hour, would mean death within a couple of days. Those kinds of exposures cause extensive neurological breakdowns that cannot be reversed medically. So basically, to be near that for any amount of time beyond a couple of minutes, would be a death sentence. What that means is really interesting. This site has been extensively mapped. There is a map that is current that shows many, many hot spots. This hot spot was not discovered until just a couple of days ago. Now that could mean a couple of things. It could mean really poor health physics in that this was missed for 100 days.

I do not think that is the case, but earlier site maps do not show this high concentration of radioactivity in that area. More likely is that this event happened over time, this radiation built up over time, and that is my theory about how the material was deposited. The key is that it occurred in a vent. Now that vent was venting the containment for weeks and months before the radiation was detected.

When you start your car up in the morning, you will see water dripping out of the end of the exhaust pipe. I think that is what happened at Fukushima. The hot humid gasses from inside the containment were going up this stack and where the gasses touched the outside of the stack, they were condensing. It was not just water and hot air, but it also contained lots of cesium. So the cesium and the hot water ran down the outside of the pipe and collected at the bottom. So over a period of time, that concentration got higher and higher and higher. It is likely that the first surveys missed it, because it just was not as high a radioactive source in comparison to all the other radioactive sources that were there.

But over time the concentration went up and up and up as more and more and more water containing cesium came down. It is important to remember that this lethal amount of radiation was found on site, not off site. So that is good. The other piece of that is, it was found in the stack, air was being pulled over that, and up and exhausted into the air for a long time. I think it really speaks to how much radiation was released over the last 140 days. And that this is just a small portion of what was released to the environment.

There is another competing theory: some people think it was blown into that location during the explosion in the first week.

Again, either the health physics practices of measuring that on site were really, really poor, or it was not there in the first week and has gradually built up over time.

Tokyo Electric has found high radiation in the ground in that vicinity and all around the plant.

And in fact has bulldozed some of it under, so that workers could access some of these areas. What that means is that we are going to continue to see over the next 10 years, spikes in radiation on site. First, as pieces that were bulldozed actually come to the surface in the excavations, there will continue to be these enormous radioactive sources that are in the dirt.

And second, when they get into these buildings to actually try to dismantle the plant, they are going to find even higher radiation levels than this one. Remember, at the bottom of the nuclear reactor, the nuclear core has leaked out and is now lying like a pancake on the concrete floor, working it's way down, but probably not through the concrete. That is even much more radioactive than this.

That is why it is going to take Tokyo Electric 10 or 20 years to clean up. This is not something you send somebody in with shovels to shovel the floor. This is going to have to be done robotically and it is going to take a long, long time.

I will keep you informed as more develops.

One last thing, I wanted to say that I made a mistake in the last video at the University of Vermont. It is Finland that has the waste repository. In my presentation, I said Sweden. My apologies to the Finns for mistaking your country.

Thank you very much.

[/tab][tab title="日本人"]

犏島原発での臎死レベルの攟射線その意味するずころは䜕か

 æ±äº¬é›»åŠ›ïŒˆTEPCOは犏島第原発敷地内で臎死量のガンマ線が発生しおいる箇所を発芋したした。フェアりィンズは、攟射性物質がどのような経緯でこの堎所に堆積されたのか、たた、同様の攟射性物質が敷地倖に攟出された可胜性に぀いお、考察したす。

 

こんにちは。フェアりィンズのアヌニヌ・ガンダヌセンです。今日は8月4日朚曜日です。2日前、東京電力は非垞に高レベルの攟射線が犏島第原発で怜出されたず発衚したした。この事象を党䜓に䜍眮づけ、犏島原発で䜕が起きおいるかに぀いお私の考えをお䌝えしたいず思いたす。

たず、東京電力が非垞に高レベルの攟射線を発芋したのは、攟射性物質を空気䞭に攟出するための排気塔です。枬定された攟射線量は䞊倖れお高く、10シヌベルトでした。私はレムに慣れおいるのでそれに換算するず、1,000レムです。

これはどれくらいの数倀でしょうか。1,000レム、いや枬定噚が振り切れたのでそれ以䞊ですが、これはその近くに分居ただけで、数日で死に至るレベルです。このような被曝をするず広範囲にわたっお神経现胞が砎壊され、医孊では修埩できたせん。近くに数分以䞊いたら、死刑宣告を受けるようなものです。

興味深いのは、原発の敷地内に぀いおはこれたでに詳现な地図が䜜成されおいるこずです。最新版を芋るず、ホットスポットが非垞にたくさんあるのがわかりたす。ずころが今回のホットスポットは、2日前たで発芋されたせんでした。

理由はいく぀か考えられたす。たずえば、保健物理孊攟射線の安党な取り扱いを研究する実践的研究分野の調査がひどくお粗末だったために、この100日間のあいだ芋逃されおいた可胜性です。私はそうは思いたせんが、ずにかく、叀い地図を芋おもその堎所に高線量の地点があるず蚘されおいないのは事実です。

もっず可胜性が高いのは、時間の経過ずずもに攟射性物質が蓄積したこずです。私はそう考えおいたす。

重芁なのはこれが排気塔で芋぀かったこずです。今回の高レベル攟射線が怜出されるたで、この排気塔は 䜕週間も䜕ヶ月ものあいだ栌玍容噚内のガスを逃がしおきたした。朝、車の゚ンゞンをかけるず、排気管から氎が滎り萜ちるこずがあるのはご存知でしょう。犏 島で起きたのはそういうこずだず思いたす。栌玍容噚から出るガスは高枩で倚量の氎分を含んでいたす。ガスは排気塔を䞊ぞずのがっおいきたすが、排気管の倖 偎にガスが觊れるず、気䜓が凝瞮しお液䜓になりたす。

排出されるのは高枩の氎蒞気ず高枩の氎だけではありたせん。倚量のセシりムが含たれおいたす。セシりムず高枩の氎が配管の倖偎を䌝わっお萜ち、䞋に溜たった。時間ずずもにどんどん溜たっお濃床が高たっおいきたした。

最初の調査のずきには、ただほかの攟射線源ず比べたら線量が高くなかったために芋萜ずされた可胜性がありたす。しかし、時ずずもにセシりムを含んだ氎がさらに流れ萜ちおくるに぀れお、その濃床はどんどん高たっおいきたした。

芚えおおいおいただきたいのですが、この臎呜的なレベルの攟射線が芋぀かったのは敷地倖ではなく敷地内です。これは喜ぶべきこずです。ですが、その排気塔からは長期にわたっお排気が行なわれおいたした。実際に過去140日間でどれだ け高レベルの攟射線が攟出されおきたのかを今回の発芋が物語っおいたす。しかもそれは、環境䞭に攟出された党䜓量のごく䞀郚でしかないのです。

別の説もありたす。事故埌䞀週間のあいだに起きた爆発で吹き飛ばされたものが、あの堎所に萜ちたずいうものです。これもやはり保健物理孊の調査がよほどお粗末だったためか、最初に調査したずきにはなかったのにしだいに蓄積しおいったかのどちらかです。

東京電力は原発敷地内のいたるずころで高線量のがれきを確認しおいたす。䜜業員のアクセスを容易にするために、その䞀郚はすでにブルドヌザヌでどかしお埋めおありたす。ずいうこずは、今埌10幎間にわたっお、敷地内ではずきおり急激な線量の䞊昇が起きるこずになりたす。ひず぀には、埋めたがれきを掘り出すずき。掘り出す䜜業が続くあいだは攟射線源が存圚し続けるこずになりたす。

もうひず぀は、実際に原子炉を解䜓するために人が建屋のなかに入るずきです。今回以䞊に高い攟射線量 に盎面するこずになるでしょう。思い出しおいただきたいのは、炉心が今や原子炉を突き抜けお、パンケヌキのようにコンクリヌトに匵り付き、䞋ぞ䞋ぞず萜ち おいっおいるこずです。ただコンクリヌトを突き砎っおはいないず思いたすが。その炉心の攟射線量は今回発芋されたレベルの比ではありたせん。だから東電は 原子炉をきれいにするたでに10幎から20幎かかるず発衚しおいるわけです。

この䜜業は、䞭に人を送り蟌んで床をシャベルで掘れば枈むずいうものではありたせん。ロボットにやらせる必芁がありたすので、非垞に長い時間がかかりた。

この件に関しお進展があればたたお知らせしたす。

最埌にひず぀お詫びがありたす。前回のバヌモント倧孊からのビデオに䞀箇所間違いがありたした。最終 凊理斜蚭が建蚭䞭なのは「フィンランド」です。プレれンテヌションのなかで私は間違っおスりェヌデンず蚀っおしたいたした。フィンランドの皆さん、皆さん の囜を間違えおしたっお申し蚳ありたせん。

ありがずうございたした。

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Nuclear Power 101: Fairewinds Examines the Fundamental Advantages and Disadvantages of Splitting Atoms to Boil Water

About This Video

Included in this presentation and PowerPoint is a discussion of how nuclear power plants work, how to cool a reactor during an accident, the effect of hot particles when inhaled, and concerns involving the long-term storage of nuclear waste. This presentation took place at the Nuclear Power Conference held at the University of Vermont July 23, 2011.

Associated Material

New Video of Scientist Kaltofen Presenting to American Public Health Association

Ex Japanese Nuclear Regulator Blames Radioactive Animal Feed on "Black Rain"

Fairewinds-Energy-Radioactive-animal-feed-and-black-rain.jpg

https://vimeo.com/26651670

About This Video

While many radioactive cattle have been discovered large distances from Fukushima, what is more important is where their feed is coming from. "It's not only about the radioactive cattle in Fukushima Prefecture; its also about the radioactive straw the cattle eat that was grown elsewhere". Straw found 45 miles from Fukushima is highly contaminated with radioactive cesium, which is an indication that radiation has contaminated large portions of Northern Japan. More than half a million disintegrations per second in a kilogram of straw are comparable to Chernobyl levels. This proves that the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission was correct when it told Americans to evacuate beyond 50 miles and that the Japanese should have done the same. An Ex-Secretariat of Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission blames this contamination on "Black Rain". Rather than minimize the information the Japanese people receive, Gundersen suggests minimizing their radiation exposure."

Video Transcript

[tabgroup][tab title="English"]

Arnie Gundersen: Hi, I'm Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds and it is Tuesday, July 19th.

Today, I plan to talk about the condition of the reactors at Fukushima. And more importantly, the radiation that has been detected throughout Japan, not just on the site. And finally, I want to talk about a condition that the Japanese are beginning to call Black Rain.

The first thing is the condition of the site itself. All 3 Fukushima reactors that were running, I, II and III, and the fuel pool on Unit 4, continue to release radiation. Now, you do not see it in the day because the days are warm now, but you do see it at night. I have gotten many, many emails about this, where people think that the site is blowing up. In fact, it is steam coming out of these reactors and hitting cold air from the Pacific. So they continue to release radiation. But most of the radiation from Fukushima was released in March and in April. At this point, there is a lot less radiation every day than there was in March and April. About 90-95% of the radiation from Fukushima was released in the first 6 weeks of the accident. While it continues to release radiation, there is nowhere near as much on a daily basis. On the other hand, Fukushima may be continuing to release radiation for a long time.

The Japanese are building large tents to put over each of these reactors. The first tent is in fabrication now and it will cover reactor 1, and then they will move to reactor 2, and reactor 3, and finally reactor 4. Those tents are designed to prevent the steam from getting out and to collect it as water and treat it. So beginning in September, most of the airborne radiation will be eliminated from Fukushima, at least Unit 1. More and more though, we will wind up with the contaminated ground water and the contaminated liquids that are on site. There is nothing in the foreseeable future to eliminate those. As a matter of fact, the Japanese announced that it is going to be 10 years before they begin, begin to remove those cores from the bottom of the containment. There is no technology right now to remove them. Remember they have melted through the nuclear reactor and they are lying on the floor of the nuclear containment.

At Three Mile Island, they had melted onto the bottom of the reactor, but not through the reactor. So this is brand new. It is sort of like trying to peel an egg off the bottom of a frying pan. If it is cooked too long, it is a very, very complicated and difficult process. And that is what we are facing at Fukushima in the long term clean up. So in the meantime, there will be an awful lot of liquid radioactive waste that will have to be processed for 10 or perhaps 20 years.

Well, in my mind, the more concerning thing is the information that has been coming in from off site lately. Some friends of mine are biologists that had worked at Chernobyl and went to Japan to do some scientific work over there. They went anticipating things were going to be bad. I got a call this week from them and they said that things are really, really bad. So these are hardened scientists that are used to dealing with radiation and they believe that conditions at Fukushima are much worse than they had thought.

There is some corroborating evidence that has come in on that. The first is that mushrooms between 30-40 miles from the reactor, are found to be contaminated well in excess of what the Japanese are allowing. The interesting part of that is that the mushrooms were grown indoors. So how can a mushroom grown indoors exceed the radiation standards that the Japanese have set? It is a major concern and again, it is 35 miles from the accident.

The second piece of corroborating evidence, is that cattle have been contaminated throughout the Fukushima Prefecture and beyond. In the last week, first it started that 8 cows were contaminated and then it became 40 cows and now it is over 130 cows that are contaminated, and I am sure that number will go up as time goes on. Now there are a couple of interesting things here. First is that the cows were 30-40 miles from the reactor and their cesium levels are well in excess of anything anyone has ever approved for human consumption.

When the cows got to market, the Japanese did not sample the meat, they rubbed the hide of cow to see if there was any contamination. And based on rubbing the hide of the cow, they released it to market. It was only after that, that it was discovered that the meat was contaminated. That is not an acceptable way of measuring beef. But the more important issue here is, how did the cows pick up that contamination when everyone thought the cows were being fed silage, in other words, straw that had been saved from before the accident?

It turns out that the Japanese use the stalks of rice to feed their cows. And farmers out at 45 miles and beyond, were cutting their rice stalks down and shipping it in to the farms that were inside the Fukushima Prefecture. The straw was contaminated to 500,000 disintegrations every second, in a kilogram of straw. Now this is cesium. It has got a 30 year half life. But 30 years from now, it is still going to be disintegrating at 250,000 disintegrations per second. And 30 years after that at 125,000 disintegrations per second. That is what this term half life means.

This occurred out at 45 miles. You will recall that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission suggested evacuation out beyond 50 miles. This appears to indicate that the NRC was right. The Japanese should have evacuated their population out beyond 50 miles and instead stopped at around 12 – 18 miles.

This contamination then has spread beyond the Fukushima Prefecture. Yet, the Prefecture itself seems to be the only place the Japanese are worried about this radioactive exposure.

The last thing I would like to talk with you about today, is what happens outside the 50 miles that we have just been talking about. It is already pretty clear based on the radiation in the straw that we have discovered that radiation, even out as far as 50 miles, is as high in some areas as Chernobyl was.

Well, what about further? Let's take a look at Tokyo and I am concerned there too. First, the sewage treatment plants in Tokyo have contaminated their sewage sludge. Normally, that material is used in building construction material. But it is so radioactive that it has to be stored outside under tarps, until someone can figure out a way to get rid of it.

The second thing is, a Japanese gentleman sent me a lab report. This person took it into his own hands to pay for a lab to analyze data on a street near a playground in Tokyo.

Here is the lab report. It shows that there are 53,000 disintegrations per second in a kilogram, that is 2.2 pounds of material, on the side of a street near a playground in Tokyo.

This person was so concerned that they went to the mayor of that town and the mayor said, I am not worried about it. Here is a citizen that with his own money, paid for a lab report and could get nowhere with his local government.

Well, there is another piece of data. And that comes out of the National Cancer Center hospital near Tokyo as well. It has been on their website since a couple of days after the accident. The report shows that on March 24th, that is 9 days after the accident, the radioactive background outside the hospital was 30 times higher than the radioactive background inside the hospital. There was deposition of hot particles on the soil. And it was significant enough to increase the amount of radiation that the detectors were picking up by a factor of 30. Now a national cancer hospital clearly knows how to measure radiation, so these are experienced scientists.

The last report I want to share with you is every day, I get an email from a prominent Japanese physicist named Dr. Glen Saji. He was their secretariat of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Japan. He wrote two days ago, this. And it has to do with the straw that has been discovered near Fukushima.

"I believe it is due to storing straw in a field at the time the plume passed by during the first week of the accident, in particular, due to the Black Rain."

Now Black Rain is not a term I am sure he uses lightly. But it clearly was experienced in Japan after the accident. What he is referring to there is clouds of radioactive hot particles depositing everywhere in northern Japan.

Well, the Japanese are resourceful people, as evidenced by their world cup win on Sunday. But they need to know the magnitude of the problem they are facing in order to handle it correctly. Rather than limit the information, it is important that they limit the radiation.

Thank you very much and I will get back to you.

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元原子力安党委員䌚事務局の専門家、家畜飌料を攟射性物質で汚染したのは「黒い雚」である、ず発蚀 

 çŠå³¶ç¬¬ïŒ‘原発から遠く離れた堎所の家畜から攟射性物質が発芋されおいる問題で、より重芁なのはその家畜の飌料がどこから来たのか、ずいうこずです。犏島県内の汚染家畜だけではなく、家畜に䞎えられたわらが別の堎所で収穫されそれが汚染されおいた、ずいうこずも問題なのです。

犏島第原発からマむルキロメヌトル離れた堎所で発芋されたわらは、攟射胜セシりムで高床に汚染されおいたす。このこずは、攟射胜は北日本の広い範囲を汚染しおいるずいうこずを瀺すものです。わら1キログラム圓たり毎秒䞇回以䞊におよぶ原子栞の厩壊50䞇ベクレルは、チェルノブむリの攟射胜レベルに匹敵するものです。米囜原子力芏制委員䌚が自囜民にキロメヌトル圏倖に避難するこず、ず蚀っおいたのが正しかったずいうこず、および日本囜民も同様にすべきであったこずを、蚌明するものです。日本の元原子力安党委員䌚事務局の専門家は、この汚染は「黒い雚」によっおもたらされた、ず蚀っおいたす。ガンダヌセン氏は、日本囜民が知るべき情報を制限するのではなく、むしろ攟射胜被曝こそを最小限に制限すべきである、ず指摘しおいたす。

 

こんにちは。フェアりィンズのアヌニヌ・ガンダヌセンです。今日は7月19日火曜日です。今日お話したいのは、たず犏島第䞀原発の原子炉の珟状に぀ いおず、もっず重芁な問題ですが攟射性物質が犏島だけでなく日本䞭で怜出されおいる件に぀いお、そしお日本で「黒い雚」ず呌ばれ始めおいるものに぀いおで す。

たず原発自䜓の珟状からです。1号機から3号機たでのすべおの原子炉ず4号機の燃料プヌルからは、攟射性物質が攟出され続けおいた す。日䞭は暑いために攟射性物質の攟出を目で芋るこずはできたせんが、倜になれば芋えたす。これに぀いおは、原子炉が爆発したのではないかずたくさんの メヌルをもらっおいたすが、あれは原子炉から立ち䞊る蒞気が倪平掋からの冷たい空気にぶ぀かったものです。いずれにせよ攟射性物質の攟出は続いおいたす。

ずはいえ、犏島からの攟射性物質のほずんどは3月ず4月に攟出されたした。珟時点では、䞀日あたりの攟出量は3月や4月よりもはるかに少なくなっおいたす。犏島からの攟射性物質の玄9095%は事故埌最初の6週間で攟出されたした。今も攟 出は続いおいるずはいえ、日々の攟出量で芋たら圓初ずは比べ物になりたせん。その䞀方で、犏島からは今埌も長期にわたっお攟射性物質が攟出され続けるおそれがありたす。

日 本では倧きなテントを䜜っお各建屋にかぶせる蚈画を立おおいたす。珟圚は最初のテントを補造䞭で、1号機にかぶせる予定です。それから順次2号機、3号機 ず移っお、最終的には4号機にもテントをかぶせたす。テントをかぶせる目的は、蒞気が倖に出るのを防ぎ、蒞気を氎にしお集め、その氎を凊理するこずにあり たす。これにより、9月以降は犏島から空気䞭ぞの攟射性物質の攟出はほずんどなくなりたす。少なくずも1号機からは。

しかし、攟射性物質 の倚くは汚染された地䞋氎ず珟堎の汚氎ずなり、圓分のあいだはそれを陀去する手立おがありたせん。それどころか日本政府は、栌玍容噚の底に萜ちた炉心を取 り出す䜜業に「着手する」たでにあず10幎かかるず発衚しおいたす。今はただ炉心を取り出す技術が存圚しないのです。思い出しおいただきたいのですが、燃 料は原子炉を突き抜けお「メルトスルヌ」しお栌玍容噚の底に萜ちたした。スリヌマむル島の事故のずきは、燃料が溶けお原子炉の底に萜ちたしたが、メルトス ルヌはしおいたせん。ですから今回のような状況には前䟋がないのです。

この䜜業は、フラむパンの底にこびり぀いた卵を剥がすようなもので す。加熱時間が長ければ、剥がすのはそれだけ難しくなりたす。私たちが盎面しおいるのはそういう状況です。原子炉をきれいにするのには長い時間がかかりた す。たた、それず䞊行しお膚倧な量の攟射胜汚染氎の凊理も進めなければなりたせんが、これには10幎か、堎合によっおは20幎かかるかもしれたせん。

私 がそれ以䞊に心配しおいるのは、最近になっお原発以倖の地域から聞こえおくる情報です。私の友人で、チェルノブむリでも仕事をした生物孊者数名が、調査の ために日本に行きたした。圌らは日本がひどい状況にあるこずは想像しおいたしたが、今週私に電話をかけおきお「状況は本圓に本圓に深刻だ」ず話したした。 圌らは筋金入りの科孊者で、攟射線の問題を扱うのにも慣れおいたす。にもかかわらず、犏島の状況は圌らの予想をはるかに超えるひどさだず蚀うのです。

そ の蚀葉を裏づける蚌拠も埗られおきおいたす。最初はシむタケです。原発から5060kmくらい離れた地域で、日本の基準倀を倧きく超える攟射性物質が怜 出されたした。興味深いのは、そのシむタケが「屋内で」栜培されおいたずいうこずです。なぜ屋内で栜培されたシむタケから基準倀を超える攟射性物質が怜出 されるのでしょうか。これは非垞に憂慮すべき状況です。もう䞀床蚀いたすが、原発から55km皋床離れた地域で起きたこずなのです。

2぀ 目の蚌拠は、犏島県各地ず犏島県倖で汚染牛が芋぀かっおいるこずです。最初は8頭の牛に汚染が確認されたず䌝えられ、やがおそれが40頭になり、130é ­ 以䞊になりたした。この数は時間ずずもに間違いなく増えるず思いたす。頭以䞊です。この問題でいく぀か泚目したいのは、たず汚染牛が原発から 5060kmくらい離れたずころで芋぀かっおいるこず。そしお怜出されたセシりムの量が、これたでに定められた食品のいかなる基準をもはるかに䞊回る高 レベルだったこずです。

汚染牛が売られるずき、日本政府は肉のサンプリング怜査をしたせんでした。牛の皮をこすった䞊で倖偎から被曝の有 無を確認しただけです。被曝が確認されなかったので垂堎で売られたした。売られたあずでようやく肉の汚染が明らかになったのです。このようなやり方は、牛 肉の汚染を調べる方法ずしお容認できるものではありたせん。

ですがもっず重芁な問題は、牛はどこで攟射性物質を取り蟌んだのかずいう点で す。アメリカの皆さんは牛の逌にはサむレヌゞ、぀たり原発事故前に貯蔵しおおいた牧草が䞎えられるず思うでしょうが、日本では牛の逌に皲のわらを䜿っおい るのです。70km以䞊離れた蟲家が皲を刈っおできたわらを、犏島県内の蟲家に出荷しおいたのです。その皲わらは、1kg圓たりの厩壊数が毎秒50䞇個 ぀たり50䞇ベクレルでした。これはセシりムですので半枛期は30幎です。぀たり、今から30幎たっおもただ25䞇ベクレルの攟射胜があるずいうこず です。さらにその30幎埌に12 5000ベクレルになる。それが半枛期ずいう蚀葉の意味です。

これは原発から玄70km離れた堎所での 話です。米囜原子力芏制委員䌚NRCが圓初、原発から半埄80km圏内のアメリカ垂民を避難させるべきだず提蚀したのを芚えおいるでしょうか。どうや らNRCは正しかったようです。日本政府は20km30kmで止めずに、80km圏内の䜏民を避難させるべきでした。攟射胜汚染は犏島県倖にも広がっお いたす。にもかかわらず、日本政府が攟射線被曝を心配しおいるのは犏島県だけに぀いおのようです。

今日最埌にお話したいのは、その 80km圏倖で䜕が起きおいるかです。汚染された皲わらが芋぀かったこずからもすでに明らかなように、80km圏倖であっおもチェルノブむリ䞊みに汚染さ れおいる地域が存圚したす。たずえば東京銖郜圏はどうでしょうか。私は東京に぀いおも心配しおいたす。ひず぀には、東京の汚氎凊理斜蚭で攟射性物質に 汚染された汚泥が芋぀かっおいるからです。通垞であれば汚泥は建蚭甚資材に加工されたすが、今回は攟射線レベルがあたりに高いため、凊分方法が決たるたで は防氎シヌトをかけお屋倖で保管するしかありたせん。

そしおもうひず぀、ある日本人の方が私宛おに怜査報告曞を送っおくれたした。東京 銖郜圏の公園近くの道で採取した土を、この方が盎接研究所に持ち蟌み、自分でお金を払っおデヌタ分析を䟝頌したのです。これがその報告曞です。東京の 公園近くの土から、キロ圓たり玄53,000ベクレルの攟射胜が怜出されおいたす。この方は非垞に心配になったので、垂長を蚪ねたした。ずころが垂長の返 事は「私は心配しおいない」ずいうものでした。

䞀垂民が、身銭を切っお研究所に怜査を䟝頌したにもかかわらず、垂に蚎えおもたったくらちがあかなかったのです。

さ らにもうひず぀デヌタがありたす。やはり東京の近くにある囜立がん研究センタヌの病院からです。これは病院のりェブサむトに事故の数日埌から掲茉されおい るデヌタです。この報告曞を芋るず、事故から9日埌の3月24日に蚈枬された屋倖の背景攟射線量が、屋内の背景攟射線量の30倍に達しおいたす衚を芋る ず実際は玄36.6倍。ホットパヌティクル高攟射胜粒子が土に降り、それによっお線量が高たったため、枬定噚が怜知しお屋内の30倍ずいう数倀を蚘 録したのです。囜立がん研究センタヌですから、線量を枬る方法は間違いなく心埗おいるはずです。ですから熟緎した研究者によっお蚈枬されたデヌタです。

最 埌にもうひず぀レポヌトをご玹介したす。私は毎日、日本の著名な物理孊者であるグレン䜐治博士おそらく、䜐治悊郎さんず思われるからメヌルをもらいた す。䜐治博士はか぀お原子力安党委員䌚の事務局を務めおいたした。圌は2日前のメヌルでこう曞いおいたす。汚染された皲わらが芋぀かった件に぀いおです。 「汚染の原因は、事故埌䞀週間の間に攟射胜の雲が通過したずきに皲わらを屋倖で保管しおいたためであり、ずくに『黒い雚』のせいであるず考えたす」 䜐治博士が「黒い雚」ずいう蚀葉を軜々しく䜿うずは思えたせん。事故埌の日本に「黒い雚」が降ったのは明らかです。぀たり、博士が蚀うのは、高攟射胜の雲が日本の北半分の至る所にホットパヌティクルを萜ずした、ずいうこずなのです。

日本人は臚機応倉な囜民です。そのこずは、日曜日のワヌルドカップサッカヌの勝利からもわかりたす。しかし、日本人は自分たちが盎面しおいる問題の倧きさに気づく必芁がありたす。そうでなければ適切に察凊するこずはできたせん。情報を制限するのではなく、攟射性物質を制限するこずが重芁です。

ありがずうございたした。たたお目にかかりたしょう。

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Why Fukushima Can Happen Here: What the NRC and Nuclear Industry Dont Want You to Know

Fairewinds-Energy-Why-Fukushima-Can-Happen-Here.jpg

https://vimeo.com/26231562

About This Video

The well-known safety flaws of Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactors have gained significant attention in the wake of the four reactor accidents at Fukushima, but a more insidious danger lurks. In this video nuclear engineers Arnie Gundersen and David Lochbaum discuss how the US regulators and regulatory process have left Americans unprotected. They walk, step-by-step, through the events of the Japanese meltdowns and consider how the knowledge gained from Fukushima applies to the nuclear industry worldwide. They discuss "points of vulnerability" in American plants, some of which have been unaddressed by the NRC for three decades. Finally, they concluded that an accident with the consequences of Fukushima could happen in the US.

With more radioactive Cesium in the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant's spent fuel pool than was released by Fukushima, Chernobyl, and all nuclear bomb testing combined. Gundersen and Lockbaum ask why there is not a single procedure in place to deal with a crisis in the fuel pool? These and more safety questions are discussed in this forum presented by the C-10 Foundation at the Boston Public Library.

Special thanks to Herb Moyer for the excellent video and Geoff Sutton for the frame-by-frame graphics of the Unit 3 explosion.

Video Transcript

[tabgroup][tab title="English"]

David Lochbaum: Good evening. I appreciate C10 for hosting this event and you all for turning out.

For those of you who do not know me, my name is David Lochbaum.

For those of you who do know me, my name is also David Lochbaum. For some reason it works out the same either way.

Arnie and I are going to present what happened at Fukushima and why those vulnerabilities plague U.S. reactors, Seabrook, Pilgrim, Vermont Yankee. The type of reactor really did not matter. The primary cause at Fukushima would have knocked down any one of our plants. So it is not a direct problem with GE reactors or boiling water reactors, it is a problem with nuclear reactors that we need to address.

There were six reactors at Fukushima. Three of them were operating at the time; three of them were shut down for scheduled refueling at the time.

Boiling water reactor on the left hand side. The nuclear fuel was inside a reactor vessel. The heat from splitting atoms is used to warm water that is flowing upwards through the reactor core. That heat causes the water to boil. The steam leaves the reactor vessel and is carried through piping to a turbine that is connected to a generator. The spinning turbine generates electricity that goes out on the wires to consumers down the line. The steam leaving the turbine is then passed into a condenser, a large metal barn basically. In this case, seawater was passed through tubes inside that condenser to cool the steam down, convert it back into water. The condensed water was then sent back to the reactor and used over and over again to remove steam, make steam and spin the turbine. The warmed seawater was returned to the Sea of Japan (Pacific Ocean) for further use.

This is called a simplified diagram but looks a little more complicated than the last one. The red portions show the steam lines going from the reactor vessel to the turbine, as the earlier, even simpler diagram showed. The light blue lines, cyan lines, show that the water going back from the condenser to the reactor vessel. This will come in more important in just a second . . .

When the earthquake occurred, these reactors -- because Japan is kind of susceptible to earthquakes -- those reactors automatically shut down within seconds when they detected ground motion caused by the earthquake. So within seconds of the earthquake, sensing that, the control rods inserted into the nuclear reactor core stopped the nuclear chain reaction and turned the reactors off. About a minute later, the turbine tripped. There was not enough steam going through the turbine any more so the turbine tripped. The earthquake knocked out the electrical grid, the normal source of power to the plant. When the turbine tripped, the generator tripped, that meant it was not producing any electricity for the plant either. So the earthquake and the turbine trip took away the normal source of power for the plant.

The red line shows the steam line going from the reactor vessel to the first valve that is inside the reactor containment building. The loss of power caused those valves to fail-safe. The fail-safe position for those valves was closed, which meant the steam was no longer going down the pipe, or at least no further than that closed valve.

In that case, you have steam still being produced by the decay heat being put off by the fuel in the reactor core, so you had to have something to deal with that energy that is still being produced. At Unit 1, which was different than Units 2 & 3, Unit 1 was the oldest of the reactors at Fukushima. That plant had what was called an isolation condenser, which is shown on the left. It is a big tank of water that has tubes that flow through it. Actually there are two tanks of water, each with tubes flowing through it.

Shortly into the accident, the little valves circled in yellow automatically opened because the pressure inside the reactor vessel was rising too high to protect the reactor vessel from bursting like a balloon or the piping from bursting due to too much pressure. The high pressure automatically opened that valve, allowed steam from the reactor to flow through the tubes inside this large tank of water, where it got cooled back down into water and then gravity drained that water back into the reactor vessel. So that isolation condenser controlled the pressure inside the reactor vessel and also controlled make up. There is no steam leaving. It was all being reused, so the amount of water in the reactor core reactor vessel remained the same.

The operators about 11 minutes later turned that system off. As in Three Mile Island, you turn off emergency safety systems, you are basically toying with the Devil and the Devil wins.

But they turned the safety system off. They closed that valve 11 minutes after it opened because the temperature of the water inside the reactor vessel was cooling down at 300 degrees an hour. It is a big piece of metal and there are limits on how fast it heats up or cools down, because you want to control the expansion and contraction, so it does not break. It was cooling down faster than they wanted it to, well above the 100 degree an hour limit, so they turned the safety system off. When they did that, they lost the way to handle the pressure buildup inside the reactor vessel, so the reactor vessel finds it’s own way. It uses some safety relief valves that discharge the steam to a different place that is called the torus or suppression chamber. In this design it is a large metal ring, looks like a donut made out of metal, nuclear sized, that holds about 2 1/2 million gallons of water. The steam from the reactor vessel is then routed down into this large body of water.

That is controlling the pressure, but with no make-up, and there is absolutely no make-up for this type of plant. Ultimately, as you discharge that steam into the torus, the water level inside the reactor vessel kept dropping. As the steam left, there was less and less water inside the reactor vessel. It started out with about 15 feet of water, normal water level to where the top of the core was. It was just a matter of time before . . . I call it the nuclear wick. They lit the wick on a nuclear candle. It just took time for that to melt down.

During normal operation, the temperature inside the fuel pellet is up to about 1600 degrees. That heat drops as it moves through the gap between the fuel pellets and the fuel rods. Fuel rods are 15 foot long hollow tubes of metal with fuel pellets stacked in them like peas in a pod and welded from top to bottom. As the temperature inside the fuel goes through that gap, goes through the metal cladding and reaches the water, it drops down to about 560 degrees on the surface of the fuel cladding. As the water level dropped lower and lower, the water was doing less and less cooling, less and less removal of that heat. As a result, the fuel pellets warmed up, the fuel cladding warmed up. As the temperature of the fuel cladding exceeded 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, you start getting a chemical reaction between the water the zirconium metal that produced a large amount of hydrogen. A very large amount of hydrogen was created.

Hydrogen has a lot of good properties, but it also has a lot of negative properties if anybody remembers the Graf Zeppelin, the Hindenburg. When hydrogen ignites, it burns very rapidly. There is a system installed at these plants to control that. There is a lot of talk about a hardened vent. This diagram shows that hardened vent. It is located on the left hand side of the screen. The turbine is on the right hand side. The little building that surrounds what looks like an inverted light bulb is the reactor building. The way it was supposed to work, the way it was designed, as steam carried hydrogen down into the torus, the hydrogen bubbled up through the water and collected in the air space above the water in the torus. There is a valve that can be opened that allows that air space which includes hydrogen and radioactive materials, to go out through an 8 inch diameter pipe, directly out to an exhaust in the roof of the building. It passes through the reactor building, but it is supposed to be on the inside of that pipe where it goes out through the exhaust, the chimney basically.

It did not work for some reason. The operators mainly opened that valve because the valve is motor controlled. And without electricity, a motor operated valve does not move. So they had to go down and crank open that vent in an area that was very hot, very dark and very nasty. It took them awhile to do that. It took longer than they would have liked.

During normal operation, the yellow circle surrounds a filter system that is used to filter the radioactive releases from the plant. There is a charcoal filter and a HEPA filter that reduces the amount of radioactivity that is vented out the stack.

During accident conditions, there is another filter system that is supposed to do the same thing for anything that collects inside the reactor building. However, both of those systems need electricity to work. Neither of those systems work when you do not have electricity.

For reasons unknown, but hard to deny, the hydrogen got into the reactor building and then blew up. Not once, not twice, not three times, but four times. I am not sure exactly how it happened in any of those times. It was not supposed to be in those buildings. There are no detectors to detect hydrogen in those buildings, other than missing walls and roofs perhaps.

But at some point, on Saturday morning, March 12th, Unit 1 blew up. The hydrogen collected and detonated, blew out the sides of the building and the roof. The schematic on the right shows the Hatch Plant in Georgia, which is very similar to that plant and many other plants in the United States. Up to the point of the spent fuel pool, the concrete walls withstood the hydrogen explosion. From that point on, it is a sheet metal siding, not unlike a Sears storage shed. I have nothing against Sears or their storage sheds, but it is really not a place to store nuclear waste.

The picture on the left proves that out. That is Unit 1 reactor building at Fukushima, with the upper part of the walls and the roof taken away by the explosion.

Arnie Gundersen: Unit 1 was the oldest plant and it had this isolation condenser that Dave was talking about.

Let me step back a little bit though. When uranium splits, 95% of the heat comes from the splitting of the uranium. But 5% comes from these pieces that are left over that are called radioactive daughter products. Now 5% does not sound like a lot, but each of the reactors at Fukushima was producing around 2 1/2 million horsepower. So 5% of that is still 125,000 horsepower of heat that you had to get rid of after the plant was shut down. Those horses were in a room that was 12 by 12 by about as high as this. So put 120,000 horses in a room like that and you can imagine that they are going to turn out a lot of heat that has to be dissipated. Unit 1 had the isolation condenser which is really interesting. It is almost identical to a Model T, the way the Model T was cooled. The model T had a gravity fed cooling system on it.

Unit 2 and 3 had something called the RCIC Turbine, and that is the first piece of information here. This is kind of neat. It uses the steam from the nuclear reactor to spin a turbine. Just like in Unit 1, there is all this heat producing steam. The isolation valves were closed, so the steam was not going anywhere. And the turbine spun, which in turn, turned a pump, so there was no electricity required to turn that pump. It was using the decay heat steam which is kind of neat, except, you guessed it, the valves that worked that system required electricity. So even though the pump and the turbine would have gone on for days, when they lost the control of the valves, the RCIC Turbine stopped. Next slide.

So what does that do? The fuel gets hot. This is up on our website. There is a friend of mine . . . I had a piece of nuclear fuel, empty, that I was given when I was in the industry. It is made of a thing called zircaloy. Zircaloy is really unique in that it does what Dave said, it can spontaneously oxidize. Basically it burns when water is in touch with it at temperatures over 1800, 2000 degrees. What my friend and I did with a blowtorch was simulate what happens to zircaloy when it gets to that temperature. Now this is one fuel element, and there were thousands of those fuel elements at that kind of a condition inside Units 1 2 and 3 when the cooling stopped. What happens then is the zircaloy gets really brittle and it is being heated from the inside. The pellets that Dave was talking about are inside that piece of metal there.

The metal gets brittle and these pellets then break and fall out. And as Dave said, the centerline temperature of those pellets is easily over 3000 degrees. The pellets then fell to the bottom of all the reactors. Whether or not it was Unit 1 or 2 or Unit 3, they wound up with this molten pile of pellets on the bottom. Well there is water over the top and that was cooling the top of them.

But in the center the water could not get to. And it easily got to 5000 degrees and began to eat at the metal at the bottom of the nuclear reactor. We know now that all three nuclear reactors, this molten blob, melted through about 8 inches of steel because the isolation condenser and the RCIC turbines failed.

What does that do, it creates a lot of hydrogen. So while the blob is going down, you have got all this hydrogen building up. Next slide.

This is a camera that was mounted, the Units 2, 3 and 4. By the time this picture was taken, Unit 1 had already exploded. These pictures are at 1/300ths of a second apart. You will see on the 4th slide, that is a flame front. I calculated that the speed at which it grew, I could scale it off the building. I knew the size of the building and I knew the duration of the single flame, that that flame front was moving at around 1,000 miles an hour. That is called a detonation. When something travels faster than the speed of sound, that is called a detonation. When it travels less than the speed of sound, it is a deflagration. Either one of them are going to hurt you, there is no doubt. The Challenger explosion technically was a deflagration. And we all know that was catastrophic. But this is worse because the wave front, just basically, the pressure of the wave and the speed of the wave can do enormous damage.

This is a problem on all reactors because no one knows why this happened. Hydrogen and oxygen at room pressures should not detonate. I have talked to a bunch of chemists and we cannot figure out how hydrogen and oxygen could . . . It can deflagrate like the Hindenburg. But it should not be able to detonate. And that has major ramifications on containment design. Containments are not designed to take a detonation wave. It can crack it and I hope the NRC pays attention to that.

Two other things here. This side of the wave is straight and the direction is out and to the south, to my right. I believe that happened because the detonation began in the spent fuel pool which is on that side of the building. That would provide a wall, which it would move straight up against, but the other wall was weak and it would move out. I think that is evidence of the fact that the detonation occurred in the spent fuel pool. Next slide.

So now the gasses and the cloud of dust and the smoke from the explosion begins to dominate and the actual flame front begins to be obscured. It is actually there for quite a few frames but at this point, this thing is on it’s way. Next slide.

There are those who say that the perfect sphere might mean something. I am not sure that an explosion like that would not, why wouldn’t it form a perfect sphere? Anyway it is going up as a sphere. This is not a nuclear bomb. This is a chemical reaction, but clearly the amount of energy in is pretty enormous. Next slide. (11 times)

This happened over two seconds. Next slide. It looks like a little face up there. Next slide.

To give you an idea, this is 50 meters, this is 150 feet to the top of the building. We are talking something that is up at 3 or 4 thousand feet in just a couple seconds. Last slide.

The rubble is pieces of the roof but it is also nuclear fuel. That is what is really frightening about this. They were able to find pieces of nuclear fuel about the size of my pinkie over a mile away, between a mile and two miles away. I calculated again how much energy it would take to throw something like that in air, which would have some air resistance, and even if it was a perfect sphere which had very little air resistance, it still would have had to have been thrown at around 1,000 miles an hour, which again, it indicates that this was a detonation, not a deflagration. I think the nuclear industry is going to argue to downplay the significance of that, but the difference between a detonation and a deflagration is dramatic in containment design.

While that was dramatic, that was not what caused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to evacuate out to 50 miles. They were concerned about the spent fuel pool which would have been more catastrophic than that explosion, had it ignited. The spent fuel pool on Unit 4 had the entire guts of the nuclear reactor plus 5, 6 or 7 years worth of nuclear fuel in it.

Brookhaven has done a study where if one of the nuclear fuel pools catches fire, it will kill about 180,000 people from the cancers of the airborne plutonium. So it was not that dramatic explosion that convinced Chairman Jaczko to evacuate the Americans. It was fear of the, of what was really the worst case that has not happened yet, and that is the Unit 4 fuel pool igniting.

And it is important to know now that Fukushima had dry cask storage and the dry casks rode it out just fine. So one message for, these are typical dry casks of different designs, but these are dry casks. They were hit by the tsunami, they got wet, they got muddy, but they did not melt and they did not explode and they are still there today, essentially intact.

The lesson here for both C10 and Pilgrim Watch is to get as much of the nuclear fuel out of the fuel pools and into dry cask storage where they are much safer.

David Lochbaum: I want to talk a little bit about the primary cause of the disaster at Fukushima. This illustration shows a pressurized water reactor like Seabrook. That was intentional because really, no matter what US reactor was faced with the primary cause of the disaster, the outcome would basically be the same. The timeline might be different, the pathway might be different, but the destination would have been the same.

The primary cause was an extended loss of power at a power plant, as ironic as that might be. When the earthquake occurred, the normal grid was lost and the plant’s own in plant power from the generator was also lost as a result of the earthquake. So the earthquake gave the plant it’s first strike. It lost it’s normal supply of the power for the plant.

There were backups to that. Each reactor had two emergency diesel generators at the site, installed there for the sole purpose of providing electricity to important plant equipment if the normal source of power was lost. Within 6 - 10 seconds, the emergency diesel generator started, providing that job of providing electricity to important plant equipment. Not everything, but enough to cool the reactor core and maintain the containment integrity.

Then the tsunami arrived. In Japan, they put the emergency diesel generators in the basement of the turbine building. That provided maximum protection against the earthquake, because if you put something up on stilts and then shake it, it falls. But if you put it down low and shake it, it stays there. So it was maximum protection against the earthquake, they survived the earthquake, but it is not real good protection against floods. None, not one of the 12, survived the tsunami waves. So the tsunami came in and wiped out the emergency diesel generators to give the plant it’s second strike.

There is a backup to the backup. This plant, as almost all US plants have, were banks of batteries that provide enough power for one safety system per reactor. In Japan, the battery banks were sized to last for 8 hours. In US plants, most of our reactors are designed for 4 hours, so the chances of our reactor surviving better, with half the capacity, is probably slim.

At some point during the accident, the batteries were depleted, giving the plant it’s third strike and they were not bowling, so it was not 10 strikes they were going for, it was more like baseball. They were out.

This is a chart from an NRC study done years and years before Fukushima that shows what happens when you lose normal power supply, the backup power supply in the batteries. And Fukushima was very courteous in following the timeline that had been established years and years ago. The green dotted line vertical is 4 hours. That’s what US plants had battery capacity for.

The red dotted red line is 8 hours. At about 5 or 6 hours, on this analysis, the batteries were gone. At that point, the water level started dropping, the core started heating up. At about 14 hours, 10-12 hours, the reactor core had melted, burned through the reactor vessel.

A prediction. Not a surprise. And a few hours after that the containment failed. So you have everything bad that can go wrong, was predicted to go wrong, many, many years ago. Fukushima showed it 3 times that this analysis worked.

The result, Unit 3 is on the left, Unit 4 is on the right. It does not really matter. You can swap them. It is not pretty either way. The building exploded. There may not have been any fuel in the Unit 4 core, but it blew up as well. Sympathy pains or something.

The reactor buildings are secondary containment, the last barrier between nasty radioactive stuff and the public, meaning there are no barriers left at Fukushima.

This is not my study, it is not Arnie’s study, it is not Ralph Nader’s study, it is not Helen Caldicott’s study, it is the NRC’s study from August of 2003. They looked at what would happen at US plants if there was an extended power outage. The NRC. Not us.

This is the table for pressurized water reactors like Seabrook. The third column over shows the chance of core meltdown due to an extended power outage. The second column shows the overall risk of meltdown for that reactor that is calculated by the plant’s owner, again, not me, not Arnie, not Greenpeace or anybody else.

The fourth column is simply the fraction. What percentage of the overall chance of meltdown does station blackout represent. For many plants in the United States it is a very large chance of a meltdown if you lose power for that long. And that is even for plants that are not even on the coast. So it does not take a tsunami to knock out the emergency diesel generators at the plants in Illinois.

For Seabrook, a 22% chance of meltdown by an extended power outage, according to the NRC and the plant’s owner. They have not been saying that very loudly since Fukushima for some reason.

This table also shows the battery capacity for U.S. reactors. All the red circles are 4 hour plants. 8 hours was not enough for Fukushima. 4 hours must be enough, according to the NRC, for US reactors.

This is the table for boiling water reactors, like Pilgrim and Vermont Yankee. Again, most of the plants have 4 hours capacity batteries. Many plants have a very high chance of extended power outage leading to core meltdown. There is the LaSalle plant in Illinois, outside of Chicago, not known as a very tsunami risk high hazard area. 80% chance of core melt due to extended power outage. Which means it is equal to 4 times the risk from all other causes combined.

That was the primary cause. And while our plants are not all susceptible to tsunamis, they are susceptible to extended power outages. The August 2003 outage, Hurricane Andrew, went through Turkey Point, knocked it off, took it’s power out for 4 days. I live in Tennessee. Just across the border in Alabama, tornadoes a couple of weeks ago knocked the Brown’s Ferry Plant for a loop, literally for a “LOOP”, Loss Of Offsite Power. They were several days without electricity. Fortunately their diesel generators worked, well most of them worked, they had a few failures, but they worked overall to prevent the hydrogen explosions.

That was the primary cause.

The contributing cause was inadequate procedures. While I worked for the NRC, I taught emergency procedures to NRC inspectors. These are some of the charts we used to train them. They are identical to the ones that are used by the operators at Pilgrim and Vermont Yankee and boiling water reactors in the United States.

They provide a lot of information on how to deal with power control, water level inside the reactor vessel, pressure inside the reactor vessel, for all kinds of various scenarios. But that really only works when the accidents follow the script. All of this is based on the assumption that we get power back within 4 hours, because that is what we assumed. So therefore by fiat, power is restored within 4 hours.

In Japan, they assumed it was restored within 8 hours. So if the accident does not follow the script, if the power does not come back when it is assumed to, the operators have no guidance at all on what to do. They handled it very well. They had no guidance, they had no options. There was not much that you can do though. They had a bunch of pumps, a bunch of motors, none of which work without power. They could have pointed to the various pumps that would not work, but they could not point to any that would work.

This is an unabridged listing of all the emergency procedures that exist for dealing with spent fuel pool accidents. Every single one of them is listed here. (laughter) The good news is that the operators can neither forget, nor violate, procedures that do not exist. (laughter) I did say I worked for the NRC for a year. We can look at the good side of anything.

We think that is an area that needs to be, a gap that needs to be filled. It would be nice for the operators to have procedures in case there was a spent fuel pool accident at a U.S. plant.

Arnie Gundersen: A second contributing cause of this type of accident, again, it does not have to be a Fukushima, it can happen here, is overcrowded fuel pools.

When these plants were designed, the plan was that the fuel would stay there for 5 years and then be shipped to a reprocessing plant. When I was a senior VP in the industry, one of the things that my division did was build nuclear fuel racks. We would build nuclear fuel racks sometimes three times for the same client, because they would say, well 5, we will double it and go to 10. Five years later, they would be back knocking on the door saying we need more.

And so what has happened is that the fuel racks in the country are chock-a-block full. The reactors like Pilgrim have them (pools) very high (in the air). There are extra issues there.

But the real issue is when you have all that fuel in one place. There is more cesium in the fuel pool at Pilgrim than has been released by all the atomic bombs, Chernobyl and Fukushima 
 combined. So if a fuel pool has a fire, the potential is astronomical for incredible damage.

This is a picture of the Unit 4 fuel pool and it was taken in April after the explosion but before most of the water was added back in. It shows the top of the fuel racks are 
 the little tiny boxes 
 and they are exposed. So they lost enough water to expose the top of the nuclear fuel. And I will point it out here: There are a bunch of little boxes in here and there are a bunch of little boxes in here. If you are in the building of little boxes business, they are really obvious, but if you have not built these little boxes, it might take a little bit of observation. This slide is on our website, if you wanted to look in some detail.

This is a high density rack. The Japanese were much better than the Americans. They kept the fuel there for 5, 6, 7 years and then got it into dry cask storage. The Americans have almost no dry cask storage, just enough to keep enough for a full core offload. So contributing cause #2 is the fact that we put too much fuel in our fuel pools and we need to get it into dry cask storage. Next slide.

The third cause, and this is finally becoming discussed. Even if the diesels had not flooded, Fukushima would have failed anyway. Because the diesels have their own cooling pumps called service water pumps and they are right on the water. Well, the tsunami came and inundated the service water pumps. And if you drop your hair dryer in the kitchen sink and then pull it out and try to turn it on, it is not going to work very well. The service water pumps failed at Fukushima as well. When different American reactors will tell you, “Our diesels are way up high. It would not happen here.” The fact of the matter is, the pump has to be down at the water because that is where the water is. You can see on this picture, there is a bunch of rubble, right here. That is the service water pumps. They were gone. So even if the diesels had survived, even if the diesels had been up higher, they would not have had the water to cool the diesels and we would be in the same situation.

Again, so when people talk about our diesels are different from their diesels, the service water system is not. It has got to be on the water. So for instance, in Florida, at the Turkey Point plant that Dave talked about, Hurricane Andrew narrowly missed and they pushed up a huge wave of water in front. It does not take a hurricane much worse than Hurricane Andrew to inundate the service water pumps and cause a Fukushima-like accident here.

And last but not least, the lesson I learned is that no matter how smart you are, Mother Nature is smarter. This picture is taken last week at a nuclear plant in Nebraska. There are two nuclear plants, I do not know if you have been following this, but if you are in Nebraska you are following this, you better believe it. There has been an enormous amount of snow in the Rockies. Several of the rivers that run down out of the Rockies, and this is the Missouri, are at flood stage. Actually, they are way over flood stage. The Missouri is about ready to breech the levees at this nuclear plant. That is what we call a design basis accident, that is what you build for. You should not expect to have a design basis accident and everybody thinks we put some extra heft into this. This is right at the top of the levees now. Yet it happened in 1993 as well.

When you have two design bases accidents in 20 years, the lesson is, maybe we really need to build these levees higher. That would be a good idea. But it does not happen. The other piece of this is, what Fukushima told us is, we anticipated a tsunami. But we did not anticipate the mother of all tsunamis. The reason the Missouri is flooded right now is because there are 6 dams upstream that are full to capacity and if they get any fuller they are going to break. So all of the pipes are discharging all of the water they can downstream to prevent the dams from breaking.

Well I live in a “what if” world. What if one of those dams breaks? The applicant, the guy who owns this plant, does not have to design for that. So we are one dam breakage away from our own Fukushima, in Nebraska, right now.

Here, you guys had the Cape Ann earthquake. I do not know if you remember that back in 1690 or something. It leveled Boston. And do not think that the Cape Ann earthquake is the worst you can expect. I mean Mother Nature is teaching us here that she can throw stuff at us that is a lot more difficult than we have anticipated.

Yet the New England plants, their design basis earthquake is Cape Ann. And the records back then were not too, too great, so we are going on a very slim history.

On the West Coast, you have got Diablo Canyon. Three miles off shore is a fault that they discovered after they built the plant. But it is grandfathered in because they discovered it after they built the plant.

Down the coast is San Onofre and the tsunami wall there is 9 meters or about 28 feet. I think we need to re-evaluate. Mother Nature can do a lot more to us than we want to believe can happen.

David Lochbaum: After learning what some of the problems are, what we need is NRC inaction. NRC in action, sorry. Whoops. We need 3 words, NRC in action, is what we need.

It is difficult to get, I have worked for UCS for 14 years and it is very difficult. And having worked for the NRC, one of the problems I left was that there was not enough action. It was not stress that was the problem, it was shelf life. It was not really strenuous work, working for the NRC.

This is a schematic of a pressurized water reactor. What I want to talk about here is some of the safety problems the NRC knows about that they are not fixing at US reactors putting you at elevated risk. They have known about it. This first problem I am going to talk about. They first warned the President about it a few years ago. The President they warned about it is Jimmy Carter. And the problem has still not been fixed. It is not Jimmy Carter’s fault. I believe it is the NRC’s fault. The problem is, in a pressurized water reactor, if a pipe breaks that is connected to the reactor vessel, the water inside the cooling reactor escapes through the broken pipe very rapidly. The initial response for the system is to put a high pressure tank of water that has nitrogen pressure above it, that rapidly injects that water into the piping to replace the water that is escaping out through the broken pipe.

That initial makeup water gives enough time for the pumps to automatically start on the left to transfer water from a tank out back into the reactor vessel to replace the water that is flowing out both ends of the broken pipe. At some point, that tank outside is going to empty. So the next step is to take the water that is collecting in the basement of the reactor and send that through the same pumps, just realign where they are getting their water, to send that back in to cool the reactor. It spills out through the broken pipe, ends back up in the basement, and you just recycle that water to cool the reactor. The problem, that the NRC has known about, is that the violence of water jetting out the broken ends of the pipe scours paint off walls, coating insulation off piping, and any other loose material in the way, carries it down into the basement, where it clogs the screens, just like hair in the bathtub drain. And the water stays in the tub instead of getting to the pumps. The NRC knows about that since they warned President Carter in 1978.

This is an NRC study of what are the chances of this happening at the 69 pressurized water reactors in the United States. The red boxes, according to the Sandia National Lab is very likely to cause a reactor meltdown at the U.S. reactors. I will speed this up some.

A mere 53 of the 69 reactors are very likely to have this meltdown if there is an accident, 53 out of 69 since 1978. The good news is that the NRC has asked plant owners to fix this problem, giving a toaster oven to the first one who did it. (laughter) Which turned out to be Davis Bessie for other reasons. But many of the reactors are now fixed. They have put larger screens inside the containment so it takes more debris to clog it. At the same time, they have replaced the paint and the coatings and the other materials inside the containment to make it less susceptible to be broken up and carried down into the containment.

So those reactors that have fixed the problem have really lessened the likelihood that that problem exists.

However, there are 20 reactors that have just said “no”, followed Nancy Reagan’s edict and just said “no”. And the NRC has said, “Please?” “No, I’m sorry.”

We are trying to get the NRC to get those 20 reactors to fix this problem that many other reactors have fixed and hoping in the meantime that this does not happen at the plant in your backyard, because it is very likely that it will not work. But that is only if it fails.

Earlier than President Carter being warned, there was a fire at the Brown’s Ferry Plant in Alabama that was owned and operated by the Tennesee Valley Authority. A worker using a candle to look for air leaks, started a fire as candles have been known to do. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow has an alibi, but the worker using a candle to look for air leaks, started a fire that was in the room just below the control room. All the cables from the control room passed through this room right below the control room and then went out to various equipment in the plant.

So the plant had all of it’s electricity, but all the cables between the controls and the control room and the equipment in the field was lost. Unit 1 at Brown’s Ferry lost all of it’s emergency equipment. The fire damaged all the cables. Unit 2 lost most of the safety systems due to the fire.

So the NRC said this is too close. They adopted rules in May of 1980 to prevent the next Brown’s Ferry. This is the NRC’s list of plants that do not meet those regulations and do not meet an alternative set of regulations that the NRC adopted in 2004, saying could you please meet one of the set of regulations. Just say no. 50 reactors in the United States, roughly half of the fleet, are not protected in case of a fire for regulations that were adopted 3 decades ago. NRC inaction.

Ironically, one of the plants that does not meet the regulations, is Brown’s Ferry in Alabama that started it all, has absolutely no excuse, but they do not meet it.

This does not need to explain but roughly a decade ago, we suffered 9/11.

The NRC after 9/11 imposed security requirements for plants to meet to make their plants less vulnerable to acts of malice. Today, the NRC knows that there are several plants that do not meet those regulations. Their owners have said can we have more time. Apparently, we are waiting for terrorists to retire, is our new safety protection system. (laughter) If we identified security shortcomings, we go out there and fix them, we do not put them on a list and ask and beg and coax the plant owners to meet the security regulations. It would be nice if the NRC enforced it’s own regulations. NRC inaction.

Arnie and I were going to talk about some of the things that have been done at other places to try to address some of these issues. About 12 years ago, the NRC appointed me to a Federal Advisory Committee Act panel. That is an advisory body legally chartered to look at specific activity. In this case, it was reactor oversight process. There were a number of industry representatives, a number of NRC officials, there were a number of state officials on the panel and there was a token member of the public serving on that panel to look at how the NRC’s pilot reactor oversight process was working. The good news about that panel was that it was a consensus panel, so every member’s view had to be reflected in the final outcome. It was not a majority/minority report.

So when they did the follow up study, they changed it to a majority/minority point, so it did not matter what I said any more.

But at least on the initial one, it was a good oversight process and the reason I think there might be some value in this going forward, is if the NRC established a similar panel to look at lessons learned from Fukushima and how they are implementing them, we think it would be valuable to have the public represented on that panel. We would like to see at least one member from a local group, from a regional group in Region 1, Pilgrim watch, C10 or somebody, also Region 2, the Southeast, the West and the Midwest.

The public at the moment does not fully trust the NRC for some reason. And it would be good to have public representatives, to have the public’s concerns brought forth to the NRC. And have the NRC’s actions or explanations or justifications for whatever they are doing or not doing, reported back. I think that partnership would be better that the current system. So it has some value going forward. Arnie was the chair of a panel at the state level in Vermont that I served on briefly, before going to the NRC.

Arnie Gundersen: The other example is what we did in Vermont. The legislature enacted a law and empowered 5 people: one was appointed by the Governor, one was appointed by the president pro tem of the state senate and one by the majority leader of the House.

Those three then chose two more people to fulfill a five person panel. The difference between what we looked at and what Dave looked at is that States are not allowed to bump into the NRC’s jurisdiction and we could not look at safety. We could look at reliability.

For instance, the emergency core cooling systems were not a topic that we were allowed to look at. But if the testing of the emergency core cooling systems was likely to impact the length of an outage, that became a reliability issue. We issued a report after about 9 million dollars worth of work by consultants. I would like to say that went to me, but it did not. There were a team of consultants brought in to answer a matrix of questions. We had 13 different parameters and we looked at 6 different systems, so 6 by 13. And we had problems in 81 different areas that the panel identified. Now, I always wondered. Rather than suffer the public relations problems of having outsiders find the 81 problems, why Entergy did not do it themselves. But they chose not to.

The next year, they did not quite tell us the truth about an underground pipe and we were reconvened and found another 9 problems. So this public oversight group effectively identified 90 problems at Vermont Yankee and it will take at least until about 2015 or 2016 until all of those issues are resolved. And of course the license ends in 2012. So we shall see whether the extension occurs or not. It was as effective a process as any state has come up with to shine the light on the inner workings of a nuclear power plant.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Announcer: Thank you both. Enlightening but so sad. I want to remind you if you do have questions to write them on your cards and to pass those cards at this time to the outside and they will be collected.

Where are collectors? You will see our collectors coming up and down the outside aisle to collect your question cards. And just a reminder, I am going to introduce Dr. Richard Clapp and the other card on your chair is in case you have questions for him at the end of his presentation.

Cathy, are you collecting? Oh, someone is writing a question. Well, while that is going on, let me introduce Dr. Richard Clapp.

Dr. Clapp is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Health at Boston University’s School of Public Health, as well as Adjunct Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

He is an epidemiologist with 40 years experience in public health practice, research, teaching and consulting. Dr. Clapp was founding director of the Mass. Cancer Registry and served in that capacity from 1980 to 1989.

His research has included cancer in areas around nuclear facilities, in workers, and in the military. Dr. Clapp.

(Applause)

Dr. Richard Clapp: Thank you. I am stunned. I am actually astonished at what I have just heard. I have learned a lot. I have heard Dave speak before. I have never heard Arnie speak. I must say it is quite an enlightening experience to sit and listen to what they have to say. And I am glad they have a sense of humor because if they did not, we would all be running screaming out of this room right now, because of the design problem or the accident scenarios that they have just taken us through.

So my job tonight was actually to say: Oh, and by the way, radiation is not good for you. So, that is my role in my life’s work actually has been to document that. I will tell you a little bit about my background in addition to being the director of the Cancer Registry. Just prior to that actually, I had been part of a three agency funded federal study to look at what populations in this country could you do an epidemiologic investigation of to see what is the shape of the dose response curve at low dose. This was in the late 1970’s. This was sort of a live issue. Is it sort of a linear dose response such that with any increased radiation dose, you get an increased risk, especially of cancer or is there a threshold, or maybe is there even some kind of excess risk at low dose. Is it supralinear. That was the reason we had this research. It was called an epidemiologic feasibility study. So I actually visited some of the places Dave and Arnie talked about.

I was in Pilgrim, I went inside Yankee Rowe, I went to Indian Point, which is also on a fault line just outside of New York City. And so I was sort of introduced to this notion of there are workers especially. This was about people who worked at these places and at nuclear weapons facilities, which I also visited with my colleagues, who wear radiation badges.

And the reason is you do not want to overdose people who work around radioactive materials. Talking about ionizing radiation here, because there are, even then in the late 70’s, known consequences. So the research project was really about can we learn even more by looking at these people.

And the cancer of most interest would be, in these workers at least, leukemia. And this is because of long term low dose ionizing radiation exposure, which does increase the risk of leukemia.

So we did that, we published a report, actually a journal article, that said, we have not studied nuclear power plant workers because that is a population where at least they are supposed to wear badges all the time. There are lots of nuclear power plants. The fleet was even then over a hundred in this country and tens of thousands of workers. That study was never done, mainly because the individual utilities can control whether they are going to let some government agency, say, do a study of their workers and they never did. I am sure there are individual utilities that have studied their own workers, but those results do not usually reach the light of day.

So in any case, that is a little more of my background. It was in that project that I actually, one of the pieces of that project was to survey all the cancer registries around the U.S. to see what kind of data they collected so that you could find out how many leukemia patients were in their catchment area, so to speak, the area that they covered.

And at that time there were 37 cancer registries, not all of them states. Massachusetts, when we were doing this 1979 study, did not have a cancer registry. So I got hired to set one up, and it was because of my experience knowing what all the other ones were doing, that we established the Massachusetts Cancer Registry.

And I will tell you just one more story. As one of the things we did, we monitored cancer in all the communities of Massachusetts. But we wound up seeing excess leukemia in Plymouth and the towns right around Plymouth, the six other towns that were in the immediate vicinity of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in the early 1980’s. And 10 years earlier, (this was a General Electric boiling water reactor) there had been bad fuel that had built up gaseous radioactive material and it was vented out one of the stacks, out a couple of the stacks actually of the Pilgrim Plant.

So that was the exposure in the early 1970’s shortly after it came on line, went through 1974, where they had to vent the radioactive gas or steam, I think actually, and then ten years later this spike of leukemia happened and then a couple of years later a spike of thyroid cancer happened in the towns that included Plymouth and six towns around it.

I like to say, that is where my hair fell out. I was the director of the Cancer Registry when we saw this. It was not from the radioactivity. It was from the political fallout of that.

So in any case, that is why I guess I am here today. I want to do two things. I really just wanted to remind people in the context of all of this rush, that nuclear power is carbon free. And we do have to worry about our carbon emissions, but the industry has maintained well it is carbon free when you split atoms, split uranium in a power plant and create heat that spins turbines and becomes electricity. So isn’t that the way forward?

Well I would like to remind the people who say that, and perhaps remind you if you do not already know this, that there is radioactive exposure to the people who work in these power plants. But there is much more radioactive exposure, radiation exposure, back up the fuel chain, up the fuel cycle. In fact, in a typical power plant, if you would dothis analysis, which the NCRP, the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement, actually did this for a hypothetical big power plant, a gigawatt power plant. What portion of the radiation that affects people, in order to produce the wattage that that power plant produces, what proportion of that is at various stages in the fuel cycle?

And the biggest proportion by far is the mining, the uranium mining. So it is to the miners themselves and the people who live near the mines or downwind from the mines. And in this country, that was typically in the Four Corners area of the Southwest in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah area, was where the bulk of the mining got done in this country. It is done in other countries, of course, as well. And populations and the miners in this country, that is disproportionatelyNative Americans, actually, in those 4 states, are getting the bulk of the radiation exposure from that stage.

And the next greatest contribution in this hypothetical gigawatt power plant is milling, where the ore that has been mined out of the ground is crushed up and roasted actually and made into a uranium oxide that then is sent on to the next stage for being made enriched and being made into fuel.

So again, the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle is where the bulk of the radiation exposure in a typically operating, say, hypothetical gigawatt power plant. It does not deal with the explosion that we just heard about, and the release of radioactive material as part of the hydrogen explosion that Arnie was showing us. But let me just say that that is a fact that needs to be taken into account. And at the other end of the fuel cycle, after it has gone through the power plant, the fuel has been stored and either is eventually taken to some underground repository, which does not exist in this country, there is ionizing radiation exposure all along that pathway, including the transportation. So it is bigger than the fuel rods. I mean it goes back up the chain of production and goes all the way through to the eventual, I guess, underground repository that some day may be built for high level waste in this country. And in the meantime, dry casks is definitely a better way to do it than what we have with these overground or even underground water pools. So anywhay I wanted to remind us all of that.

And the second thing I wanted to talk about, actually is today’s New England Journal of Medicine, sort of our medical journal of record around here, has an article, it is June 16th, called Short Term and Long Term Health Risks of Nuclear Power Plant Accidents. Sort of a timely article.

It is written by a group of radiation specialists, radiologists I guess, in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. So it is a multiple author article in response to Fukushima. I do not agree with everything that is in this article, but they do provide some useful information. I want to share some of it with you in terms of radiation is not good for us. They also point out that there is already they say17,000 and counting deaths in Japan from the earthquake and the tsunami. So the biggest portion of the disaster has already happened. And it was not because of radiation. It was because of the flooding and the tsunami and the people who were lost in that process.

They also point out that there are some heros in the utility, TEPCO, that operated the 3 operating units, 4, I guess it is.

Including one of the operators I think Dave mentioned that went down inside the containment vessel to figure out how to try to deal with things. So there are at least 6, and I think now the count is 8, overexposed workers who were there at the time and who were trying to figure out what to do and actually going into very dangerous situations. Some of them got really whopping doses.

This article talks about radiation sickness as one of the first effects of a nuclear power plant accident. Talks a lot about Chernobyl, of course, where not only was there radiation sickness, but the explosion killed a bunch of people.

But in Japan there are some people who have already gotten a whopping dose and will probably be eventually called patients with radiation sickness.

And then there are dozens more actually that have exceeded what would be the annual dose that a worker in a power plant would get in this country and probably in Japan as well, without having to be pulled off the job. That count is over 70 now. So the toll is rapidly rising for the workers at these plants. And then the unknown is still to be counted. That is what has happened with especially Iodine 131 and Cesium emissions that have blown around in Japan. And actually, it was high enough up in the atmosphere that it blew to the western part of North America. It is too early to say what the ultimate effect of those exposures is going to be. This article talks about thyroid cancer after Chernobyl and the radioactive Iodine from the Fukushima plants. There is no reason why it will also cause thyroid cancer of maybe has already in the exposed population.

And then after that, other solid tumors, and leukemia is another outcome that is likely, especially in the most heavily exposed populations. So those are the cancers, solid tumors of really of almost every type can be caused by ionizing radiation. The two that are most likely, given my experience anyway, are leukemia and thyroid cancer and then from the Chernobyl experience, children especially are exquisitely at risk for thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine.

So as if it was not bad enough, from what we have already heard, there is probably more yet to be counted. These authors in the New England Journal of Medicine make some claims or some predictions of the size of the effect. They are not doing it from an epidemiologic point of view, they are actually clinicians and they are actually advising physiciansreally if you see patients who are exposed in an accident, what would you be likely to see initially and then what would you see in the longer term.

So they do not really have a way of predicting the number of casualties from the Japanese experience that they say will be between Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. I agree with that. And that is a huge range of effect, but we do not know yet and we will not know for decades.

So that is actually my story. There is a whole fuel cycle that is involved in the nuclear power plant process and it goes way back up to the mining. There are permits now to start up mining again in this country.

Radiation is not good for you. And in my view, and I am not the only person to say this, the National Academies of Science BEIR 7, Biological Affects of Ionizing Radiation 7th Committee, produced a report a few years ago where they also say there is no reason to say it is not a linear dose response relationship, which is to say there is no safe dose, that ionizing radiation will increase the risk especially of chronic illness such as cancer from any dose above zero. And the higher the dose, of course, the worse the likely health effects.

So I am sorry I do not have good news to tell you and I guess my only joke was about being bald. But that is the way it is. And I will gladly take questions when you have (them).

Announcer: More not very good news. So the question generation process has worked very well.

[/tab][tab title="日本人"]

 ãªãœçŠå³¶ã¯ã“こでも起こる可胜性があるのか原子力芏制委員䌚ず原子力産業が知らせたくないこず

沞隰氎型原子炉「マヌク」の呚知の安党性に察しおは、犏島原発の基の事故以埌、倧きな泚目が集たっおいたすが、その背埌にはもっず恐ろしい危険が朜んでいたす。

このビデオで、原子力゚ンゞニアであるアヌニヌ・ガンダヌセン氏ずデむビッド・ロックバりム氏は、いかに米囜の芏制や芏制のプロセスが囜民を危険にさらしおいるかを蚎論しおいたす。

二人は日本の原発事故を通しお、犏島の事故から埗たものをいかに䞖界䞭の原子力産業に適甚させおいくのかを、段階的に考察しおいたす。原子力芏制委員䌚が幎間も口を閉ざし続けた、アメリカの原発の「脆匱性」にも蚀及しおいたす。

そしお最埌に、二人は「犏島」はアメリカでも起こる可胜性があるず結論付けたした。

げんぱ぀ じこ

ピルグリム原子力発電所の䜿甚枈み栞燃料プヌルにおける攟射性セシりムは、犏島、チェルノブむリ、それに党原子力爆匟実隓から攟出されたものより倚いのです。

ガンダヌセン氏ずロックバりム氏が共に疑問を持っおいるのは、燃料プヌルの危機に察凊する堎においお、なぜひず぀の凊理法ではないのか、ずいうこずです。ボストン図曞通でC-ファりンデヌションが開催したフォヌラムで、安党性ぞの疑問が蚎論されおいたす。ビデオ撮圱ハヌブ・モむダ―氏、グラフィック䜜業ゞェオフ・サットン氏

 

完党球圢の圢状には意味があるず蚀う人々がいたす。このような爆発もひょっずすれば完党球圢ずなるかもしれず、そうならないずしたらなぜでしょうか。どちらにしおもこれは䞊昇するに぀れお球圢ずなっおいたす。これは原子爆匟ではなく化孊反応ですが、明らかに゚ネルギヌ量は莫倧です。次のスラむド

これは秒間に起こりたした。次のスラむドここでは火炎が䞊空で小さな顔のように芋えたす。次のスラむド

想像しやすいように䟋を挙げるず、これは50mで建屋のおっぺんたでが150フィヌト45.7mです。今お話ししおいるのはほんの秒間に30000.9km〜4000フィヌト1,2km䞊昇した状態なのです。最埌のスラむド

砎片は屋根の残骞ですが、栞燃料でもありたす。それがこの爆発の本圓に恐ろしいずころなのです。事故珟堎からマむル先ず、マむルからマむルの間のずころで、私の小指ほどの栞燃料の砎片が芋぀かりたした。再床蚈算しお、空気抵抗のある空䞭にこのようなものを投げた時にどのぐらいの゚ネルギヌが必芁かを調べおみたした。空気抵抗をほずんど受けない完党球圢をしおいたずしおも、時間に1,000マむル447m/secの速床で投げられおいなければならなかったでしょう。このこずは、この爆発がデトネヌションであっお、デフラグレヌションに他ならないこずを瀺しおいたす。原子力業界はそのこずの重芁性を過小評䟡するような議論を展開しようずしおいたすが、デトネヌションずデフラグレヌションの違いは栌玍容噚蚭蚈の䞖界では劇的なものです。

これは劇的なものですが、それは原子力芏制委員䌚が日本囜内の米囜人を、原発から50マむル80km圏倖ぞ避難させた理由ではありたせん。圌らは、発火した堎合はその爆発よりもっず壊滅的ずなったかも知れない、䜿甚枈み栞燃料プヌルを憂慮しおいたした。号機の頂䞊にあった䜿甚枈み栞燃料プヌルは、その原子炉の䞭身党郚だけではなく、幎、幎、あるいは幎分の栞燃料を貯蔵しおいたのです。

ブルックヘむブンBrookhavenは䜿甚枈み栞燃料プヌルのどれかが発火したら、倧気䞭のプルトニりム起因の癌によっお死亡する人が玄18䞇人に䞊るであろうずいう研究を行っおいたす。぀たり、NRCのゞャツコJaczko委員長が犏島第䞀原発事故の盎埌に米囜人を避難させたのはこの劇的な爆発のせいではありたせん。それは起こっおいれば最悪なケヌスですが、幞いに今のずころただ起こっおはいない、号機の䜿甚枈み栞燃料プヌルの火灜なのです。

もうひず぀、犏島原発が也匏キャスク䜿甚枈燃料也匏貯蔵容噚を備えおいお、この也匏キャスクは事故の危機を無事に乗り切ったこずを知っおおくこずも重芁です。぀のメッセヌゞは、これらが蚭蚈は異なっおいおも兞型的な也匏キャスクであっお、接波に遇い、浞氎し泥だらけになったものの、溶融も爆発もせず今日も基本的には無傷のたた存圚しおいるずいう事実です。

ここで、C10 ず Pilgrim Watchぞの教蚓は、䜿甚枈み燃料プヌルから栞燃料をできるだけ取り出しお、より安党な也匏キャスク貯蔵庫ぞ移すこずです。

(22:36) デノィド・ロックバりム犏島第䞀原発事故の䞻な原因に぀いお少しお話ししたいず思いたす。この図はシヌブロック原発Seabrookのような加圧氎型炉です。これは意図的にそうしたのですが、米囜の原子炉が盎面した灜害の䞻芁原因が䜕であっおも、その結果は基本的には同じだからです。時間軞は異なり、そこにたどり着く経路は異なるかも知れたせんが、終点は同じでしょう。

䞻な原因は皮肉なこずに、発電所の広範囲にわたる電力の喪倱でした。地震が発生した時、通垞の送電線が砎壊され、地震によっお発電所の自家発電装眮からの電力も倱われたした。埓っお、地震が発電所に最初の䞀撃を䞎えたのです。発電所自䜓の通垞の電力䟛絊源を奪ったこずです。

いく぀かの予備電源はありたした。各原子炉は぀のディヌれル発電機を備えおいたした。通垞の電源が倱われた際に重芁な発電装眮に電気を䟛絊するずいう唯䞀の目的のために蚭眮されおいたのです。秒から秒の間にディヌれル発電機は起動し、重芁な発電装眮に電力を䟛絊し始めたした。党おにではないものの、炉心を冷华し栌玍容噚の動䜜の完党性を維持するには十分でした。

そこに接波がやっお来たした。日本ではタヌビン建屋の地䞋に緊急甚ディヌれル発電機を蚭眮しおいたす。これは地震に察しお最倧の防備ずなりたす。高い床に䜕かを眮いお揺するず萜䞋したすが、䜎い堎所に降ろしお揺すっおも留たっおいるからです。埓っお、地震に察しおは最倧の防備があった。しかし、措氎に察しおは本圓によい防備ずはいえたせん。12基のうちひず぀も接波には耐えられたせんでした。埓っお、接波が到来し、緊急甚ディヌれル発電機を党滅させたこずが、発電所ぞの番目の打撃ずなったのです。

バックアップにはさらにバックアップがありたす。この発電所には、ほずんど党おの合衆囜の発電所ず同様、原子炉基に぀き぀の安党システムに十分な電力を䟛絊できるバッテリヌを貯蔵しおいたした。日本ではこの盎流電源は少なくずも時間は皌働するべく蚭蚈されおいたした。米囜の原発の原子炉ではこれが4時間ですから、半分のバックアップ胜力で、これらの原子炉がより高く生き残る可胜性はおそらく䜎いでしょう。

事故のある時点でバッテリヌが消耗し、発電所に番目の打撃ストラむクを䞎えたした。ボりリングなら10個のストラむクを狙ったずころですが、この堎合はボりリングではなく野球のようなもので、぀のストラむクで終わっおしたったのです。

この図は、原子力芏制委員䌚NRCが犏島原発事故の䜕幎も前に実斜した研究からずったものです。通垞の亀流電源を喪倱したずきにどうなるか、バッテリヌの盎流電源が䜜動するこずを瀺しおいたす。犏島原発は䜕幎も前に定められたタむムラむンに瀌儀正しく埓いたした。緑の垂盎の砎線は時間埌を瀺しおいたす。これが米囜発電所のバッテリヌの容量分です。

赀の砎線は時間埌を瀺しおいたす。この分析によるず、玄時間ないし時間でバッテリヌは消耗したす。その時点で、圧力容噚の氎䜍が䞋降し始め、炉心が熱されお行きたす。玄14時間、あるいは10から12時間で炉心は溶融し、圧力容噚を突き抜けお燃えたした。

これは予枬であっお、予期せぬ驚きではありたせん。数時間埌には栌玍容噚が損傷したした。悪い結果が起こる可胜性がある悪い条件がそろうず、圓然悪い結果が生たれる。これは䜕幎も前に予枬されおいたした。犏島はこの分析が実際に珟実ずなったこずを、床にわたっお瀺したのです。

その結果です。号機は巊偎、号機は右偎ですが、䜍眮は問題ではなく亀換しおも同じです。どちらにしおも芋栄えのよいものではありたせん。建屋は爆発したした。号機の炉心には燃料はなかったかもしれたせんが、同様に爆発したした。号機ぞのシンパシヌ・ペむンか䜕かでしょうか。

原子炉建屋は二次的栌玍容噚、぀たり、汚い攟射性物質ず公衆を遮る最埌の防壁ですので、これが砎壊されたずいうこずは、犏島には攟射胜ぞの防壁がもはや残っおいないずいうこずを意味したす。

これは私の研究ではなく、アヌニヌのでもなく、ラルフ・ネヌダヌのでもなく、ヘレン・カルディコットのでもなく、他ならぬNRC原子力芏制委員䌚の2003幎8月の研究です。広域停電が起こったら米囜の原発で䜕が起こるかを芳察しおいたす。NRCであっお、私たちではありたせん。

これはシヌブルックSeabrookのような加圧氎型炉に関する衚です。第列は広域停電による原子炉溶融の確率を瀺したす。第列は圓該原子炉が溶融する党䜓的なリスクで、プラント所有者によっお蚈算されたものです。これも、私やアヌニヌやグリンピヌスなど他の者ではありたせん。

第列はただの割合です。発電所のブラックアりトがあった時のメルトダりンの党䜓的な確率が䜕パヌセントかを瀺したす。米囜の倚くの発電所で、長時間の電力喪倱があった堎合のメルトダりンの確率は非垞に高いのです。これは海倖沿いに立地しおいないものも同様です。むリノむ州の発電所の緊急ディヌれル発電機を砎壊するのに、接波を連れお行く必芁はありたせん。

シヌブルックSeabrook原発の堎合は、広域停電による溶融の確率は22です。NRCずプラント所有者によるデヌタですが、なぜか犏島事故以埌、圌らはこのこずに぀いお倧きな声で語ろうずはしたせん。

この衚は米囜の原子炉のバッテリヌ皌働胜力も瀺しおいたす。赀く囲たれおいるのは皆時間発電所です。時間でも犏島では十分でありたせんでした。ずころが、NRCは時間で十分なはずだずいうのです。

28:40 これはピルグリムPilgrimやバヌモント・ダンキヌVermont Yankeeのような沞隰氎型原子炉に぀いおの衚です。倚くの発電所で、広域停電が炉心溶融に぀ながる高い可胜性を瀺しおいたす。ここにむリノむ州のラサヌル発電所LaSalleが、シカゎ郊倖で接波のリスクが特に高い危険地域ずは知られおいたせんが、入っおいたす。広域停電により炉心溶融が起こる確率は80です。他のあらゆる原因を合わせたリスクの倍に等しい確率です。

これが䞻芁な原因でした。米囜の発電所はすべおが接波に脆匱ではありたせんが、広域停電には脆匱です。2003幎のハリケヌン・アンドリュヌによる停電の際、ハリケヌンはタヌンキヌ・ポむント原発Turkey Pointを通過し、これを停止させ、日間にわたっお電力䟛絊を奪いたした。私はテネシヌ州に䜏んでいたす。州境をちょうど越えたずころのアラバマ州偎で週間前にトルネヌド竜巻がブラりンズ・フェリヌ原発Brown’s Ferry を襲い、ルヌプを匕き起こしたした。文字通りの「ルヌプLOOP」倖郚電力喪倱: Loss Of Offsite Power.です。数日間、倖郚電源喪倱状態になりたした。しかし、ディヌれル発電機の倧方は皌働し、いく぀かの故障はありたしたが、党䜓ずしおは正垞に皌働しお氎玠爆発を防げたした。

以䞊が䞻芁な原因です。

副次的な芁因は手続の䞍十分さです。私が原子力芏制委員䌚NRCで働いおいた間、そこの怜査官に緊急手続に぀いお教えおいたした。これは私が圌らを教育するのに䜿っおいた図の䞀郚です。米囜内のピルグリム原発やバヌモント・ダンキヌ原発、沞隰氎型原子炉の運転員たちによっお䜿われおいたものず同䞀です。

これらの教材は電力のコントロヌル、圧力容噚内の氎䜍、圧力容噚内の圧力を、さたざたな想定䞋でのあらゆる皮類のシナリオのもずでどのように凊理するかに぀いお倚くの情報を提䟛しおいたした。しかし、それは事故が台本どおりに埓っおくれた堎合にのみ有効なのです。その党おは電力が時間以内に埩旧するずいうこずを前提ずしおいたした。実際にこれを前提ずしおいたしたので。ですから、恣意的に、電力は時間以内に回埩するずされおいたのです。

日本では電力は時間以内に埩旧するずの前提を立おおいたした。ですから、事故がこの台本通りに進たず、前提ずした時間たでに電力が埩旧しない堎合に、運転員は䜕をすべきかに぀いお䜕の指針も持たないのです。圌らは実際によく察凊したした。䜕の指針もなければ、どのような遞択肢もなかったのですから。できるこずは倚くはありたせんでした。あったのは数台のポンプ、数台のモヌタヌで、しかも電力なしには動かせたせん。動かせないポンプを指摘するこずはできたずしおも、動かせるものを䜕䞀぀み぀けるこずはできなかったのです。

これは䜿甚枈み栞燃料の事故に察凊するために甚意されおいる、緊急手順の党おの完党版リストです。党おが掲茉されおいたす笑よいニュヌスなのは、運転員は存圚しない手順を忘れるこずも、これに違反するこずもできないずいうこずです笑。幎間NRCのために働きたした。どんなこずにも良い偎面をみ぀けるこずはできたす。

これが埋められねばならない領域であり、ギャップだず思いたす。もし米囜の原発で䜿甚枈み燃料プヌルの事故があった堎合に、運転員が参照できる手順があればよいのですが。

アヌニヌ・ガンダヌセンこの皮の事故に番目に寄䞎しおいる原因は、これも犏島に限ったこずではなく、ここでも起こりえるのですが、過密状態の䜿甚枈み燃料プヌルです。

これらの発電所が蚭蚈された際、䜿甚枈み栞燃料はそこに幎間眮かれた埌に、再凊理工堎ぞ茞送される蚈画でした。私が業界で䞊玚副瀟長だった時、私の郚門がやっおいたこずは栞燃料ラックを蚭眮するこずでした。ずきには同䞀の顧客のために回も栞燃料棚を造ったこずがありたす。もし幎が限床なら、10幎間䜿おうずいうわけです。幎経ったら、顧客は戻っおきおドアをノックし、もっず必芁だず蚀ったこずでしょう。

そしお、日本で起こったのは燃料ラックがすし詰めずなったこずです。ピルグリム原発のような原子炉は燃料プヌルが非垞に高く空䞭にそびえおいたす。ここにはさらに問題がでおきたす。

しかし、本圓に問題なのはこれらの燃料を党お䞀カ所に眮いおいるこずです。ピルグリム原発の燃料プヌルには、これたでの党おの原子爆匟ず、チェルノブむリ、犏島を合わせお攟出された以䞊のセシりムがありたす。埓っお、燃料プヌルが火事になるず、それは倩文孊的な数字の信じがたい損害をもたらす可胜性がありたす。

これは号機の写真で、月の氎玠爆発の埌、倧方もず通りの量の氎が絊氎される以前のものです。燃料棚のおっぺんに小さな箱があり、これらが露出しおいたす。栞燃料の先端が露出するほど倚くの氎を倱ったずいうわけです。ここで指摘したいのは、ここにいく぀かの小さな箱が、たたここにもいく぀かの小さな箱が集たっおいるこずです。もし、小さな箱を぀くるビゞネスに埓事しおいる人がいれば、これが䜕を意味するかは明瞭ですが、そうでない人にはしばらく芳察するこずが必芁かも知れたせん。詳现をご芧になりたければ、このスラむドは私たちのりェブサむトに掲茉しおいるので芳お䞋さい。

これは高密床の燃料ラックです。日本人はアメリカ人よりはずっずうたくやっおいたす。圌らはここに幎、幎、あるいは幎燃料を保管し、その埌、也燥キャスク貯蔵庫に移したす。アメリカ人は也燥キャスク貯蔵庫を持っおいないに等しいです。䞁床ひず぀の炉心を空にしおおくのに十分なだけです。埓っお、番目の副次的原因は燃料プヌルに倚くの燃料を詰めすぎおいるこずで、これを也燥キャスク貯蔵庫に移す必芁があるのです。次のスラむド

番目の原因、これをずうずう議論するこずになりたした。ディヌれル発電機が冠氎しなくずも犏島原発は倱敗したこずでしょう。なぜなら、これらのディヌれルは絊氎ポンプず呌ばれるそれ自身の冷华ポンプ持っおおり、それはちょうど氎の真䞊にありたす。台所のシンクにヘアドラむダヌを萜ずし、取り出しおからスむッチを入れおも、うたく動かないでしょう。犏島の絊氎ポンプも同様に故障したした。これずは異なるアメリカの原子炉は「私たちのディヌれルは高いずころにあるので、ここではそんなこずは起こらない」ずいうでしょう。この点に぀いおの事実は、ポンプは氎面䞋に沈めおおかねばならないずいうこずです。そこに氎があるのですから。この写真で、ひず山の瓊瀫が芋えるでしょう。ちょうどここです。これは絊氎ポンプです。砎壊されおなくなっおしたしたした。ですから、仮にディヌれルが残ったずしおも、たた高いずころにおいおあったずしおも、ディヌれルの冷华に甚いる氎が倱われかもしれず、それなら同様の状況に至りたす。

36 繰り返したすが、人々がここのディヌれルは日本ずは異なるず蚀っおも、絊氎システムはそうはいかず、氎の䞊になければならないのです。䟋えばフロリダでは、デむブが話したタヌキヌ・ポむント原発では、ハリケヌン・アンドリュヌ来襲時に、もう少しで発電所にぶ぀かる盎前にたで巚倧な高波が抌し寄せたした。ハリケヌンが絊氎ポンプを冠氎させ犏島のような事故を匕き起こせば、ハリケヌン・アンドリュヌよりも遥かに悪いこずになりたす。

最埌に、しかし重芁性が最も䜎いわけでなく、私が孊んだ教蚓はいかに私たちが賢くずも、倧自然にはかなわないずいうこずです。この写真は先週ネブラスカ州の原発で撮ったものです。そこには぀の原発がありたす。私の話がおわかりかどうかわかりたせんが、もしあなたがネブラスカにいればおわかりでしょうし、信甚しお䞋さる方がよいでしょう。ロッキヌ山脈には膚倧な雪がありたす。ロッキヌに発するいく぀かの川、これはミズヌリ川ですが、氟濫状態にありたす。実際には、氟濫状態を越えおいるずいっおもよいでしょう。ミズヌリ川はこの原発の堀防をい぀砎壊しおもよい状態です。これはわれわれのいうずころの蚭蚈起因の事故で、そのように建蚭されたのです。蚭蚈起因の事故は起こっおはならないもので、これは誰もがこれをひずきわ重倧 ず考えたす。この原発は珟圚堀防の真䞊にありたす。これがはじめおではなく、1993幎にも同じこずが起こりたした。

もし蚭蚈起因の事故が20幎の間に回起こったずしたら、その教蚓は、これらの堀防をさらに高くする必芁があるずいうこずかもしれたせん。これは良い考えかも知れたせんが、実珟したせん。他の䞀片は、犏島が教えたこずですが、そこでの接波は予芋されおいたずいうこずです。しかし、われわれは党おの接波の芁因を予芋するこずはできたせんでした。珟圚ミズヌリ川が氟濫しおいる理由は䞊流に胜力限床に近い぀のダムがあり、もし氎がそれ以䞊に満氎ずなれば決壊するでしょう。そこで党おのパむプがダムの決壊を防ぐため、氎を䞋流に攟流しおいたす。

私は「もし、〜なら」の䞖界に䜏んでいたす。これらのダムの぀が決壊したらどうなるか この原発の所有者であるラむセンス申請者はこのように蚭蚈をする必芁はありたせん。ですから、われわれはたった今、犏島から離れたずころでダムの決壊を目のあたりにしおいるのです。

ここボストン地区で、皆さんはケヌプ・アンCape Ann地震を経隓したした。1969幎の昔に起こったこずを皆さんが芚えおいるかどうかわかりたせんが。これはボストンを砎壊したのです。そしお、ケヌプ・アン地震が予想される最悪のものずなどず考えないで䞋さい。倧自然は、ここで、予想より遥かに困難な詊緎をわれわれめがけお投げるこずがあるずいうこずを教えおくれおいるのです。

しかも、ニュヌ・むングランドの発電所の蚭蚈の基本はケヌプ・アンです。それにさかのがる蚘録はそんなに倚くはなく、ごく少しの歎史を蟿っお行きたす。

西海岞にはダむアブロ・カニョン原発Diablo Canyonがありたす。マむル離れた沖合には、発電所が建蚭されおから発芋された断局がありたす。しかし、それは発電所建蚭埌に発芋されたために、新法什の適甚察象倖ずなっおいたす。

海岞を䞋るずサン・オノフレ原発San Onofreがあり、そこの接波防波堀は9メヌトル28フィヌトの高さです。これに぀いおは再評䟡の必芁があるず思いたす。倧自然はわれわれが起こるず信じたいこず以䞊のこずを成すこずができるのです。

デノィッド・ロックバりム䜕が問題かのいく぀かに぀いお孊びたしたが、われわれに必芁なのは原子力芏制委員䌚NRCの䞍行動NRC inaction.、おっず倱瀌、぀の語が必芁で、行動するNRCNRC in action、でした。笑

行動させるのはずおも難しく、私は14幎間UCSにいたしたが、ずおも困難です。NRC原子力芏制委員䌚で働いおいお解決できないたたでいた問題のひず぀は、行動が十分でないこずでした。それが問題だずいうこず―燃料棚の䜿甚限床ですが―を匷調するこずはなかったのです。NRCで働くずいうこずは実際には掻発で粟力的な仕事ずは蚀えたせんでした。

これは加圧氎型原子炉の抂略図です。ここでお話ししたいのはいく぀かの安党に関する問題で、NRCは自ら知りながら、米囜の原子炉の問題を解決しようずせず、人々にたすたす高いリスクを負わせ぀぀あるずいうこずです。以前から圌らはこのこずを知っおいたす。これが最初にお話ししようずするこずです。最初に圌らは数幎前、倧統領に譊告を行いたした。譊告を発した盞手の倧統領はゞミヌ・カヌタヌでした。その問題は未だに解決しおいたせん。それはゞミヌ・カヌタヌの誀りではなく、NRCの過ちだず信じおいたす。その問題ずは、加圧氎型炉では、原子炉容噚に぀ながる配管が砎断するず、原子炉内郚の冷华氎が砎断した管から急速に挏れだすずいうこずです。システムの最初の察応は、窒玠ガスで䞊郚に圧力をかけた高圧氎槜氎をパむプに通しお、砎断したパむプから挏れおいく氎を補絊するこずです。

最初の補絊氎は、ポンプが自動的に巊偎から䜜動し、亀換氎をタンクから圧力容噚に戻しお、砎断したパむプの䞡端から流出する氎を補絊するたでに十分な時間を䞎えたす。ある時点で、倖郚のタンクは空になりたす。そこで次のステップでは原子炉の底に集たっおいる氎を同じポンプを通しお送り蟌む。これらのポンプは取氎の堎所を再調敎し、圧力容噚を冷华するために送り返したす。氎は砎断した配管を通しお挏出し、炉の底での補絊を終え、その氎は原子炉の冷华のためにリサむクルされるのです。NRCが知っおいる問題は、配管の砎断した方の端から噎出する氎の激しさが壁の塗料、配管の断熱絶瞁被芆剀、行く手の剥がれやすい他のどのような物質をも匕き剥がしお建屋の地䞋たで運び、そこでバスタブの排氎口の髪の毛のように網を詰たらせるずいうこずです。そしお、氎はポンプにたどり着くのではなく、建屋内で溜たるのです。NRCはこのこずをカヌタヌ倧統領に譊告を行った1978幎から承知しおいたす。

これはNRCが行った、米囜の69カ所の加圧氎型炉でこれが起きる確率を調べた研究です。赀いボックスは、サンディア囜立詊隓堎によるず、米囜原子炉でメルトダりンを起こしやすいずころです。少し急ぎたす。

69の原子炉のうちただ53基だけが事故が起こった際にこのメルトダりンが起こる可胜性が高い。1978幎以降で69基のうちのたった53基だずいうのです。よいニュヌスはNRCがプラント所有者にこの問題を解決するように芁請し、オヌブントヌスタヌを、最初にこれを実行した䌚瀟に䞎えたこずです。笑最初の䌚瀟は、理由は他にあるのですが、デむビス・ベッシヌ原発でした。しかしこれらの原子炉のうちの倚くが珟圚はこれを解決しおいたす。かれらは栌玍容噚内にもっず倧きな濟過スクリヌンをおいおこれを塞ぐデブリヌをより倚く取れるようにしたした。同時に圌らは栌玍容噚内のペむントや塗装、その他の材料を亀換しお、砎損しお栌玍容噚に萜ちおしたいがちだったのを匷化したした。

埓っお、この問題を解決した原子炉では実際にこの問題が存圚する確率も小さくしたのです。

しかし、20の原子炉はナンシヌ・レヌガンの指瀺に埓っお、NRCの芁請を拒吊し、NRCの再床の芁請にも埓えないずいう態床を取りたした。

私たちはNRCがこれら20の原子炉に倚くの他の原子炉が解決枈みのこの問題に察凊させるように働きかけおおり、その間に皆さんの裏庭にあるプラントでこの問題が起こらないように望んでいたす。ずいうのはそれがうたく働かない可胜性は十分あるからです。しかし、それは原子炉が停止した堎合のみですが。笑

カヌタヌ倧統領が譊告を受けたよりも早く、アラバマ州でテネシヌ河谷開発公瀟が所有・運営しおいるブラりンズ・フェリヌ発電所で火事がありたした。ろうそくを䜿っお空気挏れを探しおいた䜜業員が、ろうそくがそうなるこずは知られおいたすが、火事を発生させたのです。オレアリヌ倫人の牛にはアリバむがありたしたが、この䜜業員はろうそくの火で空気挏れを探そうずしお制埡宀の真䞋の郚屋で火事をおこしおしたったのです。党おのケヌブルが制埡宀からその真䞋のこの郚屋を通り、プラントのさたざたな斜蚭に出お行っおいたした。

発電所はすべおの電力を維持するこずができたしたが、制埡システムず制埡宀を぀なぐ党おのケヌブルず屋倖蚭備が倱われたした。ブラりンズ・フェリヌの号機は緊急蚭備のすべおを倱いたした。火事は党おのケヌブルを損傷したした。号機はこの火事により、安党システムの倧郚分が喪倱したした。

それで、NRC原子力芏制委員䌚がこれは際どいず思ったのです。NRCは1980幎月、ブラりンズ・フェリヌ事故の再発を防ぐために芏則を採択したした。これは、NRCのリストで、これらの 芏則に察応せず、たたNRCが2004幎に採択した別の芏則のどちらにも察応しおいない—NRCがどちらかの芏則に埓うよう芁請しおいるにも拘らず―原発の䞀芧です。これらはNOず答えたきりです。米囜の50の原子炉のうち、およそ半分で、幎前に採択された芏則に基づいた防備がなされおいないのです。これはNRCの怠慢です。

皮肉な事に、これらの芏則に察応しおいない発電所のひず぀は、そもそもこの問題の発端ずなったアラバマ州のブラりンズ・フェリヌ原発で、党く匁解の䜙地はないのですが、芏則に埓っおいないのです。

これは説明の必芁もありたせんが、およそ10幎前に私たちはあの9/11を䜓隓したした。NRC原子力芏制委員䌚は原子力発電所が悪意を持った行動に察する脆匱さを軜枛するために埓うべき安党芁件を課したした。今日、NRCはこの芏則に埓っおいない数カ所の発電所があるこずを認識しおいたす。これらの原発所有者はもっず時間が必芁だずいうのです。みたずころ、テロリスト達がリタむアするのを埅っおいたす、ずいうのが私たちの新しい安党防備䜓制なのです。笑もし私たちが安党面での䞍備を芋぀けたら、珟堎に行っおそれに察凊するはずで、䞀芧衚に茉せお原発所有者に安党芏則に埓うよう芁請し、お願いし、説埗するずいうようなこずはしたせん。NRCが自ら定めた芏則を執行すればよいのですが。行動しないのです。

アヌニヌず私は、原子力芏制委員䌚NRC以倖の堎で、これらの問題に察凊するため行われたこずに぀いおお話ししようずしおいたした。玄12幎前、NRCは私を連邊政府諮問委員䌚法の委員に任呜したした。この委員䌚は特定の掻動を監芖する為に法的に認可された諮問組織です。この䟋では原子炉を監督する掻動でした。委員䌚のメンバヌには業界代衚数名、NRC圓局者数名、州政府圓局者数名がおり、さらに、名目的な委員で、どのようにNRCの詊隓的な原子炉監督掻動の実際を芳察するために加わった垂民代衚が名いたした。この委員䌚の良いずころは、党䌚䞀臎の委員䌚であっお、最終的な結果にはそれぞれの委員の芳点が反映されねばならないずいうこずでした。報告曞は倚数意芋ず少数意芋をたずめたではなかったのです。 委員䌚がフォロヌアップ調査を行った際にはこのルヌルを倚数意芋少数意芋に倉えおしたったので、私が䜕を蚀ったのかは問題ではなくなりたした。

しかし、少なくずも最初の委員䌚ではよい監督掻動だったので、これを前進させるこずはそれなりに意矩があるだろうず考えたす。NRCが同様な委員䌚を぀くり、犏島からの教蚓を孊び、どのようにNRCがそれを実行するかを芳るこずを目的ずするならば、垂民がその委員䌚に代衚を送る倀打ちがあるず思うのです。少なくずもメンバヌの人は地元のグルヌプ、Region 1の地域グルヌプ、ピルグリム・りォッチ、C10その他の人から、たたRegion 2、南西地域、西海岞あるいは䞭西郚から遞ばれるずよいず思いたす。

珟圚のずころ、垂民はいく぀かの理由により、NRCを党面的には信頌しおいたせん。垂民の代衚を送り、垂民の関心事をNRCに提起するのはよいこずでしょう。そしお、NRCの行動、説明、あるいは行っおいるこずや行っおいないこずの正圓化に぀いお、垂民に報告を返させるのです。

アヌニヌ・ガンダヌセン他の䟋は私たちがバヌモント州で行ったこずです。州の立法府は法埋を策定し名の人々に暩限を䞎えたした。人は知事任呜、人は州䞊院の臚時代衚、もう人は州䞋院の倚数掟リヌダヌでした。

これら名が名の委員䌚の定員を充たすために、あずの人を遞びたした。私が調査したこずずデむブが調査したこずずの違いは、州はNRCの管蜄事項ずぶ぀かっおはならないずころで、私たちは安党事項を調査するこずはできたでした。責任事項は調査できたすが。

たずえば、非垞甚炉心冷华装眮ECCSは私たちが調査できない事項でした。しかしECCSの点怜が停電の期間に圱響するような堎合は、それは責任事項ずなりたした。私たちはコンサルタント達の900䞇ドルに倀する仕事の埌に報告曞を発行したした。そのお金は私のずころに来たず蚀いたいのですが、そうではありたせんでした。行列の圢を取った怜蚎事項に答を出すために、コンサルタントのチヌムが招かれたした。13の異なるパラメヌタヌに぀いお、6぀の異なる原子炉システムごずに調査しおいたした。それは13×6の行列です。そしお、委員䌚が特定した81の異なった領域での問題に関わっおいたした。い぀も䞍思議でした。郚倖者を雇っお81の問題を芋぀けさせるこずによる枉倖事務の問題に耐える代わりに、なぜ゚ンタヌギヌ瀟Entergyはそれを自分たち自身でやらなかったのか。しかし、圌らはそうしないこずを遞んだのです。

その翌幎、圌らが地䞋の配氎管に぀いおの真実を党おは私達に䌝えぬたた、私達は再招集され、さらに぀の問題を発芋したした。埓っお公的な監芖グルヌプは実効的にはバヌモント・ダンキヌ原発における90の問題を特定したこずになり、これら党おの課題を解決するには少なくずも2015幎から2016幎たでかかるこずが予想されたした。他方、もちろん、原発の操業認可は2012に終了したす。そしお、この延長がなされるかどうかを私達は芋るこずになるでしょう。原子力発電所の内郚メカニズムに光を圓おるのにどのような州政府でも考え぀く掻動ず同様、効果的な掻動でした。

有り難うございたした。

拍手

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New Analysis of Unit 3 Fuel Pool Video Reveals Top of Fuel Bundle

About This Video

A video first released by TEPCO in April has been re-analyzed by Ian Goddard and appears to reveal a handle found atop a single nuclear fuel bundle. This raises more questions about the condition of any fuel still remaining in the Unit 3 fuel pool.

Video Transcript

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Arnie Gundersen: Hi I'm Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds.

If you have been watching the site lately, it has been about 3 weeks since we have updated a video.  During that time, Maggie and I have been on the road making a couple of presentations in Massachusetts, a couple of TV shows and some radio and print.  That will be on the site over the next couple of weeks to inform you of what we have been up to.  But something happened last night that I really wanted to share with you right now.

I got an email last night from Ian Goddard.  And Ian is a long time watcher of this site and has done some really great analysis in the past as well.  He took a look at an old TEPCO video.  And Tokyo Electric had gone into the Unit 3 fuel pool just once.  You remember that Unit 3 is the reactor that is blown to smithereens.  The video showed a lot of damage.  But Ian Goddard was able to find one spot where there is clearly something that appears to be discernible.  It looks like the handle of a BWR fuel bundle.

Ian compares that bundle to other bundles which were looked at over in Unit 4 and it is pretty clear to me and a couple of other nuclear engineers I have shown it to, that this might be a single nuclear fuel bundle in the Unit 3 fuel pool.

It raises more questions than it answers.  First of all, there should be a lot of bundles there.  Yet, obviously, there is only one in this picture.   Where are the other bundles?  The other part of the question is, this should be under about 25 feet of water.  It is not, it is very near to the surface.  So what has happened to that particular bundle, or to the water level in the pool that caused it to come in such close contact with atmosphere?

Like I said, it raises more questions than it answers, but I really do want to thank Ian Goddard for discovering this.  If you have any comments or questions or thoughts on what you think it might be, please send in through the comments section on the website.

Thanks, we will get back to you soon.

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号機䜿甚枈み燃料プヌルのビデオの再分析で、燃料集合䜓の䞊郚を発芋

東京電力が月に公衚したビデオをむアン・ゎダヌド氏が再分析した結果、぀の燃料集合䜓の䞊に付いおいるハンドルが確認できるようです。号機の䜿甚枈み燃料プヌルにただ残っおいる燃料があるずすれば、それは珟圚どのような状態になっおいるのか、より謎が深たりたした。

 

こんにちは。フェアりィンズのアヌニヌ・ガンダヌセンです。ここ週間ほど曎新しおおりたせんでしたが、その間マギヌず私はマサチュヌセッツでの講 挔やテレビ、ラゞオの出挔、執筆などをこなしながら家を離れおいたのです。この暡様や経過を週間の内に皆様にお芋せできるず思いたす。しかし、今日 は昚倜起きたこずをぜひ皆様にお䌝えしたいず思ったのです。 昚倜むアン・ゎッダヌドさんからメヌルをもらいたした。むアンさんはフェアりィンズのサむトに以前から泚目しおくれ、すばらしい分析もしおいたす。圌は以前公開 された東電のビデオを再床怜蚎したそうです。東電は䞀床だけ号機の䜿甚枈み燃料プヌルを撮圱しおいたす。思い出しおください。号機は爆発でめちゃくちゃになった原子炉です。ビデオには倚くのダメヌゞが映っおいたした。むア ン・ゎッダヌドはその䞭に䞀箇所だけ、圢がはっきり分かるものを芋぀けたのです。それは沞隰氎型原子炉甚の燃料集合䜓の取っ手のように芋えたす。

むアンはその取っ手ず号機の燃料プヌルに映し出されおいた燃料集合䜓の取っ手を芋比べおみたした。ほかの䜕人かの栞の専門家にも芋せおみたしたが、私にもそれは号機の䜿甚枈み燃料プヌルに残っおいる燃料集合䜓のように思えるのです。 答えよりも疑問の方が倚くなっおしたいたす。たず、燃料集合䜓はたくさんあるはずです。しかし、明らかに映像には䞀䜓しか映っおいたせん。ほかの集合䜓はどこぞ行ったのでしょうもうひず぀、燃料集合䜓は氎面からフィヌトmほど䞋にあるはずです。しかし、この燃料集合䜓はそうではありたせん、ほずんど氎面に近いのです。䞀䜓ここに映っおいるこの燃料集合䜓に䜕が起きたのか、たたは䜿甚枈み燃料プヌルの氎䜍に䜕が起きたのか。結果ずしおこの燃料集合䜓が倧気にほずんど觊れる䜍眮になっおいたす。

ずいうように、答えよりも疑問の方が倚くなっおしたいたしたが、これを発芋したむアン・ゎッダヌドさんに倧倉感謝したいず思いたす。みなさんのご意芋、質問、ご感想などありたしたら、サむトのコメントに残しおください。それではたた、近いうちにお䌚いしたしょう。

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Duxbury Emergency Management Hosts Independent Nuclear Expert Panel

Duxbury Emergency Management Hosts Independent Nuclear Expert Panel

June 15th Duxbury Masachusetts Emergency Management Agency and the Duxbury Nuclear Advisory Committee forum entitled "Can Fukushima Happen Here?" and posted it for you to view. Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds Energy Education was among four of the nation's leading independent nuclear experts invited to participate on the panel.

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