In the midst of mounting public health concerns in Japan over radiation releases from the very real Fukushima nuclear accident, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently released a synthesis of twenty years of computer modeling studies on the hypothetical consequences of a severe nuclear accident. The “State-of-The Art Reactor Consequences Analysis” (SOARCA) would have you believe that blowing up a nuclear reactor isn’t really that bad after all. The NRC brochure is boiled down for general public consumption from the agency’s voluminous technical study (Volumes 1 and 2). Basically, it states, reactor accidents are likely to occur slowly, giving plenty of time for evacuation and the public health impacts will be significantly smaller than previously forecast, in fact, near “zero.” Don’t worry, be happy -- and disregard what’s happening in the real world in Japan.
The NRC study focuses in on several hypothetical accident scenarios at two reactors; Peach Bottom, a GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor in Pennsylvania and Surry, a Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor in Virginia.
There are many concerns with the report, not the least of which is that, as pointed out on the last page of a U.S. congressional analysis, it does not evaluate the consequences of hundreds of tons of high-level radioactive waste stored at each of these reactors becoming involved in the reactor accident and a catastrophic release, as mounting evidence indicates has happened at Fukushima Daiichi. Beyond Nuclear has published a backgrounder on the risks of high-level radioactive waste pools at General Electric Boiling Water Reactors of the Mark I design in the U.S., in light of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe.
But pool risks extend to pressurized water reactors as well. A 2001 NRC study about pool risks revealed that 25,000 to over 40,000 people could die from latent cancer fatalities caused by catastrophic radioactivity releases downwind of a waste pool fire, such as one caused by the drop of a heavy load instantly draining the pool's cooling water supply. An earlier federal report on waste pool fire risks put the potential deaths downwind at over 140,000. These studies are cited in a major report on irradiated nuclear fuel pool risks by Alvarez et al., published in 2003, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. National Academies of Science largely validated Alvarez et al.'s findings in 2005. Robert Alvarez at Institute for Policy Studies published another report on high-level radioactive waste storage pool risks in the U.S. in the aftermath of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe as well.
Beyond Nuclear, along with nearly 200 other environmental groups, has called for a decade for "Hardened On-Site Storage," emptying the pools into monitored and retrievable, quality assured dry casks, fortified against attacks, safeguarded against accidents, and built well enough to not leak for centuries. Of course, as Beyond Nulear board member Judith Johnsrud, who has described high-level radioactive waste as a "trans-solutional problem," a problem beyond a solution, the only real solution is to stop making it in the first place.
The SOARCA study also makes many broad assumptions about human behavior. NRC predicts that populations around nuclear power plants will cooperate with emergency plans and not spontaneously evacuate until ordered so as not to trap those close to the plant in traffic jams; or, emergency responders will not delay or abandon their duties, such as assuming volunteer bus drivers and teachers will assist school children in evacuation, before they tend to their own families' safety.
The main concern is that SOARCA is the precursor to further NRC and industry streamlining of new reactor construction and old reactor license extension, perhaps even to reduce the size of emergency planning zones and in order to decrease the associated costs.
SOARCA has been in the works for many years at NRC. It is an update on "CRAC-2" (Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences), a study NRC commissioned Sandia National Lab to do in the early 1980s, but then tried to cover up. U.S. Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) made the CRAC-2 report public in congressional hearings. CRAC-2's figures for deaths, injuries, and property damage due to catastrophic radioactivity releases across the U.S. are shocking. NRC has since disavowed the CRAC-2 study with a disclaimer on its website. On March 1, 2011 -- ten days before the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe began -- a three judge panel of the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, the NRC staff, and FirstEnergy Nuclear claimed not to know what "CRAC-2" referred to, when Beyond Nuclear cited it as evidence to be applied against a 20 year license extension at the problem-plagued Davis-Besse atomic reactor near Toledo.