Robert Alvarez, Senior Scholar, Institute for Policy StudiesThe U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has recently published a draft study, which concludes that the risk of a catastrophic irradiated nuclear fuel storage pool fire is vanishingly low. This conclusion seems to starkly contradict earlier NRC findings that pool storage risks are real, and should be dealt with.
The NRC draft study focuses on the risk of a severe earthquake impacting a General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor storage pool (specificially, at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in PA). Ironically enough, NRC's draft conclusion clearly contradicts a warning issued a decade ago by its own current agency Chairwoman, Dr. Allison Macfarlane, who knows a thing or two about seismic risks: she is an internationally recognized Ph.D. geologist, who has long focused on radioactive waste risks. See below.)
NRC has granted the public a short 30 days to comment on this new 369 page draft. Deadline for public comments is currently Friday, August 2nd. Beyond Nuclear, and its environmental allies, are racing to meet this arbitrarily short deadline, to prepare comments which individuals and groups can endorse, or use to write their own. Watch for this in the near future.
However, there are strong voices who disagree with NRC's flip assurances of safety. Robert Alvarez (photo, left), a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, and a former senior advisor to the Energy Secretary during the Clinton administration, published a report in late June, commissioned by Friends of the Earth (FOE), entitled Reducing the hazards of high-level radioactive waste in Southern California: Storage of nuclear waste from spent fuel at San Onofre. The report appeared a couple weeks after Edison International announced the permanent shutdown of San Onofre Units 2 & 3, under intense pressure from FOE and a widespread grassroots environmental network, due to the $2.5 billion, defective steam generator replacement boondoggle, which had put 8 million Southern Californians within a 50-mile radius at radiological risk. Alvarez concludes that the risk of catastrophic radioactivity releases from a high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) storage pool fire at San Onofre, such as caused by a severe earthquake suddenly draining away the pool cooling water supply, are high. A large region downwind could be severely contaminated with radioactive Cesium-137 fallout, including lethal doses to thousands of people within a 10-mile radius.
Alvarez's study follows a 2003 report he and others (including the current NRC Chairwoman, Dr. Allison Macfarlane) co-authored, warning of the catastrophic risks of HLRW pool fires, and calling for the unloading of pools into not-risk-free, but safer, dry casks. Alvarez also published a report in May 2011, documenting the nationwide risk of storage pool fires, in light of the still-unfolding Fukushima catastrophe, which began a couple months earlier.
Just today, the New York Times and Agence France Press/Jiji have reported that steam at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 could either be due to a nuclear criticality in the molten core, or, as Alvarez (and Fairewinds Associates, Inc's Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen) have hypothesized, could be due to a nuclear criticality in the ruined HLRW storage pool itself.
Beyond Nuclear and a nationwide coalition of hundreds of environmental groups, representing all 50 states, have long advocated Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS). HOSS calls not only for catastrophically risky pools to be emptied, but for dry cask storage safety, security, and environmental protection to be dramatically upgraded. Dry casks are currently badly designed, poorly fabricated, and not even required to withstand terrorist attacks.
What can you do about HLRW storage pool risks? Contact President Obama and your Senators and Representative (via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121), and urge HOSS as an interim alternative to a recently introduced Senate bill which would make matters worse, by rushing "Mobile Chernobyls" onto the roads, rails, and waterways, in a race for senseless "centralized interim storage" parking lot dumps targeted at already radiologically-burdened DOE sites and nuclear power plants, or, as an act of blatant environmental injustice or radioactive racism, Native American reservations.