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US nuclear reactors same design as Fukushima’s- are they safe?

 US reactors of the same design have generally been found to have less, not more, emergency battery power to cool reactors during power outages. Most such reactors also have much larger loads of spent fuel in their cooling pools than did their counterparts at Fukushima.

Nuclear power safety: Latest on Japan crisis fuels new concern in US Nuclear Regulatory Commission still insists that US nuclear plants with same design as Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi facility are safe. But watchdog groups cite failed venting system, which led to hydrogen explosions.   CSMonitor.com, By Mark Clayton, Staff writer / May 20, 2011

As the nuclear plant crisis in Japan reveals more vulnerabilities in facility operation and design, calls are being renewed to change the way nuclear plants are evaluated and regulated in the United States……

The antinuclear group Beyond Nuclear charged that, while some US Mark I reactors possess the same venting systems that failed in Japan’s crippled plant, the NRC knows that other Mark I reactor operators may not have installed – or may even have uninstalled – those venting systems. (NRC officials insist all such reactors are equipped with the vents.) If the venting systems at Fukushima Daiichi had worked as designed, they would have prevented damage to containment from the hydrogen explosions, it said.

“The NRC left the retrofit of this experimental venting system to the voluntary discretion of the US reactor operators,” said Paul Gunter, director of reactor oversight at Beyond Nuclear, in a statement. “Now that this experimental containment vent is demonstrated to have failed at Fukushima, we need to know who installed it at US plants, who didn’t, and the justification for the continued operation of these deeply flawed and dangerous reactors.”….

“We need to suspend licensing and relicensing, and suspend reactor certification decisions,” Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said Thursday in a conference call with reporters. “Not the processes involved – but the decisionmaking itself – should stop because we don’t know whether we’re making decisions that are consistent with safety.”

Beyond Nuclear wants the NRC to hold a public meeting in each emergency planning zone for reactors with a design like the one at Fukushima. The NRC should “revoke all prior approvals for the installation of the vent and instead require operators to submit a license amendment request with full public hearing rights,” said Mr. Gunter…..

the problem is not that the NRC is unable to identify problems, but that it often simply does not follow through on addressing known problems.

“They’ve identified the right issues for the most part, but it’s not clear that they’re planning to apply anything but band-aids,” says Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist and expert on reactor safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear watchdog group. “In most cases they tend to underplay the potential for severe accidents – and as a result those regulations don’t cover severe accidents in a serious way.”

One example: NRC’s approval of a buildup of spent-fuel rods in pools. The Fukushima crisis has now demonstrated the vulnerabilities of that practice, but US reactors of the same design have generally been found to have less, not more, emergency battery power to cool reactors during power outages. Most such reactors also have much larger loads of spent fuel in their cooling pools than did their counterparts at Fukushima….Nuclear power safety: Latest on Japan crisis fuels new concern in US – CSMonitor.com

May 21, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA