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US nuclear regulators covered up flood threat to nuke plants

Flood Threat To Nuclear Plants Covered Up By Regulators, NRC Whistleblower Claims, includes UK video HUFFINGTON POST,    09/14/20  In a letter  submitted Friday afternoon to internal investigators at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission , a whistleblower engineer within the agency accused regulators of deliberately covering up information relating to the vulnerability of U.S. nuclear power facilities that sit downstream from large dams and reservoirs.

The letter also accuses the agency of failing to act to correct these vulnerabilities despite being aware of the risks for years.

These charges were echoed in separate conversations with another risk engineer inside the agency who suggested that the vulnerability at one plant in particular — the three-reactor Oconee Nuclear Station  near Seneca, S.C. — put it at risk of a flood and subsequent systems failure, should an upstream dam completely fail, that would be similar to the tsunami that hobbled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan last year. That event caused multiple reactor meltdowns.

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, Richard H. Perkins, a reliability and risk engineer with the agency’s division of risk analysis, alleged that NRC officials falsely invoked security concerns in redacting large portions of a report  detailing the agency’s preliminary investigation into the potential for flooding at U.S. nuclear power plants due to upstream dam failure.

In addition to the Oconee facility, the report examined similar vulnerabilities at the Ft. Calhoun station in Nebraska, the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota and the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, among others……

The report concluded, among other things, that the failure of one or more dams sitting upstream from several nuclear power plants “may result in flood levels at a site that render essential safety systems inoperable.” High floodwaters could conceivably undermine all available power sources, the report found, including grid power, emergency diesel backup generators, and ultimately battery backups. The risk of these things happening, the report said, is higher than acceptable. “The totality of information analyzed in this report suggests that external flooding due to upstream dam failure poses a larger than expected risk to plants and public safety,” Perkins’s report concluded, adding that the evidence warranted a more formal investigation…… http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/14/flood-threat-nuclear-plants-nrc_n_1885598.html

September 15, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA