nuclear-news

USA came all too close to nuclear catastrophe

America’s nuclear safety under scrutiny after Oyster Creek’s Sandy alert
US nuclear regulators model risk from seismic activity or flooding based on past history. That’s leaving way too much to luck Richard Schiffman
guardian.co.uk, 1 November 2012  Oyster Creek nuclear power station was offline on Monday for maintenance, but officials said Sandy’s storm surge came within 6in of damaging its cooling system. Photograph: PR
We know the bad news about superstorm Sandy: the Jersey shore was devastated and many towns remain waterlogged. New York suffered a direct hit, with the city’s mass transit system flooded and part-paralyzed for days to come…..  luckily, it did not trigger an even greater disaster at one of the region’s nuclear power plants. But it could have.

Watchdog groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) warn that America’s nuclear facilities remain vulnerable to a variety of potential catastrophic events, both natural and resulting from deliberate sabotage or cyber-attack. And they say that federal regulations are currently inadequate to deal with all of these possible disaster scenarios.

I reported on one such danger, solar flares, last May in the New York Daily News. A 2011 study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory warns that a massive solar storm could knock out electricity in some areas for weeks, overwhelming the capacity of many nuclear plants to keep their critical cooling systems operational.

But nuclear regulators have not required power plants to guard against the risk of solar storms. David Lochbaum, the director of UCS’s nuclear safety project told me in an email interview that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses plants “using the rearview mirror”. It looks to the past, in other words, to assess future risks…..  we need to come up with solutions “sooner rather than later” to fix America’s inadequate regulatory system.

Lochbaum points out in a blog that the risks of nuclear power generation are magnified by the fact that the plants are always located near a river, lake or ocean. That is because producing nuclear power creates a lot of heat, which needs to be dissipated by huge volumes of water. These cooling systems are all that prevents the plutonium in reactor cores from going critical and melting down, much like what happened at Fukushima.

But locating nuclear plants near bodies of water has its risks, which range from the clogging of intake pipes by barnacles and mussels – as happened at the Pilgrim nuclear plant near Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1981 – to potential damage from storm surges, such as those created by Hurricane Sandy.

One facility was put in a state of “high alert” during Sandy due to high-water levels in its water intake structure. The Oyster Creek Generating Station on Barnegat Bay – 40 miles north of Atlantic City, and the oldest nuclear facility in the nation – was shut down last week for refueling. Plutonium, however, can dangerously overheat whether or not a plant is actively producing electricity. So, 300 employees stayed at Oyster Creek, Monday night, to ensure that the imperiled cooling system continued to function.

Nuclear plants located near oceans are not the only ones threatened by flooding. Thirty-four reactors, fully a third of those in the US, are sited along rivers with dams upstream. A report released last March by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission suggests that many of these plants were not designed to withstand the massive floods that catastrophic dam collapse would unleash…….http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/01/nuclear-safety-oyster-creek-sandy-alert?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038

November 2, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA