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NRC knew years ago of the flood danger to nuclear reactors

An Early Nuclear Warning: Was It for Naught? NYT, By MATTHEW L. WALD January 22, 2013,  The accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011 alerted the American nuclear industry and its regulators to the possibility that operators at plants with more than one reactor might have to deal with more than one meltdown at a time in a flood, earthquake or other catastrophe. Officials are now working to assure that they could master that situation.

But documents uncovered by a group that is critical of nuclear safety show that a high-level safety analyst at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission posed the possibility to his superiors in July 2007, about four years before the earthquake and tsunami that led to three simultaneous meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi. The documents also show that in August 2008, the commission staff formally acknowledged the issue.

But until Japan’s disaster, progress in the American nuclear industry was glacial. Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which uncovered the documents, compares them to records located after the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in which engineers voiced concern that debris falling during a launch could damage an orbiter.

Action to prepare for a dual meltdown was not a case of “forewarned is forearmed,’’ he said, but more like “forewarned is forestalled.’’

The warning, which now seems prophetic, predicted “common cause failures,’’ meaning single events that disable different pieces of equipment that are supposedly independent and nearly invulnerable to failing simultaneously on their own. The risk analyst, Richard Sherry, wrote that flooding or earthquakes could disrupt both normal grid power and emergency backup power……http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/an-early-nuclear-warning-was-it-for-naught/

January 23, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA