NRC slaps FirstEnergy for safety violation at Perry

NRC file photo of FirstEnergy's Perry atomic reactor on the Lake Erie shore northeast of ClevelandThe Plain Dealer of Cleveland has reported that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has cited the FirstEnergy nuclear utility with a "white finding" of "low to moderate" safety significance after four contract workers were briefly exposed to high radiation levels due to poorly written procedures involving a task near the reactor core. The article quotes Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps: "Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a group opposed to nuclear energy, said Perry's problems are not as isolated from Davis-Besse's past problems as one would think. 'All the hooting and hollering about the need to improve FirstEnergy's 'safety culture' after the Davis-Besse hole-in-the-head fiasco of 2002 comes to mind,' he said. 'Apparently that 'safety culture' isn't as fixed as FirstEnergy and even the NRC would like the public to believe.' "

FirstEnergy's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant came closer than any other U.S. reactor since the Three Mile Island meltdown of 1979 to a major accident, due to severe corrosion of its reactor lid. Beyond Nuclear, in coalition with Citizens Environment Alliance of Southwest Ontario, Don't Waste Michigan, and the Green Party of Ohio, has won standing and the admittance of several contentions against the 20 year license extension sought by FirstEnergy at Davis-Besse.

Beyond Nuclear “Freeze Our Fukushimas” petition accepted in part by NRC: Prompts deeper investigation of GE Mark I reactors

On August 16, 2011, a Petition Review Board of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) provided its recommendations to accept and reject in part emergency enforcement actions requested by Beyond Nuclear in an April 13, 2011 petition regarding the 23 Fukushima-style reactors now operating in the US.  

The Beyond Nuclear petition, which NRC confirms includes more than 5,000 additional co-petitioner requests from around the country, seeks to suspend the operation of the dangerous and deeply flawed General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactors until certain safety conditions are met. The NRC review board will now look further into several of Beyond Nuclear’s requested actions.

The petitioners are seeking to have the agency; 1) hold public hearings in each of the emergency planning zones for the Fukushima-style reactors; 2) revoke the agency’s 1989 NRC prior approval allowing nuclear power plant operators to “voluntarily” install the same radioactive containment venting system demonstrated at Fukushima Daiichi to have a 100% failure rate during a severe nuclear accident and; 3) issue an Order to all GE Mark I operators to immediately install dedicated emergency back-up electrical power systems to keep cooling the densely-packed nuclear waste storage pools that sit atop each of the reactors in the event of simultaneous loss of all off-site and on-site electrical power for safety systems. 

The NRC review process will now consider the review board’s recommendation to “accept” in part Beyond Nuclear’s requested actions for additional investigation to include:    

(1)  “Immediately revoke prior pre-approval of the hardened vent system or direct torus vent system at each GE BWR Mark I unit under the provisions of 10 CFR 50.59,” and; 

(2)  “Immediately issue Confirmatory Action Orders to all GE BWR Mark I units to promptly install safety-related backup electrical power (Class E-1) and additional backup DC battery system to ensure reliable supply for the spent fuel pool cooling system.”

The review board further recommended that the agency “reject” in part Beyond Nuclear’s requested actions for any further review to include;

1) “Immediately suspend operating licenses of all GE BWR Mark I units pending full NRC review with independent expert and public participation from the affected emergency planning zone communities,” and;

2) “Conduct public meetings within each of the ten-mile emergency planning zone for each GE BWR site for the purpose of receiving public comment and independent expert testimony regarding the reliability of hardened vent system or direct torus vent system.”

You can still take action and become a co-petitioner with Beyond Nuclear's "Freeze Our Fukushimas" petition.

Update on August 19, 2011 by admin

And see the Beyond Nuclear press release. Please distribute to media outlets.

Reports indicate Fukushima nuclear crisis worsening and widening

As the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe that began on March 11, 2011 now continues beyond 161 days, news accounts indicate that the accident maybe worsening and the scope of radioactive contamination widening.

One source states that Tokyo Electric Power Company workers are blowing the whistle on numerous cracks have opened up in the ground around the stricken reactors releasing highly radioactive steam into the area, forcing workers to retreat. The highly radioactive steam would be further evidence that three of the destroyed Fukushima reactor units not only melted down through the reactor vessels but one or more of the molten cores may have now burned through concrete floors and entered into the earth below. This would essentially qualify the multi-unit nuclear accident under the so-called “China Syndrome.”

If these anonymous workers’ reports can be corroborated, this would be further proof that the nuclear catastrophe is still seriously out of control and in fact worsening. It also renews concern about the possibility of an additional hydrogen explosion as a result of the corium (super-hot melted nuclear fuel) coming into contact with subsurface ground water, generating steam and if hot enough, chemically separating out water into its elemental form of explosive hydrogen and oxygen.

In the widening catastrophe, the Japanese Mainichi Daily News reports that excessive amounts of radioactive cesium contamination have been measured more than 62 miles west of the destroyed reactor site in sludge samples taken from a ditch in front of a district court in Fukushima Prefecture. Radioactivity levels were recorded at 186,000 becquerels per kilogram where Japanese government standards now permit no more than 8,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium contaminated materials to be hauled off and dumped in ordinary landfills. Further news stories report that Chinese territorial waters in the East China Sea are at increasing risk of radioactive contamination of sea food by the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. Chinese authorities are increasing sea water monitoring following findings of 300 times permissible levels of radioactive cesium-137 and 100 times permissible levels for radioactive strontium-90.

Separately, on July 28, 2011, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Task Force on the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe reported at its public meeting that highly radioactive reactor fuel fragments and particles previously found more than one and a half miles away from the reactor site are pieces of fuel rods forcefully ejected from the one or more of the reactor cores and not as many had speculated to be fragments of “spent” fuel ejected from the GE Mark I roof top storage pools during one of the four explosions. Dr. Gary Holahan, the NRC Deputy Director of New Reactors, is quoted in the agency’s official transcript at page 63 to say, “You know, although the -- we don't consider this a technical report on the details of what happened at Fukushima. I think, you know, a very reasonable working hypothesis -- I don't want to get too definitive on it, but, you know, ascribing these dispersed radioactive materials in various forms on the site, you know, it most likely appears they were from the reactor cores rather than spent fuel pools. I think we have to wait for a definitive answer, but things like the amount of iodine in the, you know, in the radiological material that was dispersed are generally indicative of core damage as opposed to spent fuel pool damage.”  The preliminary finding revealed by a top NRC senior manager indicates that at least one of four hydrogen explosions during the first days of the accident simultaneously ripped entirely through the reactors’ multiple barrier system; the reactor vessel, the reactor’s primary containment component and finally, the reactor building.

Japanese officials withheld radioactive fallout patterns: “akin to murder”

An August 8, 2011 New York Times story revealed that Japanese authorities in Tokyo deliberately abandoned their responsibilities to notify communities of the direction that radioactive fallout was blowing from the meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.   

Given no guidance from the headquarters of the Japanese nuclear emergency agency, local community officials evacuated populations including women and children to Tsushima district, an area farther north that they believed to be in the opposite direction of where winter winds would carry the radioactive fallout to the south.  In fact, the wind blew clouds of radiation escaping from the badly damaged reactors directly toward Tsushima where evacuated children were playing outside and their unaware parents were gathering water from streams for cooking.

Emergency planning authorities later admitted that they had withheld computer predictions showing where the fallout would spread and denied the facts of the radioactive disaster very likely to limit the size of costly evacuations in “land scarce” Japan. The mayor of the town of Namie, just five miles from Fukushima nuclear power plant, described the misdeeds as “akin to murder.”

The scope and reality of evacuating and sheltering people from nuclear catastrophe is consistently downplayed among all nuclear nations. Just like the lie that government officials told tens of thousands of Japanese citizens to delay and cover up knowledge of the severity of the unfolding nuclear accident, the facts about the effectiveness of an emergency response often belie industry and government assurances even here in the United States. 

For example for the evacuation of children from the many schools located within the ten-mile emergency planning zone around US nuclear power plants, a 1985 UCLA study “Role Conflict in a Radiological Emergency: The Case of School teachers” identifies after a review of the facts surrounding the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident and other nuclear accidents, teachers and bus drivers---who are essentially conscripted into participating in the evacuation of their students---are more likely to abandon this state assigned role to attend to their immediate families first.  The study’s findings are more recently reiterated by teachers from around New Hampshire’s Seabrook nuclear power plant, one who noted “the belief of a number of teachers and people familiar with this is the children can’t be safely evacuated in the amount of time necessary to protect their health.”

Vermont Yankee challenges state shutdown decision with nuclear fuel order

Entergy Nuclear, the New Orleans-based owner and operator of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power station, announced that it is ordering more nuclear fuel for its Vermont Yankee nuclear power station. Entergy plans to refuel the GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor in October 2011.  The announcement is in defiance of the State of Vermont February 24, 2010 decision not to allow the Fukushima-style reactor to operate beyond March 21, 2012 at the end of its original 40-year license. 

After a 5 year licensing challenge before a federal relicensing board, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted to extend the reactor's operating license by another 20 years just days after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant accident in Japan on March 11, 2012.  

The Entergy announcement was not a surprise to many engaged in the legal challenge that goes to trial on September 12, 2011 as well as a citizen mobilization gearing up for mass nonviolent direct action to oppose the continued operations.