Tom Zeller Jr.'s excellent article Leaked Report Suggests Long-Known Flood Threat To Nuclear Plants, Safety Advocates Say reveals an un-redacted version of an NRC report about the risk to nuclear power plants located near dams, that indicated that the NRC has been misleading the public for many years.
"The redacted information shows that the NRC is lying to the American public about the safety of U.S. reactors," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and safety advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Evidence in the report indicates that the NRC has known for at least the last six years that failure of a dam upriver from the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina would cause floodwaters to overwhelm the plant’s three reactors and their cooling equipment -- not unlike what befell Japan's Fukushima Dai-chi facility after an earthquake and tsunami struck last year. Three reactors at Fukushima experienced a full meltdown, which contaminated surrounding farmland and exiled hundreds of thousands of residents.
According to the NRC's own calculations, which were also withheld in the version of the report released in March, the odds of the dam near the Oconee plant failing at some point over the next 22 years are far higher than were the odds of an earthquake-induced tsunami causing a meltdown at the Fukushima plant. ... "The NRC is lying to the American public," says David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and safety advocate.
Nuclear plants at Fort Calhoun Station in Nebraska, the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota and the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee," are among those plants identified at risk from a failure of a large dam.
"Rather than hiding the triple meltdown threat from the public and taking more than a decade to address it," said Jim Riccio, a nuclear analyst with Greenpeace, "the NRC should force Duke Energy to reduce the risk or retire the reactors."
I encourage you to read the entire original report as it is chock full of vitally important information, not just about the safety problems with nuclear power plants, but even more importantly, the extent to which the NRC, and apparently also perhaps others agencies, are withholding information that should be public in a democracy.
Given a little more time I will find other sources to bring you shocking quotes and comments from independent reputable scientists contained in this report.
Here is a link to the complete original un-redacted NRC Report Screening Analysis Report for the Proposed Generic Issue on Flooding of Nuclear Power Plant Sites Following Upstream Dam Failures by Richard H. Perkins, P.E., Michelle T. Bensi, Ph.D., Jacob Philip, P.E., Selim Sancaktar, Ph.D., U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, Division of Risk Analysis, July.
Here's an excerpt from a worst-case scenario imaging a failure of the Jocassee Dam.
Following notification from Jocassee, the reactor(s) are shutdown within approximately 1 hour. The predicted flood would reach [Oconee Nuclear Station] in approximately 5 hours, at which time the [Standby Shutdown Facility] walls are overtopped. The [Standby Shutdown Facility] is assumed to fail, with no time delay, following the flood level exceeding the height of the [Standby Shutdown Facility] wall. The failure scenario results are predicted such that core damage occurs in about 8 to 9 hours following the dam break and containment failure in about 59 to 68 hours. When containment failure occurs, significant dose [of radiation] to the public would result.
Duke Power contends that any failure of the Jocassee Dam would occur more slowly giving them more time to react, apparently, not even considering the possibility of a terrorist attack. Which may be one of the reasons these kinds of scenarios are apparently being without from the public
This leaked report also highlight an additional uncounted "external cost" of nuclear power relative to renewable alternatives. The perceived need to classify safety reports and withhold increasingly large amounts of safety information from the public.
Also, one of the lead authors of the study, Richard H. Perkins, is suggesting that the "NRC staff had improperly redacted information from the public version of his report "to prevent the disclosure of this safety information to the public because it will embarrass the agency.""
"The redacted information includes discussion of, and excerpts from, NRC official agency records that show the NRC has been in possession of relevant, notable, and derogatory safety information for an extended period but failed to properly act on it," Perkins wrote. "Concurrently, the NRC concealed the information from the public."
"If that were the case, then the NRC would need to weigh the benefits of redacting this information against the detriments to safety, open discussion, prioritization, and funding that result when information is censored from the public," Perkins told The Huffington Post. "This issue of flooding following upstream dam failure has been debated for many years. Can it still be reasonable, all these years later, that the NRC needs to redact large sections of a report that deals exclusively with a safety issue? If so, how much longer should this strategy be employed? Indefinitely? Until a specific plant is retired? Does the public have a right to know?"
I highly recommend this very long and important report.
2:35 PM PT: