Tuesday, 18 March 2008
Plymouth, MA
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
I wrote this for publication. --Jeff Berger
[Statement Text]
[Jeff Berger is chairman of the appointed Nuclear Matters Committee of the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts.]
A Letter to The Editor in the March 12 Plymouth Massachusetts Old Colony Memorial included this comment regarding the proposed relicensing of Entergy's Pilgrim Station Nuclear Power Plant: "So long as the review of Pilgrim is governed by science and engineering, we are confident it can and will receive license extension."
With all due respect to the writer, "Mass AREA Program Coordinator" Lauren Mauriello, the fact that the review of the plant's relicensing application is being handled by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) should give every citizen in Plymouth and surrounding towns great pause.
Let me be clear: though I have been chair of Plymouth's town-appointed Nuclear Matters Committee for several years, I am writing this as a Plymouth resident and not as chair.
That said, as chair I have had an opportunity to witness the operations and behavior of the NRC. When I joined the committee, I was neutral about the NRC but in favor of safe nuclear power. I still favor safe nuclear power but the fact is that the NRC itself is a mammoth problem: it is obviously in bed with the nuclear industry, and it is doing practically nothing to protect the interests of the citizens it was created to serve. More on that momentarily.
When the Nuclear Matters Committee held a public hearing about relicensing at the Plymouth Public Library, Entergy packed it with dozens of employees who sang the praises of the company. Few "regular" (non-employee) citizens had anything positive to say. One I remember was a local business to which Entergy had donated a substantial amount of cash.
Ms. Mauriello is not a disinterested observer, either. "Mass AREA," her employer, is involved in "Government Relations" for the nuclear power industry. The Massachusetts Department of Public Safety should also be a watchdog over the nuclear industry but instead, it is a black hole where nuclear-related information goes never to be seen or heard from again. Am I the only one who finds it interesting that Ms. Mauriello (based on her own public profile on the "LinkedIn" website), before she got her current job lobbying for the nuclear industry, worked for the State of Massachusetts in the Executive Office of Public Safety?
A member of my committee observed upon resigning more than a year ago that the NRC is supposed to be a watchdog over the nuclear power industry, not a lap dog to it. Tragically for all of us, it is the latter.
Ms. Mauriello's comment that the relicensing process should be "governed by science and engineering" is vacuous tripe that sounds good but is fundamentally flawed. It is March, 2008, not August, 2001, when everything was fine and dandy and nobody (except the prior federal administration) was worried about terrorism or spent fuel vulnerability or scalding hot water being pumped into Massachusetts Bay where it does proven damage to the ecosystem.
I'm not a tree-hugger. Nuclear power is necessary -- for the moment -- until the White House is inhabited by an administration devoted to a permanent end to this country's gluttonous appetite for fossil fuels. We can (and I'm sure we will) develop alternatives that are far cleaner, safer, and less costly to the environment than fossil fuels or the current crop of nuclear power generation facilities.
But the NRC is an absolutely counterproductive disgrace which fails miserably at its one and only job, protecting public health and safety by regulating the nuclear power industry -- Ms. Mauriello's biased protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. Why? Look:
1. The NRC requires thorough inspection of the core shroud (similar in structure to a tin can) surrounding the reactor vessel only over the course of ten years, which means cracks could appear and not be seen until years later when they are serious. In Japan when significant cracks appear, they replace the core shroud at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. In the US, they use what industry insiders call "jock straps" --- glorified (big) bandages to hold the pieces together. Good policy? Hardly.
2. The NRC requires no real-time meteorological monitoring outside plant grounds. So what? If an accident occurs which releases a deadly radioactive plume, that plume leaves the plant and goes somewhere. Along the way, weather and Plymouth topography will likely cause it to change direction. Where it goes matters because town officials need to tell Plymoutheons whether to evacuate or shelter-in-place. Punch line: without effective real-time meteorological monitoring at many locations inside the "Emergency Protection Zone" (EPZ) outside the plant, town officials will have no clue where the plume is going and therefore, no way to save lives. Good policy? No: it's a deadly policy that is highly likely to cost Plymouth people their lives if we have a serious accident -- yet the NRC does not require such meteorological monitoring outside the plant within the EPZ, so Entergy dutifully obeys NRC regulations and does nothing --- no real-time "met" monitoring outside the plant.
3. The NRC doesn't take into account evacuation plans in its deliberations. They're not what Ms. Mauriello called "science and engineering." No, they are common sense. Plymouth's plans were hatched when Plymouth was a village. Today it is a city (except by law) of 60,000 people. The town's evacuation plan has been obsolete for years but the NRC refuses to do anything to make sure it is current and effective. Good policy? No: yet another deadly policy reflective of just how horribly the NRC does its job.
4. Until recently the NRC wouldn't consider terrorism either. A court had to tell them to "consider" it but in their world, "consider" and "make it invulnerable to any conceivable attack" have decidedly different meanings. There may as well be a huge illuminated red target painted on top of Pilgrim Station. The NRC is still doing nothing significant to require better external protection of plants. It is not the plants' responsibility in any event; it is the U. S. Government's responsibility to protect critical infrastructure but under the current Washington administration, it's doing practically nothing but window dressing. Virtually all our oil refineries and many nuclear plants and LNG facilities lack rock-hard safeguards which should have been put in place after 9/11. It hasn't happened. Some safety experts think everything's fine. Unfortunately we can't read terrorists' minds and that fact alone makes me cringe with the NRC in charge. Good policy? Hardly.
5. Nuclear waste at Pilgrim is stored in pools which the NRC says is a safe storage method. But as we have seen chillingly before, terrorists think outside the box. Just because the NRC says the pools are safe doesn't make it so. Spent fuel needs to be absolutely invulnerable to attack and right now it absolutely is not.
If, as the pro-nuclear lobbyist Ms. Mauriello stated, the review of Pilgrim's application is only "governed by science and engineering" we are in big trouble. Our lives depend on that review also being based on common sense and on recent history, and on an NRC that puts as its first obligation the safeguarding of the lives of the people it is entrusted to serve.
The NRC has a horrendous track record as noted above. Perhaps the next administration will do better, but by then a very imperfect NRC will have approved a very imperfect local nuclear power plant.
Entergy obeys laws and regulations, as far as I can tell. But that's the problem: the NRC formulates those regulations. My quarrel is with the NRC, which does its job with overwhelming incompetence.
That is not something that anyone here should be comfortable with or tolerate silently. Not even Ms. Mauriello.
Jeff Berger
Plymouth, Massachusetts |
