This week's revelation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's apparent assumption that it may ignore the potential impacts of widespread land contamination from a terrorist attack, as well as the lax safety procedures at the San Onofre Nuclear Station are two recent examples of Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) single minded perspective. The NRC believes that security problems are resolved and that virtually every safety malfunction at nuclear facilities results in “no danger to the public.” This is the lowest of the NRC’s classification levels and perhaps it’s time to take a look at what falls under this classification.

The falsification of documents relating to fire watches at San Onofre did place the public at risk. Fire watch issues have been the subject of dozens of documented problems at U.S. nuclear facilities. If anyone in this country believes that “no danger to the public” actually means that the public was not and is not at risk, a few citations of safety problems should disabuse them of this fantasy.

Missing radioactive fuel rods from reactors in California, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Arkansas remain unaccounted, but according to the NRC there is little cause for concern even though the threat of “dirty bombs” and proliferation stills exists.

Emergency sirens failed during tests and earthquakes in New York, California, Tennessee, and North Carolina. In California, 56 of the 131 sirens failed during an earthquake in 2003 and yet the NRC gave Pacific Gas and Electric Company a “Green” rating for emergency planning because the sirens had been “statistically“ functional during testing that year.

Malfunctions of water pumps, emergency back-up diesel generators, automatic shutdown systems, steam generators and driers, emergency core cooling water systems, valves, turbine control systems, and other safety components have repeatedly occurred in nuclear reactors across our nation. The most egregious example was an emergency core cooling system (ECCS) that would not have been able to perform its function for the 28 years the plant operated, yet the NRC said the public was “never at risk.” [1] This incident was closely followed by the same ECCS problem, undetected at the Palo Verde reactor for 19 years.

Corrosion and/or leaks afflicted reactor vessels in at least seven states. The most striking and dangerous example is the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio where a football size hole was discovered after the NRC knew that corrosion problems existed and allowed the utility to continue to operate until its next refueling outage. …

And finally, adding to the NRC’s arrogant assumption that nuclear facilities cannot be breached by committed terrorists (within and without our country) is the national scandal of sleeping guards at nuclear reactors in Pennsylvania (caught on video tape) and New York, all employed by the same firm that provides security at nine other nuclear facilities.

So what does “No danger to the public” mean to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? To the public it means that the NRC is not doing its job, and that Congressional oversight is needed immediately.

[1] Amnesty Irrational, Jim Riccio 1999

Rochelle Becker, Executive Director
Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility
www.a4nr.org
Vice-President Sierra Club National Radiation Committee
Grover Beach, CA
(858) 337-2703