Groundwater Study Co-Authors Lack Scientific Credentials

Here at NEI, my colleagues and I have been batting around a press release from Environment America and U.S. PIRG claiming that nuclear power plants represent a threat ground water from leaks of tritium. The report is titled, “Too Close to Home: Nuclear Power and the Threat to Drinking Water.”

From where we sit, the story seems a lot like one that the AP pushed out in June 2011 about the subject. The public needs to know that there has been no known adverse impact on public health or safety from a tritium release at commercial nuclear power plants.

While we'll have more on that later, it's also important to point out that the four co-authors of this study lack any scientific credentials.

• Jennifer Kim of U.S. PIRG has a degree in history from the University of Michigan;

• According to her own MySpace page, Courtney Abrams of Environment America graduated with a degree in Psychology from Wake Forest;
  
  
• Her Environment America colleague Rob Kerth has a BA in history from Yale;
  

• Sean Garren has a degree in Government from Dartmouth.

How this qualifies any of them to publish a study on groundwater is a puzzle to us. In any case, we'll keep an eye on reporting concerning the study, and provide updates if and when they're warranted.

Readers Weigh In On CJR's Look at AP Series on Nuclear Energy

A few days back, I pointed to a piece by the Columbia Journalism Review that took a look at NEI's dispute with the Associated Press over their series on the safety of nuclear power plants. Since that piece was published on Wednesday, a number of readers have weighed in with some interesting comments. We've included a few below:

I see you think the plants were designed for 40 years of use. I think rather that the plants were licensed for 40 years of use. When you get a drivers license lasting for four years, do you expect to quit driving after four years?

When a steam generator is replaced in a plant is the new steam generator less reliable that the same steam generator placed in a new plant?

The point here is safety is not determined by plant age. Safety is determined by measuring how safe something is. Is the plant safe when it is new? Is the plant safe 10 years later? Is the plant safe 40 years later? Is the plant safe 60 years later? Safety is not based on the age of the plant! This is especially true when large parts of the plant are replaced over time.

[...]

Jeff Donn did what many reporters do in similar situations. He presented material without context and relied on “experts” friendly to his point of view to make the material seem far more devastating than it actually is. The nuclear industry was right to go for the throat in this instance. They learned the hard way during the 70’s that if they don’t hit back at reporting like this it will over time do irreparable damage to the industry.

[...]

Understanding how carefully nuclear power plants are maintained requires more than a cursory look at some of the countless pages of documents that the industry produces every year. It is not news to any engineer that pipes made of steel occasionally rust or develop thinning walls, that electrical cable insulation becomes brittle in certain situations, or that valves develop leaking seals. We have inspection routines and planned maintenance systems that are designed to identify these situations and correct them before they cause major risks.

I'm sure there are more to come. Please feel free to join the fray. Click here to leave your own.

CJR Critiques AP Series on Nuclear Plant Safety

Over the Summer that the Associated Press (AP) ran a four-part series on safety at America's nuclear power plants by reporter Jeff Donn. Needless to say, everyone here at NEI believed the stories had some significant holes, ones that we detailed in a formal rebuttal back in June.

Earlier today, the Columbia Journalism Review published a the latest edition of its Audit Arbiter series about our dispute with the AP. Please give it a read right now.

POSTSCRIPT: Click here for the formal response from NEI's media team. Click here for additional material we published here on NEI Nuclear Notes, including links to other third party sources that found the AP's work less than convincing. NEI's Chief Nuclear Officer, Tony Pietrangelo, outlined his objections to the reporting in a video report that can be found here.

Bad Directions: Energy Blog Post Directs Readers to Shoddy AP Series

Around the time of the July 4 holiday, we responded to a four-part series published by The Associated Press that was larded with inaccuracies about the nuclear energy industry. It’s one thing for a single newspaper to get something wrong in a single print file; quite another when a global news wire service devotes more than a year and notable resources to an “investigative” series characterized by shoddy reporting throughout. What could have been a notable public service by the AP instead turned out to be a grievously misguided series that lacked vital context. NEI’s Chief Nuclear Officer Tony Pietrangelo pulled no punches in assessing the merits of the AP series in a video posted to our YouTube channel.

Most recently, this Boingboing.net post – AP: US nuclear power plant safety isn’t being tightly regulated – directs readers to the AP articles. While the Boingboing.net post contains some perspective that highlights how nuclear energy can be beneficial in the economic and environmental arenas, the AP series most certainly does not. And we weren’t the only ones troubled by the AP reporting – our regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, took the unusual step of responding formally and directly and critically to the news organization’s series.

It is wrong to conclude that nuclear plant operators are systemically working with regulators to endanger the lives of employees, their families and their neighbors by implementing subpar standards and regulations. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses the professionals who operate a facility’s reactor, in addition to continuously assessing a plant’s performance and safety. The independent NRC inspectors who work at each nuclear energy facility have unfettered access to workers and information at that site and have the authority to shut down facilities they believe are unsafe. They can also order changes in operations. Bottom line: the NRC can shut America’s nuclear plants down if they aren’t operating safely.

And if there is ever a doubt in nuclear power safety, remember this fact: there have been zero “abnormal occurrences” [the NRC’s term] throughout the U.S. nuclear energy industry over the past eight years (2003-10). Optimized technology, expertise and innovation from industry employees (your neighbors), continuous sharing of plant operating experience and precise monitoring capabilities are among the reasons U.S. citizens near nuclear energy facilities are safe.

The author of the BoingBoing post references protection of the Ft. Calhoun reactor in Nebraska in the wake of record Missouri River flooding. The facility was safe because it met all NRC requirements for flood protection (it was designed and built on a higher elevation as step one) and because Omaha Public Power District took additional measures to hold flood waters back. Among these extra measures was installing a 2,000 foot long water-filled berm to protect electrical equipment—yet another example of the nuclear energy industry exceeding federal safety standards.

Every industry has its supporters and detractors, and the flow of information will be abundant. This is why we urge everyone to effectively weigh the information included and omitted in the AP series by reading “Setting the Record Straight: NEI Responds to AP Series on Nuclear Energy.”

Safe, reliable nuclear energy is a vital part of America’s energy portfolio today. The industry is building new reactors in Georgia and South Carolina and designing the next generation of plants to maintain the most significant of low-carbon electricity we have to secure our energy future.

By NEI’s Media Relations Manager, John Keeley (you can see him in the YouTube video)

The AP Trawls for Nuclear Wickedness

It’s reasonable for journalists to beaver around the nuclear energy industry to find evidence that the industry is a nest of vipers plotting disaster and misery. That’s what journalists do. And I guess one can always find something that can be ratcheted into a breathless story. But the nuclear energy industry in context is not very, um, viperous and thus such stories tend to point at wicked seeming details that are pretty benign – in context.

The Al-Jazeera story below doesn’t really qualify here because the story has a suspicion of American motivation underlying it that makes it vulnerable to conspiracy theories and bluntly unproveable – one might even say false - assertions.

But the Associated Press, in a long story published yesterday, tries a different approach, trawling through Nuclear Regulatory Commission records to try to show a coziness between the industry and its regulators that make the party animals at the Mine Safety and Health Administration look like shrinking violets. Well, no parties in this case, but thinly veiled collusion.

For example:

CRACKED TUBING: The industry has long known of cracking in steel alloy tubing originally used in the steam generators of pressurized water reactors. Ruptures were rampant in these tubes containing radioactive coolant; in 1993 alone, there were seven. Even today, as many as 18 reactors are still running on old generators.

This is a simple point. but let’s add in two additional data points:

1. Of the 69 nuclear facilities that have steam generators (not all do), 55 have replaced their generators, with two more in the process of doing so.What the AP ignores here and throughout the article is that older equipment can be, and is, replaced.

2. The number of plants reporting (to the NRC, mind you – the AP didn’t find this out by itself) degraded steam generator tubes has fallen considerably as the tubes are replaced. Fifteen plants reported degraded tubes in the 1980s, seven plants in the 1990s, and five plants reported degraded tubes between 2000 and 2004; And since 2004? No plant has reported degraded tubing. None at all.

That’s context and it puts a decidedly different cast on the reporting. There are also errors large and small in the article:

Yet despite the many problems linked to aging, not a single official body in government or industry has studied the overall frequency and potential impact on safety of such breakdowns in recent years, even as the NRC has extended the licenses of dozens of reactors.

This one is small, meant to bolster the notion of collusion. But that single “government or industry body” would be INPO, The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. It maintains a database of operational issues and it tracks them over time. Every utility that operates a nuclear power plant has access to this information for review and corrective action as needed.

But beyond lapses in providing context and simple errors, the story raises issues that are noted and solved over time. The success of such efforts is a credit to the industry, but the AP turns it into a debit:

Two years later, cracking was allowed to grow so bad in nozzles on the reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, that it came within two months of a possible breach, the NRC acknowledged in a report. A hole in the vessel could release radiation into the environment, yet inspections failed to catch the same problem on the replacement vessel head until more nozzles were found to be cracked last year.

But the article fails to note – or the authors didn’t know – that the industry had in place a program to monitor boric acid corrosion, which is a well-known phenomenon. And immediately after Davis-Besse happened, the industry implemented a materials management initiative to strengthen the focus of research efforts and predictive maintenance in the area of materials degradation. As the story acknowledges, the cracks were detected two months before any (potential) harm could occur. In other words, the industry fixed the problem.

Obviously, the AP wants to imply that we missed disaster by that much, but if disaster is always missed by that much, then it’s logical to assume that the industry and its regulators are actually keeping a good eye on things.

Could the industry and its regulators do a better job? Sure, but a safety culture in any field is a process, not a recipe. You don’t get a soufflé at the end. You get an industry always working through issues and learning how to further enhance safety.

This has paid off: The industry’s average capacity factor—a measure of efficiency—has been within a percentage point or two of 90 percent every year for the past decade. To do this does not suggest short cuts and sloppiness; just the opposite: it demonstrates that the facilities are being well managed and maintained.

Oh, and PS: The AP built this story out of public data – you could write the same story (though a better, fairer one, I hope) if you wanted. How much more transparent could an industry be? Hard to hide in the shadows with thousand watt bulbs pointed at you.

Update 6/22, 7 am:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a response to the AP articles here (pdf).

Here's NEI's formal response as well.

Update 6/23, 9:30 am:

Rod Adams continues to batter AP's nuclear hit job. As well, here's Dan Yurman and Dr. John Bickel's critique of AP's first rubbish.