Industry Presents New Strategy to Increase Safety, Address NRC’s Post-Fukushima Recommendations

The industry will present a strategy to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today on how it plans to enhance safety at the nation’s 67 plant sites to better equip them for unexpected events. The strategy—known as the “diverse and flexible mitigation capability,” or FLEX—addresses many of the recommendations set forth by the NRC’s Fukushima task force and takes into account some of the early lessons from the Fukushima accident on the need to maintain key safety functions amid conditions where electricity may be lost, back-up equipment could be damaged, and several reactors may be involved.

NEI’s Adrian Heymer, executive director for Fukushima regulatory response, held a media briefing Wednesday to explain the FLEX approach:

FLEX is a set of portable equipment that is located in diverse locations around the plant. We think there needs to be more than one set of equipment at diverse locations that can be quickly deployed and connected to provide injection and power supplies for instrumentation. What you want to do is inject water so that you keep the reactor [and spent fuel pools] cool. At the same time you want to know what is going on in the reactor—so it’s instrumentation for monitoring, for which you need power supplies.

FLEX will include equipment such as additional pumps, generators, batteries and chargers that will be located in diverse locations—for instance, on the east and west sides of the plant site. The equipment will be commercial-grade, but with program controls—which are still being defined—so that the equipment will be tested with results being subject to NRC oversight.


The strategy is “flexible” in that it does not dictate that permanent equipment be installed, but rather that the plant sites prepare portable equipment that could be used for any catastrophic event. The New York Times’ Matthew Wald explains:

A clear problem at Fukushima, he [Heymer] said, was that the tsunami was bigger than what the plant was designed for. If the operators had taken an approach based on specific hazards, he said, “instead of having a meter high barrier, they might have had a 10-meter high barrier,” although the actual tsunami was 14 to 15 meters high. The institute’s approach would be to take some general precautions rather than depend on the commission’s regular approach of determining probability before deciding what steps are needed.

Thus, the FLEX approach allows the industry to more quickly address high-priority safety concerns ahead of NRC regulations, which Heymer said could take time to implement due to the administrative analyses and technical reviews that would be involved:

Eventually there would be, we think, a rulemaking that would go in parallel. But this is a way of installing and achieving additional mitigation contingency in a shorter period of time. So, you get the same benefit, but rather than going through the normal process we try to expedite it by just getting on and installing the equipment and having a rulemaking to go in parallel.

In a blog post yesterday, the NRC acknowledged the industry’s FLEX plan as a step in the right direction:

The NRC staff believes this approach is a reasonable starting point, although more work is needed on defining these strategies. We also must ensure the NRC can inspect how plants put the strategies in place and that we can hold plants accountable for keeping those strategies ready and available.

The bottom line is that we believe these combined developments may enhance the agency’s approach to implementing the recommendations.

The FLEX approach is just one part of a larger industry response to the events at Fukushima. Heymer said that the FLEX strategy would allow for at least three days of keeping the nuclear fuel cool, and that regional response centers are also being pursued as yet another line of defense against a catastrophic event. As the various levels of safety enhancements are added, the industry plans to train and test its plant workers regularly so that they are well-equipped for emergency situations.

The FLEX concept is based on how the industry responded to the events of 9/11, in which additional security precautions—such as portable generators, water pumps, hoses and batteries—were put in place to mitigate against “beyond design-basis events,” or unlikely events that are considered outside the scope of what a plant should be designed or regulated to withstand.

Please note, this story was also cross-posted at NEI's Safety First microsite.

Need A Little Soap To Clean Off the “Dirt”

I came across an article this week penned by professor Benjamin Sovacool that purports to give readers “the dirt on nuclear power.” The article gives way to hasty generalizations and leaves readers with a false view of one of the nation’s safest industries, and I’d like to point out a few places where there are holes in his arguments.

The first problem: Sovacool lumps common industry terms, “incidents” and “accidents,” into one venti-sized category of “accidents.” Why does he do this? I’m guessing to add to the Armageddon-like anxiety he wants his readers to feel.

Sovacool states:

Incidents are unforeseen events and technical failures that occur during normal plant operation and result in no off-site releases of radiation or severe damage to equipment. Accidents refer to either off-site releases of radiation or severe damage to plant equipment. …

Under these classifications, the number of nuclear accidents, even including the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini, is low. But if one redefines an accident to include incidents that either resulted in the loss of human life or more than $50,000 in property damage, a very different picture emerges.

He continues by providing additional examples of how everything falling under his redefined “accidents” category leads to death, destruction and demise. However, a couple of key points should be made before he submits his new definition to Merriam Webster.

First, “accidents” are NOT the same as “incidents,” and should not be treated the same way. Each term is distinctly classified because they each require different responses by involved government, regulatory and other agencies in how they are addressed. For example, if you look at auto insurance—your auto insurance company will treat a minor fender bender differently than an accident involving total demolition of the vehicle and injury to the driver (and possibly others). The reason for this is NOT because the auto industry is trying to cheat you, but rather because the auto carrier has to look at the overall picture—safety implications (establish fault—with the driver or equipment?), involved parties (emergency responders, hospitals, etc.), and overall costs of repair.

In the nuclear industry, “incidents” and “accidents” are treated similarly in that they are classified based on how they should be handled and what agencies should be involved. In fact, if you look at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), you will see that they have categorized the two types differently according to affects the incident or accident has on: people and the environment, radiological barriers and control, and defense-in-depth. This categorization serves an important purpose in establishing roles and responsibilities for managing the crisis and determining how to best address and fix the safety problem. For example, an incident involving a fire in one area of the facility not near the nuclear reactor will not warrant a full-scale international investigation, extensive radiation monitoring, federal responders, etc. However, if that fire sparked near the reactor and caused an “accident” at the site, those actions by the nuclear industry would probably be warranted and the global nuclear industry would be at the plant’s doorstep trying to take steps to prevent them from occurring at their own sites.

This is also not to say that the nuclear industry does not learn from “incidents” as well—or that they are any less important. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is revered as a model to countries around the world that are creating their own nuclear regulating bodies because of its strict regulatory oversight. The regulator’s role in an “incident” would be just the same as during an “accident”—to ensure that the plant is operating safely or to shut it down immediately. No questions asked. The industry takes safety incredibly seriously and has many layers of built-in protection in reactors’ designs and reinforces best operating practices through employee reporting mechanisms and other daily checks to ensure safety is always first.

Which brings me to another gaping hole in Sovacool’s argument: he clearly ignores the evidence about the nuclear industry’s strong safety record. In paragraph four, he states that the number of nuclear accidents “is low,” but chooses to ignore this crucial fact for the sake of his flawed argument.

Let’s look at the facts. In its 2010 safety and operations report, the World Association of Nuclear Operators, an international organization that consolidates best practices from operating nuclear plants worldwide, found on the topic of safety system performance:

For the 12th straight year, key backup safety systems concurrently met their individual availability goals more than 90 percent of the time. Nuclear power plants are built with multiple safety systems and backup power supplies so these systems are available, if needed, even when maintenance is being performed on a similar system or component. The three principal backup safety systems are two main cooling systems and back-up power supplies used to respond in the event of unusual situations. Each system at every plant has an availability goal just shy of 100 percent, and 93 percent of these backup safety systems met their individual goal, assuring that multiple layers of safety were in place as designed.

On the topic of industrial safety, the report also goes on to state that:

The nuclear industry is one of the nation’s safest working environments. U.S. nuclear plants continued to post a low industrial accident rate in 2010 with 0.09 industrial accidents per 200,000 worker-hours, the lowest level in a decade and well below the 2010 goal of 0.2. Statistics from other industries through 2009, as compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, show that it is safer to work at a nuclear power plant than in the manufacturing sector and even the real estate and financial sectors.

(See NEI’s press release for more information on the report.)

Coincidentally, Sovacool also mentions that the nuclear industry’s death rate—under his new definition of “accidents”—would be extraordinarily high—a claim that does not stand scrutiny if you examine the facts. A March post by Next Big Future gives the latest data in this regard, showing the nuclear industry to have the lowest average death rate per terrawatt-hour (0.04), lower than the coal, oil, natural gas, biofuels, solar, wind, and hydro industries.

Sovacool’s hasty generalizations extend beyond nuclear plants to include reprocessing facilities, and he also shares incredible, “dirty” stats on the nuclear industry:

To put a serious accident in context, according to data from my forthcoming book Contesting the Future of Nuclear Power, if 10 million people were exposed to radiation from a complete nuclear meltdown (the containment structures fail completely, exposing the inner reactor core to air), about 100,000 would die from acute radiation sickness within six weeks. About 50,000 would experience acute breathlessness, and 240,000 would develop acute hypothyroidism. About 350,000 males would be temporarily sterile, 100,000 women would stop menstruating, and 100,000 children would be born with cognitive deficiencies. There would be thousands of spontaneous abortions and more than 300,000 later cancers.

I’ll have to stay tuned to his latest book to see what kind of scientific basis there is to his figures and to investigate whether or not he includes the protective actions that would be taken by the utility or local/state/federal government in the event of an accident. But for now, I’d just like to point out that even in the case of Fukushima, there have not been any radiation-related deaths. The last of three deaths that NEI reported at the facility was not believed to be from radiation, and the other two workers died while trying to stabilize the plant during the tsunami.

Given that the overall premise of his argument is flawed and that none of his facts or stats are cited (or footnoted for that matter!), I’d caution everyone to think twice before believing his “dirt” on the nuclear industry.

Pictured: Benjamin K. Sovacool, from GoodPlanet.info.

Are U.S. Navy Diesel Engines Used at Nuclear Plants?

Investigative journalism. Works well when reporters do their homework, but is questionable when they make up their own facts.

This week I ran across an article in the San Diego Reader on an interview with Greg Palast – “corporate fraud investigator turned investigative journalist.” For those of you who always buy into anything under the veil of “investigative journalism,” I’m here to point out where it can sometimes get iffy.

In the interview with Palast, The Reader says:

Diesel engines take time to warm up before they reach full power-generating capacity. But these massive engines, with base horsepower ratings well into the thousands (and subsequently doubled by strapping on a turbocharger), need to be online and running at full capacity in 10–12 seconds after a failure occurs in order to avert disaster. Frequently harvested from retired cruise ships, the engines simply aren’t capable of firing up as required.

Frequently harvested from retired cruise ships? What? I know the industry works closely with former U.S. Navy nukes, but I didn’t think they were THAT close.

I immediately took his claim to NEI’s Principal Engineer Vijay Nilekani who straight out called it FALSE. Here’s his response:

All diesel engines in U.S. nuclear plants come from just three manufacturers (Fairbanks Morse, TransAmerica and I think the third one is General Motors). Although it is true that the same manufacturers do make diesel engines for ships, the diesels supplied to the nuclear industry are “nuclear quality grade,” which means they are very high quality and cost many times more. Also, all spare parts for maintenance are nuclear quality grade as well, coming from the original manufacturer. Unauthorized substitution of parts if not permitted by Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations.

What about their reliability? Are they really as faulty as Palast claims? Nilekani’s answer:

Even though diesel engines are rarely used in the real world for an actual electrical emergency because the transmission systems in the U.S. are very reliable, they still undergo rigorous preventive maintenance per manufacturers’ recommendations (and usually every two years are replaced with new parts). All diesel engines are tested every month to make sure that they start within the required time, load the emergency buses, etc. Even the diesel fuel is inspected and tested to make sure that it is very high quality. There is also a lot of predictive maintenance performed, such as lubricant analysis or vibration analysis, which have helped to keep their reliability in the upper 90th percentile.

Whew! So basically, it looks like Palast’s personal agenda of “exposing” the nuclear industry for putting profit before safety has hindered his ability to actually investigate the topic and report the truth. Go ahead and count me out for buying his latest book, although, I’m sure that it would make for some very interesting reading….

Photo: Greg Palast featured in San Diego Reader

FEMA to Conduct Nationwide Test of Emergency Alert System

The Federal Emergency Management Agency needs your help in spreading the message that it will be conducting a first-of-a-kind nationwide test of its Emergency Alert System next Wednesday, November 9, at 2 P.M. EST.
The alert and warning system serves as a tool the President could use, if ever needed, to provide information and communicate to Americans during an emergency.
FEMA’s website provides the skinny on what to expect during the test:

• The test will be approximately 30 seconds long and will look and sound very similar to the frequent local tests of the Emergency Alert System;
• It will be transmitted via television and radio stations within the U.S., including Alaska, Hawaii, the territories of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa;
• An audio message will interrupt television and radio programming indicating: “This is only a test,” though text may not indicate this same message on the screen on every television channel;
• Organizations that serve people with disabilities or people with limited English proficiency should be aware that they may receive requests for information or assistance from broadcasters or other communications service providers and emergency managers in the days leading up to, during, and after the test; and
• When the test is over, regular programming will resume. In the coming days, our agencies will be releasing additional information to help inform the public about this test. Resources, including videos in accessible formats, can be found at www.fema.gov/eastest.

Although the test will involve radio and television stations, it will not be broadcast on some other communication channels.

The test will not involve other communication devices such as the Internet, LAN and mobile telephones. No other communications networks or devices will be impacted by the test, meaning that people will be able to continue use their cell phones, the internet and other communications channels during the test. There will be no disruption of those services.

FEMA, the Federal Communications Commission and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been working in partnership with one another to conduct the nationwide test. Under Executive Order 13407, the federal government is charged with having an emergency alert system in place for use by the President “under all conditions.”
Visit FEMA’s Facebook page or website to learn more.
Image of widget from FEMA’s website.