Comments on Arkansas Nuclear One Plant Accident

Our prayers go out to our colleagues at Arkansas Nuclear One where an industrial accident claimed the life of one worker and injured eight others. The accident occurred yesterday morning at approximately 7:45 a.m. when a generator stator fell as it was being moved out of the turbine building. There was no radiological release and no impact on public health and safety.

We are greatly saddened by this loss, and offer our deepest sympathy to the family and friends of the employee who lost his life.

The nuclear industry is a close community, and we ask that you please keep our friends at Arkansas Nuclear One in your thoughts today. 

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Nuclear Industry’s Emergency Preparedness Programs Fully and Adequately Test Response Capabilities

The Associated Press published a misleading article in newspapers across the country last week in which it largely calls into question some of the nuclear energy industry’s emergency preparedness programs. The article suggests that new changes to federal regulations were passed behind closed doors and fail to adequately test evacuation procedures. This mischaracterization in reporting, not a far cry from its faulty four-part series that was critiqued by the Columbia Journalism Review last year, could not be further from the truth as it blatantly disregards the latest scientific evidence on how accident scenarios could potentially unfold at nuclear energy facilities and the rigorous drill cycles conducted annually at the nation’s nuclear plants.

At issue here are changes that were approved last August by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to enhance the nuclear industry’s emergency preparedness regulations. Sue Perkins-Grew, NEI’s director of emergency preparedness, provides us with a quick overview of the changes:

Nuclear plant licensees are required to enhance their drill and exercise programs by incorporating a wide range of scenario elements, including hostile action. Scenarios used in the biennial evaluated exercises must be sufficiently varied to prevent participants from “anticipating” a response. To accommodate the added scenario elements in biennial exercises, the cycle was expanded to eight years from six years.

The additional emergency drill scenarios are incorporated into the existing drill cycle. The eight-year cycle amounts to something that looks like this:

• Four biennial exercises that include the following scenario variations (new scenarios denoted in blue):
• Hostile action directed at the plant site involving the integration of offsite resources with onsite response
• An initial classification of or rapid escalation to a “Site Area Emergency” or “General Emergency”
• No radiological release or an unplanned minimal radiological release that requires the site to declare a Site Area Emergency, but does not require the declaration of a General Emergency
• Off-hours and an unannounced exercise
• Demonstration of post-plume or ingestion pathway response
• A radiological release and declaration of a General Emergency that results in protective actions for the general public
• Additional drills and table top exercises that demonstrate a licensee’s ability to perform all key safety functions within an emergency response organization.

The added regulations complement the already comprehensive set of periodic drills that are conducted at the nation’s nuclear energy facilities. Some highlights of these drill programs are listed below.

• Approximately six to eight times per year, operators are evaluated on their ability to respond to a variety of accident events presented in a plant simulator.
• Operators are also tested by NRC inspectors on a biennial basis.
• Each nuclear plant site conducts routing training and drills to help their Emergency Response Organization members develop and maintain proficiency with assigned functions.
• Many training sessions and drills that include participation by state or local officials.
• One biennial exercise integrated with offsite public safety organizations that is evaluated by NRC and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) evaluators.

Given the already rigorous drill cycle and the additional scenario elements that have been incorporated as part of the NRC’s revised emergency preparedness rule, the nuclear energy industry believes that the new requirements further enhance the industry’s emergency response capabilities.

Perkins-Grew commented on the completeness of these reviews in a letter to the editor published over the weekend:

New requirements have been added to make these important integrated exercises less predictable. The new scenarios include: terrorist attacks; fires or explosions damaging large areas of a power plant; events that require activation of emergency responders but do not yield a significant radiological release, and events that escalate within 30 minutes to the highest emergency levels.

The new requirements build on existing emergency preparedness and response capabilities to add another layer of safety that is informed by the latest science.

Bottom line: Every U.S. nuclear energy facility has a comprehensive plan to respond to a wide range of scenarios.

Not only do the new NRC regulations require an increased frequency of drills on various challenging, high-risk scenarios, but they also layer in new scientific evidence that highly suggests that severe accidents at nuclear energy facilities will unfold more slowly than previously anticipated, resulting in a decreased potential for widespread dispersal of radioactive materials. The State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses (SOARCA) report, released in February, offers the following preliminary findings:

• Existing resources and procedures can stop an accident, slow it down or reduce its impact before it can affect the public;
• Even if accidents proceed uncontrolled, they take much longer to happen and release much less radioactive material than earlier analyses suggested; and
• The analyzed accidents would cause essentially zero immediate deaths and only a very, very small increase in the risk of long-term cancer deaths.

Given this new scientific evidence on the likely progression of a nuclear plant accident, the new NRC requirements call on emergency planners to focus on the two-mile radius where the public would most likely be impacted, an issue that The AP disagrees with.

Taking issue with the news report, the NRC published a “For the Record” last week that defended its approach:

Extensive research shows health risks from an accident would be greatest within two miles of a plant, so guidance for the new rule focuses on that close-in population. Getting the “two-mile” people relocated first is more effective than potentially clogging evacuation routes with people further away, and can ensure resources are available for protective actions within 10 miles of the plant. Other research, announced earlier this year, provides additional insight into how successful EP [emergency preparedness] procedures, combined with the slow-developing nature of a reactor accident, can keep the public safe.

This measured approach to evacuations ensures that responders can protect the health and safety of the public most at risk first in the unlikely event of an accident, while still monitoring for radiation and informing the public within a 10-mile emergency planning zone around the nuclear energy facility. In the event of a release of radiation, state and local governments will extend radiation monitoring and sampling out to a 50-mile radius to ensure that radioactive materials do not enter the food or drinking water supply.

Aside from the years of research and planning among the industry and federal regulators in testing, developing and implementing the new federal emergency preparedness requirements, The AP also wrongly asserts that the public was not involved in this thorough process. To this point, the NRC reinforced its commitment to transparency by explaining the many opportunities for which the public could comment:

The NRC discussed the proposed changes at public conferences in 2007 and 2008, and the agency issued draft rule language in early 2008. Additional public meetings on the draft language in 2008 were followed by a proposed rule published in the Federal Register for public comment in May 2009. The NRC took public input on the proposed rule for five months, holding a dozen public meetings and gathering several hundred comments. Staff from the NRC and FEMA briefed the Commission on Dec. 8, 2009, and May 3, 2011, both of which involved a panel of external stakeholders, regarding the proposed rule.

NEI also wanted to ensure that its key audiences were given the facts when it came to the nuclear energy industry’s exhaustive emergency preparedness procedures, which is why we videotaped the interview between Tony Pietrangelo, NEI’s chief nuclear officer, and an AP TV producer.

The U.S. nuclear energy industry is trained, tested and held accountable to its emergency response procedures by one of the world’s most stringent nuclear regulators. Without a doubt, our nation’s nuclear energy facilities are prepared for the unthinkable, despite The AP’s example of selective and incomplete reporting.

For more information, see NEI’s fact sheet on emergency preparedness at nuclear energy facilities.

Photo credits: Times Free Press. Great article and video on the newspaper’s website on a recent emergency drill conducted at TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant.

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Wanted: New Stunt Men for Greenpeace

The French arm of Greenpeace is probably searching for a few new recruits after two of its activists were arrested today by French authorities for paragliding onto the grounds of the Bugey nuclear energy facility and dropping a smoke bomb. The stunt is nothing more than a political ploy by the organization to expose what it calls, “gaps,” in nuclear plant security ahead of the French presidential election. However, plant owner EDF assures the public that no such security gaps exist and that the plant remained safe and secure despite today’s criminal activity:

Safety at the installation was never called into question. Safety measures put in place at the end of 2011 allowed the detection and immediate arrest of the intruder.

But, some people still wrongly believe that the criminal activity proves just how easily someone could intrude a nuclear plant and wreak havoc. To their false notions, I’d like to point out a few facts about nuclear plant security.

First, simply landing at a nuclear energy facility via a paraglider is about the same as watching a feather land on a bucket of water. Nuclear energy facilities are highly fortified structures with many built-in, redundant safety measures, making it nearly impossible to penetrate the reactor and cause a radiation release.

The reactor is protected by roughly 4 feet of steel-reinforced concrete with a thick steel liner and the reactor vessel is made of steel about 6 inches thick. The steel-reinforced concrete containment structures are designed to withstand the impact of natural disasters as well as airborne objects with a substantial force.

Research by the Electric Power Research Institute after 9/11 confirmed the latter part of these scenarios in a 2002 study on the impact of an unexpected jetliner attack. The study results found that the structures that house reactor fuel can adequately guard against a release of radiation in the event of a terrorist strike by a large, fully fueled Boeing 767-400. The state-of-the-art computer modeling techniques used in the study determined that the areas of the plant most vulnerable to radiation release—including used fuel storage pools or the nuclear reactor—could withstand the impact forces despite concrete crushing and bent steel on the containment structures.

NEI has a video that shows the different layers of protection in a reactor containment structure and also the impact to a jetliner if it were to strike one of these elaborate structures (around the 1:30-mark).

As you can see in the video, a jetliner that strikes a nuclear energy facility at roughly 350 miles per hour (about the same speed as the aircraft that struck the Pentagon on September 11) does more harm to the plane than the structure. One can only imagine what dire consequences would come to a paraglider if he or she were to strike a nuclear energy facility at the same force!

Second, if the paraglider actually was a terrorist who had attempted to fly into a reactor and cause damage, he would have had a lot more to worry about—including the French military.

Threats of aerial attack are serious scenarios that are handled with great care by the military and air traffic control. These types of attacks are not something that government authorities, or nuclear energy facilities, take lightly and given such a scenario, there are provisions in place to “neutralize” the attacker. In fact, after the Greenpeace stunt, EDF’s head of the nuclear division Dominique Miniere confirmed this point.

The case of aircraft approaching nuclear plants is handled with great care and the French air force intervenes to divert airplanes violating--generally by mistake--the no-fly zone around nuclear plants, he said. "Sometimes airplanes get lost and they get the scare of their life," Miniere said.

This type of high-level, interagency security is mirrored in the United States, making U.S. nuclear energy facilities some of the best-defended facilities among the nation’s critical infrastructure. The utilities that operate the plant monitor the airspace around the nuclear energy facility and the government and the Transportation Security Administration protect the area.

After talking to NEI’s Security Director Dave Kline this morning about the Greenpeace stunt, he reassured me that U.S. nuclear plants are very secure facilities:

I am very confident that the U.S. plants would identify and neutralize any threats related to paragliders.

Put that way, I think Kline fully captures the ridiculousness of stunts by Greenpeace activists to show the “threat of aerial attack.” It only begs the question…what’s next? Hot air balloooning over a facility?

In the French case, officials were able to make the determination that the paraglider and his accomplice were not trying to cause harm, but rather, to make a political statement. This is why they arrested the activists immediately after the demonstration. In the future, I’d hate to hear about the copycat stuntman who meets a different fate and learns firsthand what the word “neutralize” means…

Photo: AFP/Greenpeace

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