Why Recent Earthquakes Should Make You Worry About Nuclear Power
A 5.8 magnitude earthquake -- the largest to hit the East Coast in nearly seven decades -- caused the shutdown of two nuclear reactors located less than 15 miles from the epicenter of the temblor. The back-up diesel generator system worked as designed (well, except for the one with the coolant leak), and by late Tuesday night operator Dominion Resources had restored offsite power.
Yet instead of putting folks at ease, the incident actually raises legitimate fears about the safety of U.S. nuclear power plants.
Consider, for starters, the fact that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken more than six years to develop new safety standards to address higher-than-expected seismic risks. It turns out that seismic risks to nuclear plants in the eastern United States were greater than the NRC had previously realized, iWatch.org reported.
North Anna, a twin-reactor nuclear facility about 85 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., was one of four plants with a seismic hazard higher than previously thought. (It's also the plant with the coolant leak that shut down one of its backup diesels.)
The North Anna power plant is designed to handle seismic activity up to 6.2 magnitude. However, there are gaps in its safety plan. An NRC review found North Anna's fire and flood protection systems were not designed to seismic standards. In other words, an earthquake could knock out its systems and leave the plant vulnerable to flooding or fire. Kind of like what happened to the Fukushima nuclear power plant this year when a design flaw allowed the diesel back-up power generators to be overwhelmed by a post-earthquake tsunami.
North Anna isn't the only power plant with safety issues. Many nuclear power plants, most of which were built more than 30 years ago, have significant safety issues, including fire protection problems and reported groundwater leaks.
North Anna's exposure to higher seismic risks and its safety gaps are particularly troubling because it also happens to contain four to five times as much spent fuel as their original designs intended, according to Bob Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. Meaning, it's the last place you'd want a meltdown to occur.
The Project on Government Oversight published an email sent by Alvarez about his concerns with North Anna:
The reactors have generated approximately 1,200 metric tons of nuclear spent fuel containing about 228,000 curies of highly radioactive materials -- among the largest concentrations of radioactivity in the United States.And nearly 40 percent of the radioactivity in the spent fuel pools comes from cesium-137, a long-lived radioisotope that gives off potentially dangerous penetrating radiation and accumulates in food over a period of centuries, Alvarez wrote. The North Anna polls hold 15 to 30 times more Cs-137 than was released by the Chernobyl accident in 1986.
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