regards,

First off, I have to say that Alan has no idea what he’s talking about with respect to Davis Besse, and I seriously doubt that Alan knows the first thing about the difference between a small-break LOCA and a large-break LOCA.

Aside: Of course, even a small-break LOCA can completely junk a plant, as TMI demonstrated, but we’re talking about safety issues here. Of course, Davis Bessie would have been totaled if the steel liner had ruptured. It was definitely a low-point in the history of the management of nuclear plants in the US and the owners of Davis Bessie are rightly criticized, but the industry and the regulator learned from this incident. (Sadly, they should have learned from the French, who were aware of these issues well in advance of the incident.) Nevertheless, senseless fearmongering based on ignorant speculation is also inexcusable. Learn something before commenting on what the possible consequences of an accident would have been. In particular, learn that scenarios such as this and even worse are analyzed with excruciating detail and review. [end of aside]

Although some of what Alan says is certainly true (e.g., the liner was not designed to provide structural integrity for the vessel) and I’m glad that he claims to be a “strong supporter” of nuclear energy, I have to admit that, personally, I find his use of wild speculation and fear to hawk a few pills to be rather disgusting.

Perhaps distributing KI pills is a good thing; perhaps it’s more trouble than it’s worth. These decisions should be based on sound risk analysis and rational thought, not on imagined worst-case scenarios and unsubstantiated claims. After all, we don’t issue a parachute to every passenger on a commercial airplane, do we? Why is that?

As for “human fallibility” and “flawless performance” … heh … don’t make me laugh. I’m willing to bet that Alan risks his life on the near “flawless performance” of others every day. We all do this when we drive our cars or simply cross the street. Just one slip, just one slight turn of the steering wheel (or a failure in the steering or a failure in the breaks) will send a car travelling in the opposite direction hurtling into your vehicle at a relative speed of 80 mph or more. Think you’ll survive? You and your entire family could be killed in an instant. It happens to roughly 40,000 Americans every year. That’s an average of over four deaths every hour.

Now that’s scary. Put in this context, the Davis-Besse incident seems trivial.

The film could have been more balanced but I appreciated the fact that it showed how much the Soviet government bungled the incident, even after it happened. As mentioned, thyroid cancer did increase and this could have been lessened if the Soviets had quickly announced the accident and distributed potassium iodine. The cleanup was initially very poorly managed. Other countries which had equipment that could have helped were never informed. People were not moved out of the immediate area as fast as they should have been. Not even the Soviet Premier was fully informed of it.

The film is not all that inaccurate. It’s not a very fair picture because it focuses on those who were in the worst case senerio. There is another film which has run on the Discovery Channel called “Disaster At Chernobyl” and I actually liked that film because it did a very good job of showing the events leading up to the explosion and the fact that there were numerous times when the supervisors violated the most basic safety procedures. I though it was a pretty good illustration of the fact that the reactor was not built to any kind of reasonable standards and was operated in a manner that was basically criminally negligent.

You seem awfully confident about your assessment of the likely consequences of a reactor vessel breach–can you offer some sources supporting your position?

I am a strong supporter or nuclear energy, though a critic of some of the policies of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I believe that US plants are reliable, well-run operations, and that nuclear power will hopefully play a growing role in meeting US energy needs in the future. In the interest of full disclosure, I should also point out that the company I work for (ANBEX) is the primary supplier of KI tablets to the NRC, and I have been involved in this issue for over 25 years.

My chief complaint is that while the NRC acknowledges the value of KI, they refuse to assure its availability, in the amount that would be needed, to the people who would need it, in the event of a release of radioactive iodine from any US power plant. Their current policy is to have enough only for people living within 10 miles of US plants, despite the fact that experience and their own research has concluded it could be needed for up to 200 miles. (At Chernobyl, the NRC has reported that 97% of the first 750 known cases of thyroid cancer in Belarus took place among people located more than 30 miles away from the reactor.) I further object to the fact that the NRC has decided that it is more important to protect the reputation of the nuclear power industry, than it is to protect the people who live within the potential danger zone of nuclear plants.

That you do not have KI tablets although you live within 10 miles of Indian Point is not surprising. The program to distribute them was run by the NRC, and very few efforts were made to assure that people eligible for the free tablets were made aware of the program. Thus, only about 15% of people living near the reactors actually picked them up.

One of the arts in pharmaceutical manufacturing (which is what the company I work for does) is balancing the need for acceptable shelf life with high bioavailability (the speed and ability of a pharmaceutical to be absorbed by the body in order to achieve the desired therapeutic effect). Properly manufactured KI tablets achieve this balance by careful formulation and specialized packaging.

But non-pharmaceutical KI does not have to be concerned with bioavailability, and consequently is manufactured with a large amounts of stabilizers, drying agents, preservatives and other additives designed to keep the product from deteriorating in the bottle and on the shelf. But these same additives also retard KI’s dissolution in the body and greatly reduce its bioavailability. Thus, non-pharmaceutical grade KI would make a poor protective agent. If it is ever needed, you would certainly want the good stuff.

You are wrong about the stainless liner at Davis-Besse. It was less than 3/8 inch thick, not 1 inch. Its purpose was solely to protect against the corrosive effects of boric acid, and it is far too thin to provide structural integrity for the pressure vessel. This is supposed to be achieved by the over 6 inches of steel on the outside of the vessel, but at Davis-Besse the structural steel had corroded away leaving a hole that NRC personnel described as “football sized.”

Had this reactor gone back into service, it is likely that the pressure vessel would have ultimately failed. But your belief that this would have merely led to “increased radiological contamination within the containment” illustrates breath-taking indifference to the consequences of this kind of an event. Water at over 500 degrees squirting out of a hole at over 2000 psi directly into the control rod mechanism would almost certainly have disabled the ability of the operators to shut down the reactor. Your soothing belief that this “could easily be managed by the ECCS” is fantasy. And your confident optimism that containment in an accident of this nature would not be breached is utterly without merit.

But it is your failure to understand that there are key similarities between current US nuclear operations, and the past events at TMI and Chernobyl, that outweigh the differences. The melt at TMI wasn’t caused by a stuck valve, it was due to operator error. And what occurred at Chernobyl was clearly the result of its operators breaking established safety procedures, for reasons that never could have been anticipated. Surely you can’t believe that the nuclear industry has solved the problem of human fallibility, and from now on we can depend on only flawless performance from the people who run our plants, and need not be prepared in case they screw-up.

Or do you believe this?

You call past accidents “not relevant” to today’s operations, and clearly hold the belief that “accidents can’t happen” to today’s rectors. You seem not to understand that they are called “accidents” because they occur from unimagined causes at unpredictable times. Your belief that “you can do damn nearly whatever you please to a reactor” without fear of danger is exactly the attitude that leads to catastrophe. Indeed, you inadvertently demonstrate this relaxed disregard of danger by your cheerful willingness to believe that things like nuclear plant personnel sleeping on duty is no big deal And this, of course, only assures that one day the inevitable will occur.

The many hundreds of atmospheric tests at NTS released an astonishing amount of radioactivity – many, many EBq of radioactivity, which certainly included plenty of I-131. Far more radioactive iodine was released at NTS over the years – and other radionuclides too – than was released at Chernobyl. Nuclear power isn’t a cause for concern – but those tests certainly were.

We lived 10 miles down wind from Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant. No one ever handedo or suggested we should have Iodine pills.

David

http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2008/02/should-we-be-concerned-about-guards.html