====================================================================== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. ======================================================================
DW wrote: > So...what does this all mean? Well, for starters, we ought to have a serious > open ocean regulatory authority like the NRC has with nuclear: completely > financed by fees levied on oil extraction (a national oil excise tax to > start wouldn't be bad). You really are a joke. Do you come up with this stuff on your own or is this the Lambertiste education you got? http://www.truth-out.org/107091Levine And then there's corrosion, the most obvious culprit in the near-meltdown in 2002 caused by a hole in the nuclear reactor's pressure vessel lid at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio. As the NRC itself found, as reported by the Cleveland Plain Dealer: The gaping rust hole found in 2002 in the lid of the Northwest Ohio reactor was the fifth-most dangerous situation at an American nuclear plant in the last quarter century, according to a new government analysis. In a report issued Monday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission put the odds of a core meltdown of some kind at the FirstEnergy Corp. facility during the year before the rust hole's discovery at 6 in 1,000. That's about the same chance of winning the Ohio Lottery's twice-daily Pick 3 wheel bet ... A Davis-Besse near miss in 1985 ranked at No. 2 in significance, just behind the infamous partial meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three-Mile Island in 1979. In the months leading to the accidental discovery of the rust hole, Davis-Besse was 100 times more likely to have a core-damaging nuclear accident than had it been well-maintained, according to the report. But it was the NRC's indifferent oversight and caving in to the utility's demand for delayed inspections that contributed to the near catastrophe, Gunter, the GAO, and other critics have found. As Gunter summed it up in a 2002 report: First Energy, an Ohio electric utility, drove its deteriorating Davis-Besse nuclear power station dangerously close to a catastrophic accident it was revealed today. Moreover, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) capitulated to First Energy pressure to delay inspections of a vital safety component beyond a requested December 31, 2001 deadline in order to accommodate the industry rather than force an early shutdown to conduct inspections on deteriorating equipment. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) then asked for a thorough GAO report on the incident, issued in 2004, and he blasted the agency that's now supposed to protect the public when even more nuclear plants are proposed to be built: "The General Accounting Office (GAO) Report highlights shocking, serious and dangerous systemic problems at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Problems that call into question whether the agency can, as it is currently run, continue to perform its most fundamental functions-to protect public safety. This report reveals failures at almost every rung of the bureaucratic ladder at the NRC. "The crisis at Davis-Besse is the most serious safety issue to face a commercial nuclear power plant since Three Mile Island. The GAO report shows that the NRC was ill equipped, ill informed and far too slow to react. The NRC's reaction to Davis-Besse was inadequate, irresponsible and left the public at grave risk." And despite a series of GAO reports that found a broader, failed "culture of safety" at the NRC, an agency funded 90 percent by fees from nuclear power plants, the changes so far have been largely cosmetic at best, critics say. Indeed, the agency, according to Kucinich and other observers, initially ignored and discounted the GAO report about its failed oversight at Davis-Besse, even as federal investigators pursued a criminal inquiry into cover-ups by FirstEnergy officials, and the company eventually paid over $30 million in fines. As the Toledo Blade reported after a FirstEnergy engineer received probation last year for his role in the cover-up: FirstEnergy Corp., the nuclear plant's owner-operator, has paid a record $33.5 million in fines to settle civil and criminal probes that were undertaken after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was talked out of executing an emergency shutdown order it had prepared for Davis-Besse in the fall of 2001. The NRC correctly diagnosed something was amiss at Davis-Besse, but had no idea the plant's old reactor head was weeks away from bursting and allowing radioactive steam to form in containment of a US nuclear plant for the first time since the half-core meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor in 1979. A crisis was barely averted when the plant was shut down on Feb. 16, 2002, six weeks later than what the NRC had originally proposed. But the NRC was hardly just a well-meaning agency duped by wily engineers at FirstEnergy. As Gunter and others have chronicled, the NRC overruled its own staff that had found numerous safety regulation violations that created a potentially hazardous condition. A little over two years ago, one of the agency's most well-informed critics, nuclear engineer David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, gave the agency in devastating Congressional testimony a failing grade on such major functions as effective and timely enforcement. "The NRC today is very much like FirstEnergy was when the depths of the problems at Davis-Besse were discovered," he said, while ticking off safety fiascoes, like leaks and electrical misfires, at other major nuclear utility companies. He noted that fixing the problems at these risky companies involved bringing in senior managers from outside the company and totally overhauling the negligent safety culture in the firms. "But while the NRC suffers from the same chronic performance malaise, it has never received the same treatment. Thus while Davis-Besse and others are operating today at higher performance levels than in their problem years, the NRC remains at the same level it has been at for the past decades. No better, no worse, no excuse," he said. As a result, the NRC's failings contribute to the ongoing dangers posed by nuclear plants found by the Union of Concerned Scientists in its prescient report, “Nuclear Power in a Warming World.” Surprisingly, the NRC recently hired Lochbaum - which could be a sign that the agency is, at long last, taking reform seriously, or just seeking to co-opt one of its most effective critics. More recently, the NRC's own inspector general found that in reviewing requests to extend operating licenses for another 20 years, the agency too often used the industry's own slipshod inspections and essentially passed them off as the NRC's own work. "They plagiarized the companies' inspections," says Gunter, adding, "The agency staff has renewed 32 nuclear power plant sites around the country totaling 59 reactor units. Only the Yankee Rowe nuclear power station, the original license renewal pilot plant, did not get NRC approval and instead closed because the operator could not demonstrate that the plant could go another 20 years" without concerns about an embrittled reactor vessel. The inspector general found that not only did the NRC destroy working documents it used in making renewal decisions, but it also reported: "The identical or nearly identical word-for-word repetition of renewal application text found in the [NRC's] audit, inspection, or safety evaluation reports are not offset or otherwise marked to indicate the text is identical to that found in the license renewal application. A reader could conclude that they were reading NRC's independent analysis and conclusions when, in fact, it was the licensee's conclusions. [Emphasis added.] In response to such criticisms, a spokesperson for the NRC responded in an email to Truthout, "The NRC's Inspector General found that the agency's license renewal program is technically sound, and the NRC staff have made procedural changes to ensure the agency more clearly describes its findings regarding renewal applications." Regardless of all the safety, health, financial and regulatory alarms raised by critics, it still seems likely that the nuclear industry itself will play a decisive role in shaping the ongoing embrace of nuclear power by Congress and the Obama administration. Mitch Singer, a spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute, told Truthout proudly it's not spin or ad dollars that's sold nuclear power to Washington: "It's the truth that wins out over advertising." Or at least the "truth" about nuclear power as accepted by Washington insiders, with most environmental groups going along - regardless of the consequences to the public. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
