Alternet/Brad Jacobson
The Worst Yet to Come? Why Nuclear Experts Are Calling Fukushima a Ticking Time-Bomb
Experts say acknowledging the threat would call into
question the safety of dozens of identically designed nuclear power
plants in the U.S.
May 4, 2012 |
Photo Credit: Shutterstock/ Sergey150770
More than a year after the triple meltdown at the
Fukushima Daiichi power plant, the Japanese government, Tokyo Electric
Power Company (Tepco) and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
present similar assurances of the site's current state: challenges
remain but everything is under control. The worst is over.
But nuclear waste experts say the Japanese are literally playing with
fire in the way nuclear spent fuel continues to be stored onsite,
especially in reactor 4, which contains the most irradiated fuel -- 10
times the deadly cesium-137 released during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear
accident. These experts also charge that the NRC is letting this threat
fester because acknowledging it would call into question safety at
dozens of identically designed nuclear power plants around the U.S.,
which contain exceedingly higher volumes of spent fuel in similar
elevated pools outside of reinforced containment.
Reactor 4: The Most Imminent Threat
The spent fuel in the hobbled unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi not only
sits in an elevated pool outside the reactor core's reinforced
containment, in a high-consequence earthquake zone adjacent to the ocean
-- just as nearly all the spent fuel at the nuclear site is stored --
but it's also open to the elements because a hydrogen explosion blew off
the roof during the early days of the accident and sent the building
into a list.
Alarmed by the precarious nature of spent fuel storage during his
recent tour of the Fukushima Daiichi site, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon,
subsequently fired off
letters
to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu,
NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko and Japanese ambassador to the U.S. Ichiro
Fujisaki. He implored all parties to work together and with the
international community to address this situation as swiftly as
possible.
A press release issued after his visit said that Wyden, a senior
member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources who
is highly experienced with nuclear waste storage issues, believes the
situation is "worse than reported," with "spent fuel rods currently
being stored in unsound structures immediately adjacent to the ocean."
The press release also noted the structures' high susceptibility to
earthquakes and that "the only protection from a future tsunami, Wyden
observed, is a small, makeshift sea wall erected out of bags of rock."
As opposed to units 1-3 at Fukushima Daiichi, where the meltdowns
occurred, unit 4's reactor core, like units 5 and 6, was not in
operation when the earthquake struck last year. But unlike units 5 and
6, it had recently uploaded highly radioactive spent fuel into its
storage pool before the disaster struck.
Robert Alvarez, a nuclear waste expert and former senior adviser to
the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, has crunched
the numbers pertaining to the spent fuel pool threat based on
information he obtained from sources such as Tepco, the U.S. Department
of Energy, Japanese academic presentations and the Institute of Nuclear
Power Operations (INPO), the U.S. organization created by the nuclear
power industry in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.
What he found, which has been corroborated by other experts
interviewed by AlterNet, is an astounding amount of vulnerably stored
spent fuel, also known as irradiated fuel, at the Fukushima Daiichi
site. His immediate focus is on the fuel stored in the damaged unit 4's
pool, which contains the single largest inventory of highly radioactive
spent fuel of any of the pools in the damaged reactors.
Alvarez warns that if there is another large earthquake or event that
causes this pool to drain of water, which keeps the fuel rods from
overheating and igniting, it could cause a catastrophic fire releasing
10 times more cesium-137 than was released at Chernobyl.
That scenario alone would cause an unprecedented spread of
radioactivity, far greater than what occurred last year, depositing
enormous amounts of radioactive materials over thousands of miles and
causing the evacuation of Tokyo.
Nuclear experts noted that other lethal radioactive isotopes would
also be released in such a fire, but that the focus is on cesium-137
because it easily volatilizes and spreads pervasively, as it did during
the Chernobyl accident and again after the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi
last year.
With a half-life of 30 years, it gives off penetrating radiation as
it decays and can remain dangerous for hundreds of years. Once in the
environment, it mimics potassium as it accumulates in the food chain;
when it enters the human body, about 75 percent lodges in muscle tissue,
including the heart.
The Threat Not Just to Japan But to the U.S. and the World
An even more catastrophic worst-case scenario follows that a fire in
the pool at unit 4 could then spread, igniting the irradiated fuel
throughout the nuclear site and releasing an amount of cesium-137
equaling a doomsday-like load, roughly 85 times more than the release at
Chernobyl.
It's a scenario that would literally threaten Japan's annihilation
and civilization at large, with widespread worldwide environmental
radioactive contamination.
"Japan would suffer the worst, but it would be a global catastrophe,"
said Kevin Kamps, nuclear waste expert at the watchdog group Beyond
Nuclear. "It already is, it already has been, but it would dwarf what's
already happened."
Kamps noted that these pool fires were the beginning of the
worst-case analysis envisioned by the Japanese government in the early
days of the disaster, as
reported by the
New York Times in February.
"Not only three reactor meltdowns but seven pool fires at Fukushima
Daiichi," Kamps said. "If the site had to be abandoned by all workers,
then everything would come loose. The end result of that was the
evacuation of Tokyo."
In an interview with AlterNet, Alvarez, who is a senior scholar at
the Institute for Policy Studies, said that the Japanese government,
Tepco and the U.S. NRC are reluctant to say anything publicly about the
spent fuel threat because "there is a tendency to want to provide
reassurance that everything is fine."
He was quick to note, "The cores are still a problem, make no
mistake, and there will be some very bad things happening if they don't
maintain their temperatures at some sort of stable level and make sure
this stuff doesn't eat down through the concrete mats."
But he said that privately "they're probably more scared shitless
about the pools than they are about the cores. They know they're really
risky and dangerous."
AlterNet asked the NRC if it is concerned about the vulnerability of
the spent fuel at Fukushima Daiichi and what, if anything, it had
expressed to the Japanese government and Tepco on the matter.
"All the available information continues to show the situation at
Fukushima Dai-ichi is stable, both for the reactors and the spent fuel
pools," NRC spokesman Scott Burnell replied via email. "The available
information indicates that Spent Fuel Pool #4 has been reinforced."
But nuclear experts, including Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear
industry senior vice president who coordinated projects at 70 U.S.
nuclear power plants, and warned days after the disaster at Fukushima
last year of a "Chernobyl on steroids" if the spent fuel pools were to
ignite, strongly disagreed with this assessment.
"It is true that in May and June the floor of the U4 SFP [spent fuel
pool] was 'reinforced,' but not as strong as it was originally,"
Gundersen noted in an email to AlterNet. "The entire building however
has not been reinforced and is damaged by the explosion in both 4 and 3.
So structurally U4 is not as strong as its original design required."
Gundersen, who is chief engineer at the consulting firm Fairewinds
Associates, added that the spent fuel pool at unit 4 "remains the single
biggest concern since about the second week of the accident. It can
still create 'Chernobyl on steroids.'"
Alvarez said that even if the unit 4 structure has been tentatively
stabilized, it doesn't change the fact "it sits in a structurally
damaged building, is about 100 feet above the ground and is exposed to
the atmosphere, in a high-consequence earthquake zone."
He also said that the urgency of the situation is underscored by the
ongoing seismic activity around northeast Japan, in which 13 earthquakes
of magnitude 4.0 to 5.7 have
occurred off the northeast coast of Honshu between April 14 and April 17.
"This has been the norm since 3/11/11 and larger quakes are expected closer to the power plant," Alvarez added.
A recent study published in the journal Solid Earth, which
used data from over 6,000 earthquakes, confirms the expectation of
larger quakes in closer proximity to the Fukushima Daiichi site. In
part, this conclusion is predicated on the discovery that the earthquake
that initiated last year's disaster caused a seismic fault close to the
nuclear plant to reactivate.
"There are a few active faults in the nuclear power plant area, and
our results show the existence of similar structural anomalies under
both the Iwaki and the Fukushima Daiichi areas," lead researcher Dapeng
Zhao, a geophysics professor at Japan's Tohoku University, said in a
press release. "Given that a large earthquake occurred in Iwaki not long
ago, we think it is possible for a similarly strong earthquake to
happen in Fukushima."
AlterNet asked Sen. Wyden if he considers the spent fuel at Fukushima Daiichi a national security threat.
In a statement released by his office, Wyden replied, "The radiation
caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another
earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes
the safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue
for the United States."
Alvarez agrees, saying, "My major concern is that this effort to get
that spent fuel out of there is not something you should be doing
casually and taking your time on."
Yet Tepco's current plans are to hold the majority of this spent fuel
onsite for years in the same elevated, uncontained storage pools, only
transferring some of the fuel into more secure, hardened dry casks when
the common pool reaches capacity.
For the moment, though, and for the foreseeable future -- unless the
international community substantively comes to Japan's aid -- Tepco
couldn't transfer the irradiated fuel from the damaged reactor units
into dry cask storage even if it wanted to because the equipment to do
so, such as the crane support infrastructure, was destroyed during the
initial disaster.
"That's kind of shocking," said Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear. "But
that's why we're still sitting on this gamble that there won't be
another earthquake that could topple a very precarious unit 4."
Gunter is concerned that even a minor earthquake or a subsidence in the earth under unit 4 could cause its collapse.
"I think we're all on pins and needles every day with regard to unit
4," he said. "I mean there's any number of things that could happen.
Nobody really knows."
Gunter added, "Right now its seismic rating should be zero."
Alvarez echoed Wyden's letters to the Japanese ambassador and U.S. officials.
"It really requires a major effort," he said. "The United States and
other countries should begin to get involved and try to help the
Japanese government to expedite the removal of that spent fuel and to
put it into dry, hardened storage as soon as possible."
Same Spent Fuel Pool Designs at Dozens of U.S. Nuclear Sites
So why isn't the NRC and the Obama administration doing more to shed
light on the extreme vulnerability of these irradiated fuel pools at
Fukushima Daiichi, which threaten not only Japan but the U.S. and the
world?
Nuclear waste experts say it would expose the fact that the same
design flaw lies in wait -- and has been for decades -- at dozens of
U.S. nuclear facilities. And that's not something the NRC, which is
routinely accused of promoting the nuclear industry rather than
adequately regulating it, nor the pro-nuclear Obama administration, want
to broadcast to the American public.
"The U.S. government right now is engaged in its own kabuki theatre
to protect the U.S. industry from the real costs of the lessons at
Fukushima," Gunter said. "The NRC and its champions in the White House
and on Capitol Hill are looking to obfuscate the real threats and the
necessary policy changes to address the risk."
There are 31 G.E. Mark I and Mark II boiling water reactors (BRWs) in
the U.S., the type used at Fukushima. All of these reactors, which
comprise just under a third of all nuclear reactors in the U.S., store
their spent fuel in elevated pools located outside the primary, or
reinforced, containment that protects the reactor core. Thus, the
outside structure, the building ostensibly protecting the storage pools,
is much weaker, in most cases about as sturdy, experts describe in
interviews with AlterNet, as a structure one would find housing a car
dealership or a Wal-Mart.
Not what Americans might expect to find safeguarding nuclear material
that is more highly radioactive than what resides in the reactor core.
The outer containments surrounding these spent fuel pools in these U.S. reactors patently fail to meet the NRC's own "
defense in-depth" nuclear safety requirements.
But these reactors don't merely suffer from the same storage design flaw as those at Fukushima Daiichi.
In the U.S., the nuclear industry has been allowed to store
incredible volumes of spent fuel for decades in high-density pools that
were not only originally designed to retain about one-fourth or
one-fifth of what they now hold but were intended to be temporary
storage facilities. No more than five years.
That was before the idea of
reprocessing irradiated fuel in this country failed to gain a foothold
over 30 years ago. Once that happened, starting in the early 1980s, the
NRC allowed high-density storage in fuel pools on the false assumption
that a high-level waste repository would be opened by 1998. But
subsequent efforts to gain support for storing nuclear waste at Yucca
Mountain in Nevada have also been scrapped.
More recently, the NRC arbitrarily concluded these pools could store this spent fuel safely for 120 years.
"Our pools are more crammed to the gills than the unit 4 pool at
Fukushima Daiichi, much more so," noted Kamps of Beyond Nuclear. "It's
kind of like a very thick forest that's waiting for a wildfire. It would
take extraordinary measures to prevent nuclear chain reactions in our
pools because the waste is so closely packed in there."
Experts say the only near-term answer to better protect our nation's
existing spent nuclear fuel is dry cask storage. But there's one catch:
the nuclear industry doesn't want to incur the expense, which is about
$1 million per cask.
"So now they're stuck," said Alvarez, "The NRC has made this policy
decision, which the industry is very violently opposed to changing
because it saves them a ton of money. And if they have to go to dry
hardened storage onsite, they're going to have to fork over several
hundred million dollars per reactor to do this."
He also pointed out that the contents of the nine dry casks at the Fukushima Daiichi site were undamaged by the disaster.
"Nobody paid much attention to that fact," Alvarez said. "I've never
seen anybody at Tepco or anyone [at the NRC or in the nuclear industry]
saying, 'Well, thank god for the dry casks. They were untouched.' They
don't say a word about it."
The NRC declined to comment directly to accusations it's reluctant to
draw attention to the spent fuel vulnerability at Fukushima Daiichi
because it would bring more awareness to the dangers of irradiated
storage here in the U.S. But the agency did respond to a question about
what it has done to address the vulnerability of spent nuclear fuel
storage at U.S. nuclear sites with the Mark I and II designs.
"All U.S. spent nuclear fuel is stored safely and securely,
regardless of reactor type," NRC spokesman Burnell replied in an email.
"Every spent fuel pool is an inherently robust combination of reinforced
concrete and steel, capable of safely withstanding the same type and
variety of severe events that reactors are designed for."
He continued, "After 9/11, the NRC required U.S. nuclear power plants
to obtain additional equipment for maintaining reactor and spent fuel
pool safety in the event of any situation that could disable large areas
of the plant. This 'B5b' equipment and related procedures include
ensuring spent fuel pools have adequate water levels. The B5b measures
are in place at every U.S. plant and have been inspected multiple times,
including shortly after the accident at Fukushima.
"The NRC continues to conclude the combination of installed safety
equipment and B5b measures can protect the public if extreme events
impact a U.S. nuclear power plant."
But nuclear experts told AlterNet that the majority of Burnell's
response could've been made prior to the disaster at Fukushima. In fact,
Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists,
investigated these so-called "B5b" safety measures the NRC ordered
post-9/11 and published his findings in a May 2011
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article.
Directly reflecting Burnell's response to AlterNet, Lyman wrote that
after the Fukushima disaster, "the NRC and the industry invoked the
mysterious requirements known as 'B5b' as a cure-all for the kinds of
problems that led to the Fukushima crisis.
"Even though the B5b strategies were specifically developed to cope
with fires and explosions, the NRC now argues that they could be used
for any event that causes severe damage to equipment and infrastructure,
including Fukushima-scale earthquakes and floods."
But contrary to these NRC assurances, then and now, Lyman's report
found B5b requirements inadequate, containing flaws in safety
assumptions that suggest the NRC has not applied the major lessons
learned from the Fukushima disaster. Additionally, he revealed emails
showing that the NRC's own staff members questioned the plausibility of
these procedures to effectively respond to extreme weather events like
floods, earthquakes and concomitant blackouts.
Burnell sent a follow-up email, noting, "I also should have mentioned
the NRC issued an order in March to all U.S. plants to install enhanced
spent fuel pool instrumentation, so that plant operators will have a
clearer understanding of SFP status during a severe event."
This is a curiously roundabout way of saying that spent fuel pools at
U.S. reactors currently have no built-in instrumentation to gauge
radiation, temperature or pressure levels.
Kamps also pointed out that the NRC commissioners voted 4 to 1, with
Chairman Gregory Jaczko in dissent, to not require such requested safety
upgrades to U.S. reactors until the end of 2016.
He added, "Burnell's flippant, false assurances prove that pool
risks, despite being potentially catastrophic, are largely ignored by
not only industry, but even NRC itself, even in the aftermath of
Fukushima."
Brad Jacobson is a
Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and contributing reporter for
AlterNet. His reporting has also appeared in The Atlantic, Columbia
Journalism Review, Billboard and other publications. Follow him on
Twitter @bradpjacobson.
Note: I added this video for Arnie Gundersen's direct take.
