I’m sure the general public is more attuned than usual to the effects of natural disasters on nuclear facilities, given all of the recent media attention set off by the Fukushima disaster this past March.

Most recently, the Missouri river floods in Nebraska and the Las Conchas fire in New Mexico have threatened two nuclear power stations and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, respectively. 

With the media’s eye on these incidents, it makes one wonder…how prepared are places like this to handle natural disasters, big or small?

Recently, there has been a lot of focus on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and its (real or perceived) lack of action regarding nuclear safety. 

Gregory Jaczko, NRC chairman, recently visited the Cooper Nuclear Station during the flooding. 

Mr. Jaczko was shown firsthand the measures that the plant was taking to prevent the floodwaters from entering sensitive areas of the plant.  He seemed satisfied with the measures taken at Cooper Nuclear Station, stating that, “Fundamentally, this is a plant that is operating safely.”  So far, this appears to be true.

More recently, the 36 square miles that house the 2,000 buildings that make up the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) were threatened by the Las Conchas wildfire, now the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history. 

Audits conducted by the Department of Energy (DOE) on LANL in 2007 and 2009 identified fire vulnerabilities at the facility and stated that, “there are increased risks associated with fire-related events…If such an event were to occur, not only would the safety and health of employees and the public be impacted, but the environment could be damaged as well.” 

As the Las Conchas fire moved closer to LANL, they shut the facilities down and evacuated everyone.  As of today, the lab is reopened, after a thorough check of all of the buildings for any damage.

In both of these cases, it seems like the worst-case scenario was avoided…unlike the Fukushima event.  

Most of the time, that is the case.  Even in the Fukushima event, they had all of their safety measures in place, but it was no match for what Mother Nature unleashed on the area. 

It just goes to show that, try as we might, even with all of the computer models and everything else we use to make predictions, we can never really know the extent of what can happen.

All we can, and should, do, is try our best, learn from our mistakes and in the meantime, hope that nothing too catastrophic happens.

By Ted Polakowski

I have been reading the newspaper accounts over the last few weeks of how enraged we have become regarding the closeness of regulator to regulated. 

Back in early May there was a front page New York Times article titled “Nuclear Agency Beset by Lapses.”  The article explained that several years ago, workers at a nuclear power plant caused a leak in a critical cooling water system as they were cleaning a badly corroded section of the pipe. 

Further investigation found that the company who owned the power plant, knowing that there was a corrosion problem, routinely lowered the minimum thickness of pipe that was deemed safe – seemingly after each time it cleaned up the corrosion. 

And how could the plant owner do this alone? Well it seems that they didn’t; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) routinely either ignored or condoned the action by not taking further action. 

The rest of the investigative report in the New York Times seemed to indicate that the oversight approach taken by the NRC was one not of policeman but more of a benevolent family member – my words not theirs. 

More recent news articles indicate that the same lax oversight conditions also existed between regulator and regulated in Japan. 

An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on the disaster released on June 1, 2011, suggested, that the regulatory structure of Japan’s nuclear industry lacked independence.  Because of this closeness of regulator and regulated, the Japanese nuclear power plant was just not robust enough in light of how big a tsunami might beset the plant.

So, let’s assume all this is true. 

What I am pondering here is why should either party, the regulator or regulated, not take on its own responsibility?  It seems like the regulated is playing a game of “how much can I get away with?” and not “what is prudent for safeguarding my facility, my people, and the environment?” 

It looks like we are getting to believe that as long as we can essentially fool each other into believing whatever action (or non-action) we are trying to get the other side to accept (or at least not to object to) constitutes the result we want.  But does it?  

Have we as EHS professionals, who populate the ranks of the industrial sites as well as those of regulator, forgotten that we win or lose based upon the actual record we generate, not what the either side said was OK? 

I believe we have to get back to the point where each and every one of us takes ownership of our jobs and approaches it in the absolute, not in what we can get away with.   

What do you think? 

I was at breakfast last Thursday perusing USA Today.  Of course the headlines were all about the aftermath of the earthquake, then the tsunami, and finally the nuclear power plant problems.  One of the articles included a poll taken after the disaster that indicated that 70% of Americans have more concern about the safety of nuclear energy since Japan’s crisis began.  Now, that is not surprising.  But the article went on to say that  “a plurality of Americans now oppose building more nuclear plants, a  significant change from the 57% that supported nuclear energy when Gallup asked a similar question less than two weeks before.”

In situations like this we know that emotions sometime overrule rational thought and can cloud decision making.  I began thinking about one of the first blog posts I did last year just as Citation Station was beginning.  In that post I talked about the premise of how I believe that striving to be compliant with law and regulation can have an additional benefit of allowing one to also be running a top notch prevention program that avoids the problems the laws were promulgated to prevent.  When I think about Japan I think about a society that truly believes in that premise.  Being in a high risk area for earthquakes, the Japanese have some of the most stringent building requirements in the world.  Some say that they are much more stringent than those in the United States.  When you analyze the post-earthquake, pre-tsunami period of this recent disaster, I believe you would find that the country fared extremely well from the quake itself. There were no building collapses in the city close to the epicenter and it seems as if the regulations prevented a catastrophe as has been seen in many other less regulated areas.  From a loss of life and property standpoint the prevention system worked as designed.  If you look at the post-tsunami outcome you see a very different picture.  Villages were wiped out. There was massive loss of life and treasure, and when you look at the regulatory makeup you find much less regulation and therefore much less prevention.

Now let’s add the nuclear power plant problems into the mix.  The earthquake knocked out power, but that was considered as a possibility in Japan’s safety regulations and there was a backup system of on- site emergency generators to keep water being pumped through the reactor and over the spent fuel rods.  The generators kicked in and everyone must have breathed a sigh of relief.  Then came the tsunami and the wall of water that flooded out the emergency generators and fouled the fuel supply. Luckily, there was a third safety system required by Japan’s nuclear regulator, that of battery backup.  The batteries kicked in and would work for up to eight hours – seemingly enough to repair whatever went wrong with the primary system or the backup system.  But as we now know, that rebuild time was not enough. 

The question before us, I believe, is:  Learning from this, second only to the Chernobyl disaster, should we just walk away from what might be considered the best non-carbon based source of power or should we re-examine at our regulatory system and determine whether there is yet more prevention that we need to build into the system?  I hope that we move away from emotion based decision making and towards a much more fact based analytical approach to determining how we provide our future power generation. 

What do you think?