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NRC study
warns of 500-mile radiation spread
By ROGER
WITHERSPOON
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: November 10, 2002)
A catastrophic meltdown in the spent fuel pool of a nuclear
power plant could cause fatal, radiation-induced cancer in
thousands of people as far as 500 miles from the site,
according to a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission study.
The analysis of spent fuel pool meltdowns also states that
millions of people within such a 500-mile zone might have to
be evacuated for periods ranging from 30 days to one year and
that people living within 10 miles of a nuclear plant, such as
Indian Point in Buchanan, might never be able to return to
their homes.
It also cites the potential for "prompt fatalities" from
radiation poisoning that would occur in areas close to a plant
site, where many radioactive particles would be expected to
fall.
The extent of possible radiation damage described in the
NRC documents is far more severe than anything that federal,
Westchester County or Indian Point officials have disclosed in
public forums or written statements mailed to thousands of
residents in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Orange
counties.
The agency's assessments are contained in a special report
prepared by experts within the NRC and the Sandia National
Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., in October 2000 that was
designated as an official NRC planning regulation in February
2001. A copy of the report was obtained by The Journal News.
The study has been criticized by nuclear industry
representatives who say it reflects a worst-case scenario
based on unrealistic assumptions and ignores the effectiveness
of plant safety systems.
Michael Slobodien, director of emergency programs at the
site for Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which owns Indian Point 2
and 3, said even if an accident did occur at Indian Point's
spent fuel pool, the facility had the ability to control the
situation and prevent the release of radiation into the
atmosphere.
"This is a generic report and is not applicable to Indian
Point," Slobodien said. "It neglects the Indian Point design
features, and I cannot accept the premise of a meltdown and
fire in the spent fuel pool when it comes to Indian Point. You
cannot set up a case where it can happen at Indian Point."
Sandia laboratories maintain a computer simulation system
that enables the NRC to predict the possible spread of
radiation from any of the nation's 103 nuclear plants based on
their location, geography and area population densities and
the prevailing or seasonal weather patterns within hundreds of
miles of the sites. Damage assessments — including the number
of prompt fatalities, long-term cancers, affected population
centers and durations of evacuations for specific areas — can
then be estimated for any region of the country. Within 500
miles of Indian Point, there are nearly 82 million people
living in the United States and 11 million in Canada.
The report provides the basis for any future NRC
regulations on evacuation needs, safety requirements and
insurance and compares the possible damage caused by a spent
fuel pool meltdown with that of a meltdown in a fully
operational nuclear reactor. It was developed to show the NRC
what types of problems could occur in spent fuel pools when
nuclear plants are shut down, at which point no new fuel rods
would be placed in the pools, and how long they might pose a
danger from a meltdown and fire.
The potential spread of contamination cited in the report
far exceeds the 10-mile zone the nation's nuclear plants
currently utilize in developing emergency evacuation plans.
NRC and Indian Point officials said the evacuation plans are
intended to deal only with short-term radiation poisoning,
which is not likely to occur outside the 10-mile zone.
The report was pulled from the NRC's public database
following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks because,
agency spokesman Neil Sheehan said, "if a terrorist decided to
attack any plant in the U.S., not just Indian Point, that is
information about what fatalities it could cause, and the
exact knowledge of that could be very advantageous to them."
The information was returned to the database in April,
however, because it is an official regulation governing spent
fuel pool operations and must be accessible to plant
operators.
The report states that analysts did not base their findings
on "events due to sabotage. No established method exists for
estimating the likelihood of a sabotage event. Nor is there a
method for analyzing the effect of security provisions on that
likelihood." Instead, analysts examined various accident
scenarios, ranging from worker mishaps to plane crashes into a
spent fuel pool building. The report concluded that while the
probability of such accidents is extremely low, the impact of
a meltdown would be enormous.
The protection and disposition of spent fuel is a national
problem. Every two years, plants such as Indian Point replace
a third of the nearly 100 tons of fuel used in their reactors
with new fuel. The spent fuel at Indian Point 2 and 3 is
stored in pools of water 40 feet deep, and both are nearing
their storage limit. The federal government is developing a
permanent repository for spent fuel under Yucca Mountain in
Nevada, which is expected to open around 2010.
The uranium fuel used in reactors has a zirconium coating
that permits nuclear reactions to occur but helps prevent the
fuel from literally burning up and being dispersed into the
atmosphere. The cooling water in the reactor and the spent
fuel pools keep the temperature low enough that there is no
danger of fire.
The internal heat of the nuclear fuel drops over time, and
after about five years spent fuel rods can be removed from the
pools and stored in dry casks that are air cooled. It had been
thought by plant operators that there was little chance of a
zirconium fire in fuel that was out of a reactor for at least
five years. As a result, nuclear plant operators were not
required to have emergency evacuation plans for events
involving spent fuel pools, even though the pools hold
hundreds of tons of radioactive material, far more than is
used in the reactors. The NRC was considering industry
requests to reduce insurance requirements for pools containing
only older fuel.
But the report states that a zirconium fire still can occur
30 years after fuel rods are removed from a reactor, as
significant an accident as a worst-case reactor-core meltdown,
and that the danger of cancer-causing, radioactive
contamination would not significantly decrease at least for
that long.
The report assesses the effects of a fuel fire that would
be triggered if water were completely or partially drained
from spent fuel pools. Cesium-137, which is among the
radioactive particles that could be released into the
atmosphere, is the primary cause of long-term cancers,
according to the NRC study. In that regard, cesium-137 is more
significant than radioactive iodine. Westchester, Rockland,
Putnam and Orange county officials have distributed pills to
residents living within 10 miles of Indian Point as a possible
protection against thyroid cancer induced by the radioactive
iodine.
Current evacuation plans approved by the NRC for Indian
Point are based on the premise that it would take several
hours or days to reach the stage where a fuel fire would
release radiation into the atmosphere. The agency's 2000
report states that a zirconium fire could erupt and begin
releasing radiation within two to four hours after water was
completely or partially drained from a spent fuel pool.
Charles Tinkler, a senior adviser in the NRC's office of
research and co-author of the report's section on meltdown
consequences, said the NRC studied the effects of
contamination at Chernobyl in Ukraine, which suffered a
catastrophic meltdown in 1986. There is a permanent exclusion
zone extending about 35 miles around the site of the former
reactor. A permanent exclusion zone also would be needed
following such an accident at Indian Point, Tinkler said.
"I am not sure it would be comparable to the same radius as
Chernobyl," Tinkler said in an interview. "We would predict
that persons would be excluded from that property for the
duration if they live within the 10-mile, emergency-planning
zone."
Tom Hinton, a radiation ecologist at the University of
Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Lab, said the extent of
contamination from a meltdown depends on how high the
contaminants are pushed into the atmosphere, local weather
conditions and the type of radioactive isotopes involved.
"At Chernobyl," he said, "there was contamination spread
around the world, though the majority of it was within 300
kilometers or so. Contamination depends on local weather
conditions, specifically rain. If a (radiation) cloud passes
over you and it is not raining, you will not get as much
contamination as if it were raining. Rain scavenges
contaminants out of the air and deposits them locally. That is
the reason for many hotspots that occurred around Europe after
the Chernobyl accident."
Some radiological isotopes, such as plutonium, will stay
where they land, Hinton said, while others travel through the
environment contaminating plants and waterways.
Officials in the four counties around Indian Point
conducted a mock evacuation drill of the 10-mile zone on Sept.
24 under the auspices of the NRC and Federal Emergency
Management Agency, which certifies emergency evacuation plans.
Officials at the time said radiation leaking from the
reactor would dissipate after about five miles and the
evacuation plans would protect the public from any harmful
radiation.
Though the drill did not entail the scope of accident
studied by the NRC and Sandia, Westchester County Executive
Andrew Spano last June hosted a briefing for about 80
municipal and school officials, where they were assured there
was little danger of contamination if a meltdown occurred in
the reactor. Herschel Specter, a consultant for Entergy, said
that 90 percent of county residents were "not at radiological
risk. They may be terrified, but there is no danger."
Specter said a massive release of radiation would be of
short duration and do little damage.
Slobodien acknowledged last week that the emergency
planning zone was designed to protect the public from acute
health effects, but that "the latent effects of cancer can
occur far beyond that."
Concurring in that assessment was James Lee Witt, former
director of FEMA under President Clinton. During his tenure,
Witt approved the effectiveness of emergency plans for
residents living near each of the nation's nuclear power
plants. In an interview last week, Witt said none of the plans
deals with protecting residents from long-term radiation
effects from a reactor or spent fuel pool accident.
"If you are dealing with a meltdown at that level," Witt
said, "you potentially have a threat to deal with that could
reach beyond the 10 miles. I was aware of it. But our task has
been to look at the emergency preparedness in a 10-mile
radius, and that is what we were looking at."
Witt, now a private emergency management consultant, was
given an $800,000 contract by Gov. George Pataki to examine
the effectiveness of the emergency plans for the 10 miles
around Indian Point. His report is due in December.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety analyst for the Union of
Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., said that the
argument that radiation couldn't go more than five miles or so
"was never accurate."
"If they put the correct information out there and involved
the American public and got a majority of people to agree that
only those 10 miles need to be protected, that would be one
thing," he said. "But for a small group of people to make a
decision behind closed doors is what the Kremlin used to do,
isn't it?"
Tinkler, who worked on the NRC report, said the study's
estimates of possible fatal cancers was based on the
conservative premise that a spent fuel pool fire would release
up to nine times as much cesium-137 as the meltdown at
Chernobyl, and that any dose of radiation above the normal
background level for a region could induce cancer at some
point.
"It means our figures ... represent the upper bounce,"
Tinkler said. "But it is not beyond the physical limits of the
material involved. It provides us an outside limit for
planning."
A decision on how many millions of people might have to be
evacuated following a real spent fuel pool fire, he said,
would depend on the cost of evacuation, and what is perceived
to be an acceptable death rate.
"The decision would depend on what level of radiation the
government decided people could receive without a significant
health effect," Tinkler said. "That means some acceptable
increase in the risk of cancer."
Send e-mail to Roger Witherspoon
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