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Remembering "3/11": Six Months After the Fukushima Reactor Disaster, Key Lessons Appear to be Going Unlearned
September 8, 2011
Trio
of Experts Outline Eight Key Concerns: Ongoing Health Woes in Japan,
Unaddressed Design Flaws and Inadequate U.S. Regulatory Response Seen As
Troubling.
WASHINGTON, D.C.///September 8, 2011///Regulatory, scientific and health
experts agree: The “3/11” Fukushima
reactor disaster is still ongoing six month later … and some major lessons are
in danger of going unheeded.
Sunday marks
the six-month anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis. In anticipation of that milestone, three
leading U.S. experts held a news conference today to outline both what is now
known in the wake of the Fukushima and where things stand for the nuclear power
industry in the United States.
The news
event speakers were: Peter Bradford, former member of the United States Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, former chair of the New York and Maine utility regulatory
commissions, and currently adjunct
professor at Vermont Law School on “Nuclear Power and Public Policy”; Edwin
Lyman, Ph.D., senior scientist, Global Security Program, Union of Concerned
Scientists; and Dr. Andrew Kanter, national board
president elect (2012), Physicians for Social Responsibility, and director of
Medical Informatics/Health Info Services, Millennium Villages Project, Earth
Institute, Columbia University.
The
following eight concerns and lessons were among those outlined by the speakers:
-
The U.S. regulatory
response since Fukushima has been inadequate. “Six months after
Fukushima, it seems clear that the U.S. is not going to undertake the type of
fundamental, no-holds-barred look at its nuclear regulatory practices that
followed the much less serious accident at Three Mile Island some 30 years
ago.” – Peter Bradford
- America should avoid
post-9/11 mistakes in tightening reactor safety standards. “In responding
to Fukushima by issuing orders, the NRC should not make the same mistakes
as it did following 9/11, when industry stonewalling delayed implementation
of critical security measures for many years. Even today,
some post 9/11 security upgrades have not been
completed at numerous plants … The worldwide response to the Three
Mile Island accident was clearly inadequate to prevent even worse events from
occurring. The U.S. must respond to Fukushima in a much
more comprehensive way or it may soon face an accident even
worse than Fukushima." – Edwin Lyman
- Overall Japanese health dangers are getting short shrift. “The last six
months have shown a continued pattern of secrecy, cover-up, and minimization ….
(The) news media and some so-called authorities have repeated the false
information that doses under 100 mSv (millisieverts) have no health effects.
All radiation doses have some effect, particularly when large populations are
exposed. The Japanese government's decision to increase the maximum
allowed dose for citizens of Fukushima (including children) from 1 mSv per year
to 20 mSv, the equivalent of 200 chest x-rays or the maximum many countries
allow for nuclear workers ... is unacceptable and remains in place despite
vehement public and international pressure.” -- Dr. Andrew Kanter
- In particular, the impact on the health of Japanese
children is being glossed over. “Children are at least three-to-four times
more susceptible to radiation than are adults. There are about 350,000
children under 18 in Fukushima Prefecture. If each of these children were
exposed to the 20 mSv maximum over two consecutive years, the National Academy
of Sciences BEIR VII report would predict 2,500 additional cancer deaths… The
upshot is that there is no safe dose of radiation and exposing non-consenting
people, especially children, to these increased health risks is medically unacceptable.
The Japanese government is not adequately monitoring radiation contamination of
soil, food, water, and air and is not providing the parents with sufficient
information to protect their children.”
-- Dr. Andrew Kanter
- The U.S. was warned of Fukushima-style
problems but failed to act … and is still failing to do so. “U.S. reactors
have some of the shortcomings of the Fukushima plants. Furthermore, citizen groups and scientists
had tried to call one of these – spent fuel pool vulnerability -- to Nuclear
Regulatory Commission attention during the last decade. The NRC dismissed these efforts, with one
commissioner even ordering the staff to do a review designed to discredit the
concerns. The NRC reviews of Fukushima to date are all well and good, but the
Commission and the Congress need to face up to the deeper lessons of Fukushima
as well. When mishaps occur at nuclear
power plants, the NRC requires a “root cause analysis” that gets at the
underlying causes as well as the immediate technical problems. Without a root
cause analysis of its own failure to heed the now validated warnings about
spent fuel pools, the NRC may patch the technical problems revealed by
Fukushima, but it won’t fix the underlying shortcomings that allow defects to
persist until catastrophic events rather than regulatory vigilance force the nuclear industry and the public to face
up to them.” – Peter Bradford
- Emergency planning zones
in the U.S. must be expanded. “The NRC Task Force report got some things
right but others wrong. In contrast to the Task
Force conclusions, we believe that emergency planning zones should be
expanded, certain hydrogen control measures should be immediately enforced
and spent fuel transfer to dry casks should be accelerated. Also, the
safety margins of new reactors need to be reassessed.” -- Edwin Lyman
- The recent East Coast earthquake should spur more NRC
safety analysis. “The
earthquake near the North Anna nuclear plant, which reportedly exceeded the
plant's seismic design basis, reinforces the urgency of the NRC
Fukushima task force's recommendation that all plants immediately be reviewed
for their vulnerability to seismic and flooding hazards based on the best available
information today.” – Edwin Lyman
- Fukushima is turning out to be much worse than Chernobyl. “Although the
Chernobyl reactor explosion was devastating, scattering the majority of its
nuclear core across a wide swath of Europe, the Fukushima accident involved three
reactors, which underwent meltdowns (or melt-throughs) and four spent-fuel
pools that suffered damage. It will take years to measure the total release of
radioactive materials into the environment from Fukushima, but we already know
that that the immediate releases are now estimated as being twice as high as
originally admitted. Some authoritative sources, using releases of radioactive
Xenon as a marker, show that the amount of Fukushima Daiichi radioactive fuel
that has been damaged/released could be several times that of the Chernobyl
release. Another estimate has the equivalent of 168 Hiroshima bomb's worth of
Cesium have been released onto Japan.” – Dr. Andrew Kanter
MEDIA CONTACT: Ailis Aaron Wolf, +1 (703)
276-3265 or aawolf@hastingsgroup.com.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
A streaming audio replay of a related news event will be available on
the Web at http://www.nuclearbailout.org as of 3 p.m. EDT/2000 GMT on
September 8, 2011.
