Senator Al Franken, Democrat from Minnesota, made light of a very dark, and potentially disastrous, situation at a recent Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing about nuclear safety.
“We have a plant in Monticello, Minn., that is the same design as the Fukushima reactors,’’ said Franken. He dmitted that an earthquake in the area is unlikely, but added, “if we have a tsunami there, we’ve probably got bigger problems.’’
Franken asked William Borchardt, the top staff official of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whether or not the backup generators at Minnesota’s two nuclear power plants could be overwhelmed by flooding, which is commonplace in the region.
Borchardt responded that the placement of nuclear plants is strategic and that careful consideration is made for natural occurrences, such as flooding, before construction begins.
When Franken asked if similar surveys were done in Japan, Borchardt said he couldn’t speak to the Japanese system of review.
“Wouldn’t that be a good thing to know?” Franken said. “I would suggest you hop right on that.”
Pushing his point, he said, “Are any reactors in the U.S. built near faults, or oceans?”
Of course we all know that they are.
Japan certainly took environmental factors into consideration when building their arsenal of plants as well, and look what happened.
Taking unlikely factors into consideration isn’t enough. How is the U.S. government handling the possibility of something equally if not more disastrous happening here, where plants sit on fault lines, near oceans and on flood plains?
Creating an emergency preparedness plan for such a disaster is under the jurisdiction of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They have extensive plans for other major calamities, such as hurricane, earthquake, or nuclear bomb attack, but not for a nuclear plant meltdown.
“If it’s not on the list, we are not ready for it,” said Paul Rosenzweig, deputy assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security.
Consider the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. Because the government had no plan, Rosenzweig said, the most effective immediate action was difficult to find and hundreds of thousands of barrels worth of oil ended up contaminating the waters.
I would have thought FEMA would be all over getting a plan in place for a nuclear reactor meltdown, but it looks like maybe not.
FEMA makes decisions about what they will develop comprehensive plans for through risk assessment.
“It’s a soft science to understand the probability of something [like a meltdown] happening,” said Eric Reker, a masters student at Cornell University’s Institute for Public Affairs.
Risk assessment takes three things into consideration, which is called the national response framework. First, what is the threat level of something happening?
“With many things, they look at historical outcomes,” Reker said. “How often has it happened in the past?”
Hurricanes happen pretty consistently, and the perceived threat of a nuclear weapon attack is high. But the threat of a nuclear reactor meltdown is much less in part because it hasn’t happened frequently.
Second, FEMA considers the country’s vulnerability to be affected by a specific disaster, and third, what the consequences would be if it were to happen.
Although the consequences of a nuclear reactor meltdown could be catastrophic, the assessed risk of it actually happening is low enough that a plan has seemed necessary perhaps.
Another roadblock is money. With a huge federal budget deficit and cuts being made anywhere possible, the likelihood of FEMA doling out money right now in order to create a national emergency plan for a nuclear meltdown is probably low, Reker said.
It’s a tradeoff, and right now the low probability of a U.S. nuclear reactor meltdown is winning over the disastrous consequences if a meltdown were to occur.
But do we want to wait and find out how the U.S. government will react unprepared like it was after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?
