LOCA: The Japan Syndrome
by Lorna Salzman
Around 1972 I joined Friends of the Earth Inc.(FOE) and began volunteering with its New York City branch. I was a complete novice on environmental issues but highly motivated because of my deep interest in science and the natural world. The FOE monthly newspaper, Not Man Apart (NMA) was exemplary journalism of a kind I had never encountered. My biggest aim in life was to get an article published in it. This came to pass as did my being hired to work as FOE's field rep in NYC by its visionary founder, Dave Brower.
At this time, hearings on nuclear reactor safety were being held in Washington DC by the Atomic Energy Commission (later called the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) on an obscure system of reactors called the Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS). One would have thought that this subject would make one's eyes glaze over but it had the opposite effect on me. I knew nothing whatsoever about nuclear power beyond the fact that one was under construction in Shoreham LI and was being strongly opposed. So I started reading NMA. Amazingly, they were covering these quite technical hearings in great depth, which impressed me by itself. Who else was? No one.
But as I read the hearing coverage, my anxiety and alarm grew. The ECCS, it turned out, had never been tested on operating reactors. It had been tested on a small scale model and had failed. The consequence of an ECCS failure is fatal: if the fuel core of a reactor loses its coolant, it overheats and melts down. Eventually if it encounters water an explosion can occur. In any case the fuel rods where fission products are contained disintegrate and the entire contents of radioactivity is released. A normal reactor contains radioactivity at least ten times that of a nuclear bomb.
The joke was that if such a meltdown occurred, the melted fuel would eat its way down into the earth all the way to China, hence the term "The China Syndrome", name of a film made about this prospect which inauspiciously appeared shortly before theThree Mile Island core meltdown near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1979. This is known as a Loss of Coolant Accident or LOCA.
Reading about the ECCS led me to further research on all aspects of nuclear power, a subject which consumed most of my working days for the next ten years. The odds were working against nuclear power opponents: suppressed or falsified government studies, mendacious nuclear industry engineers and utilities, elected officials resistant to environmentalism in general, and a media determined not to print bad news for general consumption. But the courageous work of a few nuclear industry experts and especially that of Dr. John Gofman, a physician and physicist formerly at theLawrence Livermore labs in California, changed the game radically, allowing the growth of what was arguably the most important and effective movement of the 1970s across the nation.
With its multi-faceted strategies including intervention in reactor licensing proceedings, lawsuits, lobbying, public education, direct action, rallies and political pressure, theanti-nuclear movement, spearheaded by groups such as the Clamshell Alliance in New England and its cousin alliances elsewhere, stopped the construction of new reactors in its tracks. No new reactor has been licensed in this country since 1978. And the Shoreham reactor on LI had the distinction of being the only constructed reactor that was ever cancelled, thanks to the Shoreham Opponents Coalition which I helped launch.
The first government nuclear safety study was WASH-740, produced by theBrookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and dealt with the potential consequences of a reactor accident in a small reactor. Its most famous conclusion was that in the event of a serious accident and radiation release, an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania would be irreversibly contaminated and become uninhabitable. Naturally the government denied the existence of this report but a Freedom of Information request by Ralph Nader and others ferreted it out. To try and white-wash the WASH report, the government commissioned WASH-1400, with a team headed by nuclear proponent, and engineer Norman Rasmussen, that relied on the data and findings of...surprise!....the nuclear industry itself, and Westinghouse in particular. Their tack: nuclear accidents are serious but unlikely to occur. The report became known as WHITEWASH-1400.
The problem with such studies lies in what is called a fault tree: identifying all possible causes of component failure and seeing where they might lead and thus gauging the probability of such an accident. The inherent problem with this methodology is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to identify all possible causes of failure. This was underscored by an accident at the Brown's Ferry reactor in Alabama, which lost all its electric power and had to scramble to find replacement power to make sure the ECCS would continue to cool the reactor core. What was the cause of the accident? A plant employee investigating possible wiring problems went under the reactor vesselusing a BURNING CANDLE. (Guess budget cuts must have eliminated flashlights). Of course this possibility was not included in the WASH 1400 report. Nor are lots of others.
Cover-ups are not unique to the US. The Soviet Union downplayed and lied about the disastrous Chernobyl fire and meltdown which spread radioactivity across western Europe, which persists in Scandinavia and the UK today in vegetation. Dr. Gofman's analysis concluded that at least half a million people would ultimately die as a result of the Chernobyl accident.
The Japanese are famous for denying just about any bad news; the worst example was their denial of the Minimata mercury scandal. In fact, some of their statements about the recent accident are misleading, namely their reference to the "primary containment" (which they say is intact) and the secondary containment. In fact the primary containment is a thin steel liner enclosing a dry well around the reactor vessel itself, which contains the fuel rods in which nuclear fission occurs and where the fission products like Cesium 137 are produced. If Cesium is being detected, this means that the "primary containment" steel liner has likely been breached, contrary to what the Japanese are claiming. At a minimum all the pipes that lead into and out of the reactor have been destroyed, allowing radioactivity to escape into the environment.
The secondary containment is the building enclosing the reactor vessel; it has already been blown up in one reactor, possibly due to an explosion involving hydrogen. No one suggested that the reactor vessel had exploded; the risk is not of explosion of the fuel rods but of their MELTDOWN, in which the extreme heat of fission melts the metal cladding that encloses the fuel (which in one reactor consists of a mixture of uranium and plutonium, or Mixed Oxide fuel and therefore more dangerous).
Cesium 137 and Iodine 131 have already been detected, which indicates that a partial meltdown has already occurred. Whether it will proceed to a complete meltdown is not known and depends on whether the heat continues to build up inside as a result of the loss of coolant. In sum, when they discuss the "primary containment", they are not referring to an additional line of defense but to the thin steel liner around the reactor vessel itself. In the USA, when reference is made to a reactor, it means the reactor vessel and its fuel rods. There are, therefore, only two lines of defense: the reactor vessel and liner, and the containment building which encloses it.
Right now they are probably figuring out how little they can tell the media and the public about what is really happening at their five nuclear plants that lost electric power as a result of the earthquake. Cesium 137, a fission product, has been detected near the exploded reactor, indicating that a core meltdown is probably already in progress. Evacuation of nearby residents and distribution of iodine tablets are under way; the only problem is that more distant communities may be under a greater threat then nearby ones because the winds carry the radioactivity far from the site. There is really no escape on a small island like Japan.
Here in the USA, two nuclear power plants are operating 25 miles north of New York City. They have had continual serious accidents and have been found in violation of federal law repeatedly. They are aging and corrosion is taking its toll. Moreover, they are not far from the Ramapo fault that runs north east from Pennsylvania through New Jersey and into New York. I have personally felt two earthquakes from this fault in the past two decades. Who's minding the store? Not our government.
(A meltdown is unquestionably in progress in Japan. Here is a report from Germany:
Television images show that the explosion was a massive one, with what appeared to be smoke rising into the air and parts of the reactor shell destroyed.
Even before the explosion, reports had emerged that caesium had leaked from the plant. Caesium 137, a radioactive isotype, is created during nuclear fission. Large amounts of the isotype were emitted during the 1986 nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl. Even today, more than two decades later, an area encompassing a radius of 30 kilometers around that power plant remains closed to the public for safety reasons.
The element, which can be released if overheating damages the core of a nuclear plant, can escape into the air or the waste water from a nuclear plant and can then be directly absorbed by plants. It can then enter into the food chain through milk, meat or fish. After the Chernobyl disaster, mushrooms were detected to have elevated levels of the element. High concentrations can cause damage in the muscle tissues and in kidneys in humans.
The next time some nuke nut tries to sell you on the safety of nuclear power, try to sell him the Brooklyn Bridge in return.
(A collection of articles by Salzman on nuclear power can be accessed at her web site: www.lornasalzman.com
Click on Nuclear Power in table of contents).