BRATTLEBORO — In past testimony before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), nuclear reactors have been compared to motor vehicles, in the sense that (for nuclear opponents) when a car ages, it is time for it to be scrapped and (for nuclear proponents) that even an antique car, properly maintained, can still function reliably.
What if components in those “vehicles” were known to be defective, but since the driver did not experience a breakdown, the condition was not reported? Would you feel less safe?
Apparently, that's exactly what's been happening with nuclear plants. The NRC Office of the Inspector General (OIG) “determined that licensees representing at least 28 percent of the operating reactor fleet do not, as standard practice, notify NRC of defects . . . unless they are reportable under event reporting regulations.”
The problem of the underreporting of safety issues just gets worse.
The NRC uses an international scale separating unforeseen “events” into “incidents” or “accidents,” and grading them from 1 through 7. With this classification system, the frequency of nuclear “accidents,” even taking into account Fukushima, is considered low.
“[I]f one redefines an accident to include incidents that either resulted in the loss of human life or more than $50,000 in property damage . . . . 99 nuclear accidents meeting this definition, totaling more than $20.5 billion in damages, occurred worldwide from 1952 to 2009 – or more than one incident and $330 million in damage every year, on average, for the past three decades . . . not includ[ing] the Fukushima catastrophe,” Benjamin K. Sovacool, assistant professor at the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, wrote on March 18.
What does all this mean for public policy?
We need to seriously look at the true costs and risks of nuclear power generation.
Hats off to New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo for convincing the NRC to at least evaluate Indian Point's seismic risk. Cheers also to the European Union Energy Commissioner who has asked for “nuclear stress tests,” even though it's not clear what such tests might entail.
Kudos to our own state Representative Sarah Edwards for asking the NRC to rescind its decision to relicense Vermont Yankee - a decision made before the Fukushima disaster occurred and confirmed afterwards, before the world had been able to evaluate all the reasons behind the catastrophe.
Commendations also to our state Representative David Deen for asking the NRC to perform a flooding stress test on Vermont Yankee.
We cannot afford to look at nuclear power in a vacuum. It is high time for an honest risk analysis. Our survival demands it.