Fukushima Docs 3: Heavily Redacted

Picking up where we left off and internal NRC communications, I first want to re-link to theMarch 16 @ 12:18 PM between divisions and the NRC Office of Public Affairs in response to media questions and ‘advice’ coming in from members of the public. In that document the response to the public was to come up with a generic dismissal statement that read:

We appreciate the suggestions of folks with idea[s] to resolve the situation in Japan. Please understand that the NRC has some of the most expert people in the world available to assist the Japanese authorities in whatever they request. We are fully staffed in all our response teams at this time and working 24 hours a day.

Unfortunately, what they were “working on” 24 hours a day by that point in time was how to keep entire swaths of timely and even vital information away from both the public and the nuclear industry responders to events at Fukushima Daiichi…

Just half an hour prior the Office of Public Affairs requested what to do with a request for confirmation from ABC News that the situation at Daiichi was “taking a turn for the worse.” Rather then deal with that, Holly Harrington told the group to “Ignore. It’s a media call.”

Thus The Plan as of March 16th was to brush off the public and ignore the media. At least until the department wigs and PR office could get together long enough to come up with “talking points.”

A possible avenue of concern for the NRC arose early on the afternoon of March 11 @ 1:57 PMwhen an internal communique asked specifically about the 2010 GI-199 safety and risk assessments of seismic vulnerabilities to U.S. plants. Michelle Bensi asked Benjamin Beasley…

I imagine this will bring a lot more importance to GI-199, especially in light of a claim made by an NRC speaker at the RIC claiming that Japanese plants are more seismically robust than US plants.

The OPA office was scrambling that afternoon to anticipate questions about the issue, and deflect any possible public concerns. By 6:12 PM a list of expected questions were sent to the TA task force…

- Was the ground motion at the Japanese sites beyond their design basis?- Why do we have confidence that US nuclear power plants are adequately designed for earthquakes and tsunamis?

- If the earthquake in Japan was a larger magnitude than considered by plant design, why can’t the same thing happen in the US?

- What would be the results of a tsunami generated off the coast of a US plant? (Or why are we confident that large tsunamis will not occur relatively close to US shores?)

Sure enough, there was a troublesome MSNBC investigative reporter who on questioned the safety of U.S. nukes (Indian Point in particular) in regards to earthquakes, based on that GI [Generic Issues] 199 list of ‘most’ vulnerable U.S. plants [eastern and central]. His article was published March 16th.

As you can see in the GI-199 – linked from the article in question – none of the nuclear facilities on the list were deemed to be in enough risk of design-basis earthquake due entirely to the reckoned ‘frequency’ of such earthquakes in their locations. NOT whether the identified plants at risk would actually survive one. The conclusion was of course that it wasn’t “cost effective” to do any retrofitting of equipment to make it more resistant to quake damage. Hereis the NRC Fact Sheet on seismic issues at our nukes, as revised on June 1, 2011 after the Fukushima-inspired review.

Wednesday, March 16 @ 6:33 PM - By dinnertime the Office of Public Assistance was a little tired of the subject of the NRC’s own risk assessments…

Thanks. OPA folks have been working this piece of junk all day.

The full MSNBC article is attached to the email at the above link, entitled What are the odds? US nuke plants ranked by quake risk, data from the GI-199 report itself, which David McIntyre of the NRC Office of Public Affairs [OPA] characterizes as “junk.”

Apparently the designation of “junk” wasn’t about how relevant the NRC’s previous evaluations of earthquake risks to U.S. nuclear plants might be to the people living within 50 miles of them, but about the PR staff’s frustration that American reporters might notice the disconnect. You’ll have this when you forget to file your lies in the proper folder for later quick reference.

At the same time Nancy McNamara of OPA was appealing to the State liason’s office at OpCenter for answers to pointed questions from reporters per the recommended 50-mile evacuation. In her communique of March 16 @ 3:24 PM labeled RESPONSE NEEDED ASAPwith priority level “high” she asked:

1. How is it that the NRC always defined the emergency planning zone to be out to 10 miles based on worse case scenarios, yet they just recommended a 50 mile evacuation?2. What does a PAR out to 50 miles say about the current 10 mile EPZ here in the United States?

Oops. It appears our NRC had never considered the possibility of any kind of accident or event bad enough to require a 50-mile evacuation zone in various plants’ emergency planning. But they didn’t hesitate to make a regular big deal out of the need for a 50-mile zone at Fukushima.

The primary world nuclear industry lobby group was busy early on March 11th trying as hard as it could to put an immediate firm lid on any possible bad news coming from Japan. The World Nuclear Association reported through Reuters that…

“We understand this situation is under control.”

…while also reporting from Washington that Hillary Clinton was claiming the USAF was flying coolant to Daiichi. Which the NRC understood immediately was total bullshit. From about noon on March 11th the NRC was losing control of the PR narrative, which was quickly devolving into blatant propaganda and total lies coming from elsewhere in the hierarchy.

Meanwhile, back on the technical assessment front working to keep up with the situation at Fukushima Daiichi, the little problem with unit-4′s spent fuel pool [SFP] was proving troublesome as well.

In an exchange between the manager of a research group at Sandia, NRC TA and the OPA about what the U.S. government knows about spent fuel fires, it is decided that so much of the material is classified that there’s no point. Re: BWR zinc fire data -

You will note that the two papers based on the Sandia testing were heavily redacted at the instruction of the NRC. The test information is generally considered Official Use Only. We will need to receive permission from the NRC to release more substantial reports.

That much of what the NRC knew about spent fuel fires was verboten to release either publicly or privately was just a glitch in the chain of technical experts trying to inform OpCenter of what to expect in the way of radiological hazard for U.S. citizens in the path of the plume by now traveling toward the North American mainland. Here is the exchange on assessing SFP damage without the classified testing data so OpCenter could get a bead on what an open to atmosphere SFP fire might do to change the “source term” (amount of crap going out and profile of isotopes) for expected impacts of the fallout. Notice that the analysts already know the unit-4 SFP had a leak, as it ran dry too fast for boil-off to account for it.

Finally the NRC principals get their act together enough to decide that requests from NEI and GE (designer/builder of the Fukushima nukes) would be brushed off in order to prevent them from finding out what the NRC knows about SFP zirconium fires. Seems our government has a limit on how much help they’ll actually give to another country suffering such a terrible mass reactor accident, as well as keeping data about gaming accident scenarios from actual reactor designers/builders…

The bottom line is that no information about zirc fire will be exchanged without our knowledge.I also told SNL that we may prepare a fact sheet that we can give to GE and NEI. The information sheet will have enough information to indicate that zirc fire is possible.

Well, DUH. Once the focus of attention goes from immediate analysis and support to keeping secrets (even from each other), covering up starts feeding on its own juice and grows exponentially from there. Almost nuclear in its energetic behavior, if one wished to make a pun about such things.

Thus by Thursday, March 17 @ 11:19 AM a draft ‘update’ for the office of the EDO [Executive Director for Operations] reiterating the 50-mile evacuation advice as ‘appropriate’ while at the same time dismissing concerns about fallout in the U.S. and territories from Fukushima.

And so it goes. One week into the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi the always present (but temporarily put aside for this disaster) paranoia of the nuclear secret-keepers reasserted itself. As it became clear that the horrors of Fukushima were beyond worst-case and would be ongoing for as far into the future as anybody cared to look, the ‘proprietary urge’ that has always surrounded and permeated this technology won the day. Over the course of the next few weeks and months it would become entirely clear that secrecy is preferable to honesty and protecting the public, as EPA monitoring was shut down and public access to radiation levels in air, food and water was cut off (if it was being monitored at all after they realized it was worse than expected). The usual cost-benefit analyses were run, the number of civilian deaths to be expected was calculated, and these nameless, faceless sacrifices were deemed ‘acceptable’ in service to the cult of secrecy in which this unholy technology was birthed and bred.

Some things never change, no matter what.