By ANDRE FRANCISCO
Scientists and lawmakers are sounding a wake-up call after Tuesday's earthquake caused the automatic shutdown of two nuclear reactors and the subsequent failure of one of four diesel generators used to cool the reactors.
"If Fukushima wasn't a wake-up call, this really needs to be to get the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] and industry moving to do seismic reviews of all the nuclear-power plants in the country," Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the Seattle Times.
The earthquake was centered in Mineral, VA, ten miles from the two reactors at the North Anna nuclear power plant. The reactors turned off automatically after sensing the quake. The plant also lost power; so four diesel generators came online to keep water circulating around the reactors to prevent overheating and a possible meltdown. One of the generators failed because of a leak and was replaced by a fifth backup generator, according to a Washington Post story.
The failure of backup generators was one of the causes of the Fukushima meltdown, and now there are calls for a review of earthquake plans and backup generators at the nation’s nuclear power plants.
“The Virginia earthquake is now our local 911 call to stop delaying the implementation of stricter safety standards,” Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA) said in a letter to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Greg Jaczko.
Markey called for stricter enforcement of maintenance requirements for backup generators. Tuesday’s generator failure was the 74th time a backup generator has failed during a shutdown in the last eight years, according to a Boston Globe article.
The earthquake was a 5.8 on the Richter scale and the North Anna plant was designed to withstand a 6.2 magnitude event, according to The Washington Post.
“[What] I would say in terms of lessons learned from Fukushima and now yesterday’s quake is that setting reactor design…hazard limits just slightly above recorded human experience is turning out to be really shortsighted,” said Allison Macfarlane, a George Mason University environmental policy professor, in the Post piece.
The combination of the Virginia quake and the Fukushima disaster may cause reforms, but some experts have been calling for there problems to be addressed for awhile.
“We don’t need to wait for earthquakes to fix safety weaknesses that have been lingering for several years,” said Bob Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, to Business Week.
Alvarez authored a 2011 Institute for Policy Studies report that was released with support from POGO that argued for addressing the safety weaknesses in another area of nuclear power.
The Alvarez report highlights the risk of storing spent nuclear fuel in water pools that require constant power. The U.S. has 65,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, and much of it is stored in overcrowded pools that require constant power to keep cool and stable. This power requirement makes them vulnerable to catastrophic events, whether it’s an earthquake or a terrorist attack, according to the report.
Alvarez argued for a switch from cooling pools to dry, hardened storage casks, which require no power and have no moving parts, so they are much less likely to fail. The casks are large concrete cylinders that prevent the fuel from leaking radiation and allow the rods to slowly cool down.
“Safely securing the spent fuel that’s currently in crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree in the U.S.,” the report said.
The plan would take about ten years to complete and would cost between $3.5 and $7 billion, but as the report concludes, “The cost of fixing America’s nuclear vulnerabilities may be high, but the price of doing too little is incalculable.”
Andre Francisco is a POGO communications associate.
Image via Flickr user DonkeyHotey.
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