Tag Archives: Fukushima

Union of Concerned Scientists Report: Nuclear “Near Misses” Symptom of Failing Regulatory Regime

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(image: UCS report on The NRC and Nuclear Plant Safety in 2011, detail)

In its second annual report on the safety of nuclear power facilities (PDF) in the United States, the Union of Concerned Scientists have documented 15 troubling lapses–what they call “near misses”–at 13 of the nation’s atomic plants. The study details specific problems that still want for repairs, but much more disturbing, it also outlines systemic flaws in America’s nuclear regulation and oversight regime.

The problems range from aging and improperly maintained safety systems to unforgivably long delays in the implementation of Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules on fire suppression and seismic security:

We found that the NRC is allowing 47 reactors to operate despite known violations of fire-protection regulations dating back to 1980. The NRC is also allowing 27 reactors to operate even though their safety systems are not designed to protect them from earthquake-related hazards identified in 1996. Eight reactors suffer from both afflictions. The NRC established safety regulations to protect Americans from the inherent hazards of nuclear power plants. However, it is simply not fulfilling its mandate when it allows numerous plant owners to violate safety regulations for long periods of time.

The report also notes instances where nuclear workers were needlessly exposed to unsafe levels of radiation, and plants where failure to follow basic protocols had rendered backup systems functionally useless.

But perhaps most alarming (if not actually surprising) were the UCS findings on how the NRC handled Component Design Bases Inspections, or CDBIs:

Inspectors are supposed to use CDBIs to determine whether owners are operating and maintaining their reactors within specifications approved during design and licensing. Some of the problems concerned containment vent valves, battery power sources, and emergency diesel generators—components that affected the severity of the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant in Japan.

While it was good that the NRC identified these problems, each CDBI audits only a very small sample of possible trouble spots. For example, the CDBI at the Harris nuclear plant in North Carolina examined just 31 safety-related items among literally thousands of candidates. That audit found 10 problems. Beyond ensuring that the plant’s owner corrected those 10 problems, the NRC should have insisted that it identify and correct inadequacies in the plant’s testing and inspection regimes that allowed these problems to exist undetected in the first place. The true value of the CDBIs stems from the weaknesses they reveal in the owners’ testing and inspection regimes. But that value is realized only when the NRC forces owners to remedy those weaknesses.

In other words, it’s nice that you made the good folks at Harris fix those problems, but when a preliminary audit reveals a one-third failure rate, perhaps that plant has earned itself a full top-to-bottom inspection. (The UCS goes even further, recommending that when a nuclear facility operator–like an Exelon or Entergy–has more than one plant that fails an inspection, that company’s entire fleet of reactors should be subject to NRC review.)

As a matter of fact, the Union goes so far as to criticize the NRC’s entire approach to inspections, explaining that the job of regulators is not just to catch deficiencies and fix them. The entire process, UCS stresses, should compel plant managers to operate in such a way that ensures there will be no problems to catch–and so ensures that nuclear plants operate with the safety of its employees and the community at large as a top priority.

* * *

The Union of Concerned Scientists is a great resource. They keep a close watch on the nuclear industry, and do so with an unassailable level of scientific and technical expertise. They are critical of nuclear power as it exists today, but it would be a mistake to call them anti-nuclear. They advocate for safe energy and a clean environment, but if you read their work regularly, it is hard to say they are calling for an end to a certain technology. It makes the nuclear safety paper all the more damning, but it also poses a bit of a paradox.

In fact, reading this report brings to mind the joke about the economist on the desert island. Don’t know it? It goes something like this:

A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded and starving on a dessert island when they discover a can of soup that has washed ashore. But there’s a problem, how will they open the can?

The physicist says that with just right length of fallen tree as a lever, and just the right sized rock as a fulcrum, they could knock the top off the can.

“Ridiculous,” says the economist, “you will either smash the can or send it flying. Either way, the soup will splatter across the beach.”

The chemist says that he can analyze the list of ingredients and calculate just how hot they need to get the can in order to expand the soup enough to blow the can open.

“Insane,” says the economist, “if the can explodes, the soup will explode with it. We’ll be lucky to salvage a spoonful.”

“OK, then,” say the physicist and chemist in unison, “what do you propose?”

The economist strikes a thoughtful pose and says, “Assume we have a can opener. . . .”

Perhaps it is not fair to compare an association of scientists to the economist in this story, but UCS goes to admirable length describing the repeated failures of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission–about how the NRC falls short, from rule-making, to inspections, to enforcement–and then essentially says that if America’s nuclear plants are to operate safely, the NRC needs to “aggressively enforce its safety regulations.” Assume we had a regulatory body capable of regulating.

The Union says that the nuclear regulators are not doing their job–and they go further, noting that Congress has also failed by tolerating a flaccid Nuclear Regulatory Commission–but, mirroring the report’s critique of the NRC, the UCS focuses on individual incidents without addressing the systemic problem.

The NRC has had 37 years to evolve from the advocacy-oriented Atomic Energy Commission, the regulatory body’s predecessor, and yet it is still behaving as the nuclear industry’s watchful parent, rather than its top cop. Don’t just take this report as an example (well, 15 examples), look to an in-depth investigation done last summer by the Associated Press that documented the cozy relationship between plant owners and their supposed watchdogs.

The congressional committees that are supposed to provide the NRC with oversight are dominated by politicians beholden to the nuclear lobby for campaign contributions. This winter’s attempted coup against NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko is only the latest in a long list of Capitol Hill follies designed to distract from the problems at hand and delay any increased regulation. Indeed, the problems with lax regulation and laxer oversight have plagued the system so long, it could be argued this is not a bug (as they say), but a feature.

* * *

Calling the 15 gross failures by operators and regulators “near misses” might get headlines because it sounds so ominous, however it is possible that the rubric actually downplays the problem. “Near misses” implies a bullet dodged, a past event, but the incidents highlighted, as well as the overall critique of the process, illustrate an ongoing crisis. These are not so much “near misses” as they are disasters in waiting.

Indeed, even what the report calls “positives”–three (yes, only three) instances where NRC intervention corrected a safety problem in time to prevent an accident–seem more like lucky breaks. For example, the government forced the operators of Nebraska’s Fort Calhoun nuclear plant to improve their flood protection, and in fact, the new equipment was able to protect the facility form a massive flood last summer. But the inflatable levees that were used to keep the flood waters at bay were just barely high enough to avoid being crested, and one even sprang a leak. Had the flooding continued just a little longer, the catastrophe that the UCS report gives the NRC credit for preventing would have likely occurred.

But even if you extend credit for keeping back the flood, what if (and not to get too biblical here) it was not a flood, but a fire? Fort Calhoun is among the 47 plants listed in the report as still not meeting the decades-old fire safety standards. As someone once remarked about another nuclear plant accident, the NRC is getting “credit for the grace of God.”

Alas, God has proven to be an uneven regulator, too. Those who had the misfortune of living downwind of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima have learned the Lord regulates in mysterious ways. Does the Union of Concerned Scientists really believe that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can change radically enough to force sufficient safety upgrades on US nuclear plants to assure that no Fukushima-like (or even Fukushima-light) accident will ever happen here?

It is hard to believe they do. The report’s full title, after all, is “The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety: Living on Borrowed Time.”

While a stronger regulatory body is a good idea–and one strongly urged by the UCS–the report provides no way to achieve that goal. Given the problems and the history, it is hard to believe even the best scientists in the field have an answer to nuclear safety’s political impediments.

So, given that, what should be the real conclusion of the Union’s report? It would be the same as the conclusion reached by any honest observer of nuclear power: atomic power–too dirty, too dangerous, and too expensive.

In the short-term, sure, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needs to do a better job of policing plant safety–but in the long-term, this part of the NRC’s mandate needs to disappear along with its unstable, untenable, and un-regulatable target.

Frontline’s Fukushima “Meltdown” Perpetuates Industry Lie That Tsunami, Not Quake, Started Nuclear Crisis

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Fukushima Daiichi as seen on March 16, 2011. (photo: Digital Globe via Wikipedia)

In all fairness, “Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown,” the Frontline documentary that debuted on US public television stations last night (February 28), sets out to accomplish an almost impossible task: explain what has happened inside and around Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility since a massive earthquake and tsunami crippled reactors and safety systems on March 11, 2011–and do so in 53 minutes. The filmmakers had several challenges, not the least of which is that the Fukushima meltdowns are not a closed case, but an ever-evolving crisis. Add to that the technical nature of the information, the global impact of the disaster, the still-extant dangers in and around the crippled plant, the contentious politics around nuclear issues, and the refusal of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to let its employees talk either to reporters or independent investigative bodies, and it quickly becomes apparent that Frontline had a lot to tackle in order to practice good journalism.

But if the first rule of reporting is anything like medicine–“do no harm”–than Frontline’s Fukushima coverage is again guilty of malpractice. While “Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown” is not the naked apologia for the nuclear industry that Frontline’s January offering, “Nuclear Aftershocks,” was, some of the errors and oversights of this week’s episode are just as injurious to the truth.

And none more so than the inherent contradiction that aired in the first minutes of Tuesday’s show.

“Inside'” opens on “March 11, 2011 – Day 1.” Over shaking weather camera shots of Fukushima’s four exhaust towers, the narrator explains:

The earthquake that shook the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant was the most powerful to strike Japan since records began. The company that operates the plant, TEPCO, has forbidden its workers from speaking publicly about what followed.

But one year on, they are starting to tell their stories. Some have asked for their identities to be hidden for fear of being fired.

One such employee (called “Ono” in the transcript) speaks through an interpreter: “I saw all the pipes fixed to the wall shifting and ripping off.”

Then the power went out, but as Frontline’s narrator explains:

The workers stayed calm because they knew Japanese power plants are designed to withstand earthquakes. The reactors automatically shut down within seconds. But the high radioactivity of nuclear fuel rods means they generate intense heat even after a shutdown. So backup generators kicked in to power the cooling systems and stop the fuel rods from melting.

Frontline then tells of the massive tsunami that hit Fukushima about 49 minutes after the earthquake:

The biggest of the waves was more than 40 feet high and traveling at over 100 miles an hour.

. . . .

At 3:35 PM, the biggest of the waves struck. It was more than twice the height of the plant’s seawall.

. . . .

Most of the backup diesel generators needed to power the cooling systems were located in basements. They were destroyed by the tsunami waters, meaning the workers had no way of keeping the nuclear fuel from melting.

The impression left for viewers is that while the quake knocked out Fukushima’s primary power, the diesel backup generators were effectively cooling the reactors until the tsunami flooded the generators.

It’s a good story, as stories go, and one that TEPCO and their nuclear industry brethren are fond of telling to anyone and everyone within the sound of their profit-enhanced, lobbyist-aided voices. They have told it so often that it seems to be part of the whole Fukushima narrative that less-interested parties can recount without so much as glancing at their talking points. Indeed, even Frontline’s writers thought they could toss it out there without any debate and then move on. One problem with that story, though–it’s not true.

I personally saw pipes that had come apart and I assume that there were many more that had been broken throughout the plant. There’s no doubt that the earthquake did a lot of damage inside the plant… I also saw that part of the wall of the turbine building for reactor one had come away. That crack might have affected the reactor.

Those are the words of a Fukushima maintenance worker who requested anonymity when he told his story to reporters for Great Britain’s Independent last August. That worker recalled hissing, leaking pipes in the immediate aftermath of the quake.

Another TEPCO employee, a Fukushima technician, also spoke to the Independent:

It felt like the earthquake hit in two waves, the first impact was so intense you could see the building shaking, the pipes buckling, and within minutes I saw pipes bursting. Some fell off the wall…

Someone yelled that we all needed to evacuate. But I was severely alarmed because as I was leaving I was told and I could see that several pipes had cracked open, including what I believe were cold water supply pipes. That would mean that coolant couldn’t get to the reactor core. If you can’t sufficiently get the coolant to the core, it melts down. You don’t have to have to be a nuclear scientist to figure that out.

Workers also describe seeing cracks and holes in reactor one’s containment building soon after the earthquake, and it has been reported that a radiation alarm went off a mile away from Fukushima Daiichi at 3:29 PM JST–43 minutes after the quake, but 6 minutes before the tsunami hit the plant’s seawall.

Indeed, much of the data available, as well as the behavior of Fukushima personnel, makes the case that something was going horribly wrong before the tsunami flooded the backup generators:

Mitsuhiko Tanaka, a former nuclear plant designer, describes what occurred on 11 March as a loss-of-coolant accident. “The data that Tepco has made public shows a huge loss of coolant within the first few hours of the earthquake. It can’t be accounted for by the loss of electrical power. There was already so much damage to the cooling system that a meltdown was inevitable long before the tsunami came.”

He says the released data shows that at 2.52pm, just after the quake, the emergency circulation equipment of both the A and B systems automatically started up. “This only happens when there is a loss of coolant.” Between 3.04 and 3.11pm, the water sprayer inside the containment vessel was turned on. Mr Tanaka says that it is an emergency measure only done when other cooling systems have failed. By the time the tsunami arrived and knocked out all the electrical systems, at about 3.37pm, the plant was already on its way to melting down.

In fact, these conclusions were actually corroborated by data buried in a TEPCO briefing last May–and they were of course corroborated by “Ono” in the opening minutes of Frontline’s report–but rather than use their documentary and their tremendous access to eyewitnesses as a way of starting a discussion about what really went wrong at Fukushima Daiichi, Frontline instead moved to end the debate by repeating the industry line as a kind of shorthand gospel.

This is not nitpicking. The implications of this point–the debate about whether the nuclear reactor, its cooling systems and containment (to say nothing yet of its spent fuel pools and their safety systems) were seriously damaged by the earthquake–are broad and have far-reaching consequences for nuclear facilities all over the globe.

To put it mildly, the pipes at Fukushima were a mess. Over the decade prior to the Tohoku quake, TEPCO was told repeatedly about the poor state of the plant’s pipes, ducts, and couplings. Fukushima was sighted numerous times for deteriorating joints, faked inspections and shoddy repairs. Technicians talk of how the systems didn’t match the blueprints, and that pipes had to be bent to match up and then welded together.

Fukushima was remarkably old, but it is not remarkable. Plants across Japan are of the same generations-old design. So are many nuclear reactors here in the United States. If the safety systems of a nuclear reactor can be dangerously compromised by seismic activity alone, then all of Japan’s reactors–and a dozen or more across the US–are one good shake away from a Fukushima-like catastrophe. And that means that those plants need to be shut down for extensive repairs and retrofits–if not decommissioned permanently.

The stakes for the nuclear industry are obviously very high. You can see how they would still be working overtime to drown out the evidence and push the “freak one-two punch” narrative. But it’s not the true story–indeed, it is dangerous lie–so it is hard to reconcile why the esteemed and resourceful journalists at Frontline would want to tell it.

* * *

That was not the only problem with Tuesday’s episode, but it is one of the most pernicious–and it presents itself so obviously right at the start of “Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown.” Also problematic was the general impression left at the end of the program. While mention is made of the 100,000 displaced by the 12-mile Fukushima exclusion zone, nothing is said about the broader health implications for the entre country–and indeed for the rest of the world as radioactive isotopes from Fukushima spread well beyond Japan’s borders.

Alas, though Frontline tells of the massive amounts of seawater pumped into the damaged facility, nothing much is said about the contaminated water that is leaving the area, spreading into groundwater, rivers and the Pacific Ocean. The show talks of the efforts to open a valve to relieve pressure inside one reactor, but does not address growing evidence that the lid of the containment vessel likely lifted off at some point between the tsunami and the explosion in building one. And there is a short discussion of bringing the now-melted-down reactors to “cold shutdown,” but there is no mention of the recent “re-criticality“–the rising temperatures inside one of the damaged cores.

And to that point–and to a point often made in these columns–this disaster is not over. “Japan’s Meltdown” is not in the past–it is still a dangerous and evolving crisis. The “devil’s chain reaction” that could have required the evacuation of Tokyo is still very much a possibility should another earthquake jolt the region. . . which itself is considered likely.

Sadly–disturbingly–Frontline’s Fukushima tick-tock ends leaving the opposite impression. They acknowledge the years of work that lie ahead to clean up the mess, but the implication is that the path is clear. They acknowledge the tragedy, but treat it as does one of the film’s subjects, who is shown at Frontline’s end at a memorial for his lost family–it is something to be mourned, commemorated and honored.

But Fukushima’s crisis is not buried and gone, and though radioactive water has been swept out to sea and radioactive fallout has been blown around the world, the real danger of Fukushima Daiichi and nuclear plants worldwide is not gone with the wind.

As noted above, it is a difficult task to accurately and effectively tell this sweeping story in less than an hour–but the filmmakers should have acknowledged that and either refocused their one show, or committed to telling the story over a longer period of time. Choosing instead to use the frame of the nuclear industry and the governments that seek its largess is not good journalism because it has the potential to do much harm.

New Fukushima Report: “Devil’s Chain Reaction” Could Wipe Out Tokyo

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Map of the east coast of Japan showing the distance between Tokyo and Fukushima Daiichi, 150 miles to the north.

A new independent report on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear disaster reveals that Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan feared events following the March 11, 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami would require the evacuation of Tokyo. The report, conducted by the Rebuild Japan Foundation, a new policy organization comprised of college professors, journalists and lawyers, sheds new light on just how in-the-dark many were in the wake of natural disasters that left the Fukushima nuclear facility with damaged safety systems and without internal or external power.

The investigation underscores the conflicting interests of the Japanese government, the directors of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO–Fukushima’s owner and operator), and those on the scene at the crippled nuclear plant. Masataka Shimizu, president of TEPCO, is said to have ordered all of Fukushima Daiichi’s employees to evacuate the facility in the days after March 11, but Daiichi’s plant manager, Massao Yoshida, argued that he could get the damaged reactors under control if he and nuclear workers remained. PM Kan eventually ordered a skeleton crew to stay at the plant, fearing that Fukushima Daiichi, the nearby Fukushima Daini and a third nuclear facility could spiral out of control and start what has been translated as a “devil’s chain reaction” or a “demonic chain reaction” that would necessitate evacuation of the nation’s capital, a city of 13 million people, 150 miles south of Fukushima prefecture.

Given this new window on internal deliberations (far too nice a word–these were likely frantic, heated arguments) in Japan, the decision made by US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko within days of the quake to recommend evacuating American citizens from an area 50 miles around Fukushima seems downright conservative. In recent days, nuclear power proponents have used this action as their latest volley in their ongoing push to oust Jaczko and replace him with a more servile chief regulator.

Interesting, too, the objections of TEPCO’s president to the plan to pour seawater on the melting Fukushima reactors and boiling spent fuel storage pools. This last-gasp measure, apparently the idea of Yoshida, the Daiichi manager, is believed to have somewhat cooled the reactors and at least kept the fuel pools from completely emptying–which would have resulted in a much more serious outcome (hard to believe, but true)–though it should be noted that the radioactive runoff is now contaminating the ground, groundwater, rivers and the ocean around Fukushima. TEPCO brass no doubt did not want to use seawater because its corrosive effects would make it impossible to ever restart any of the Daiichi reactors (again, ridiculous in hindsight, but not hard to imagine inside the profit-above-people distortion bubble that exists at companies like TEPCO). (UPDATE: Japan Times reports Kan was reticent to use anything but fresh water, but Yoshida ignored him and went ahead with the use of seawater.)

Other recent revelations–about how close Fukushima Daini came to a meltdown of its own, about how the Fukushima region is now more seismically unstable, and that the government had dire assessments of the disaster that it worked hard to keep secret–serve to buttress Naoto Kan’s fears that a string of nuclear disasters was a distinct possibility. And it should also serve as a warning that those fears are still a possibility if the region’s nuclear plants–whether or not they are still functioning–are not decommissioned and contained.

And all this information, and the new details on the lack of trust between the Japanese government and TEPCO, also paints a more nuanced–and, honestly, disturbing–picture of the environment in which US officials had to make decisions.

But, perhaps most importantly, this latest report is yet another data point against the absurd assertion that Fukushima Daiichi somehow proves nuclear power’s “defense in depth” safety systems work. The assertion that Fukushima isn’t a massive disaster, just as it stands today, is ridiculous, but reading about the lack of good information in the early days of the crisis, the internal fights and the government’s fears makes it clear that things could have easily been much, much worse. While there are still real concerns about just how much radiation residents throughout Japan will be expected to absorb, and there are still many technical questions that remain unanswered, it now appears that it was only a combination of an occasionally assertive PM, the heroism of about fifty Daiichi workers and maybe some dumb luck that gave the world the relative luxury of calling Fukushima an ever-metastasizing disaster, rather than an almost-instant hell on earth.

Nuclear “Renaissance” Meets Economic Reality, But Who Gets the Bill?

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Crystal River Nuclear Generating Plant, Unit 3, 80 miles north of Tampa, FL. (photo: U.S. NRC)

Crystal River is back in the news. Regular readers will recall when last we visited Progress Energy Florida’s (PEF) troubled nuclear reactor it was, shall we say, hooked on crack:

The Crystal River story is long and sordid. The containment building cracked first during its construction in 1976. That crack was in the dome, and was linked to a lack of steel reinforcement. Most nuclear plants use four layers of steel reinforcement; Crystal River used only one. The walls were built as shoddily as the dome.

The latest problems started when Crystal River needed to replace the steam generator inside the containment building. Rather than use an engineering firm like Bechtel or SGT–the companies that had done the previous 34 such replacements in the US–Progress decided it would save a few bucks and do the job itself.

Over the objections of on-site workers, Progress used a different method than the industry standard to cut into the containment building. . . and that’s when this new cracking began. It appears that every attempt since to repair the cracks has only led to new “delamination” (as the industry calls it).

Sara Barczak of CleanEnergy Footprints provides more detail on the last couple of years:

The Crystal River reactor has been plagued with problems ever since PEF self-managed a steam generation replacement project in September 2009. The replacement project was intended to last 3 months, until PEF informed the Commission that it had cracked the containment structure during the detensioning phase of the project. PEF subsequently announced that the CR3 reactor would be repaired and back in service by the 3rd quarter of 2010…then by the 4th quarter of 2010…and then by the first quarter of 2011. On March 15, 2011 PEF informed the Commission that it had cracked the reactor again during the retensioning process and subsequently told the Commission that it estimated repair costs of $1.3 billion and a return to service in 2014. Shortly thereafter, the Humpty Dumpty Crystal River reactor suffered yet another crack on July 26, 2011.

That July crack was later revealed to be 12-feet long and 4-feet wide–and here, at least when it came to notifying the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “later” means much later. . . like four months later.

The issue, of course–as anyone with a lifetime crack habit will tell you–is that this all gets very expensive. Not only is there the cost of the repairs. . . and the repairs to the repairs. . . and the repairs to the repairs to the repairs. . . there is the cost of replacing the energy that was supposed to be supplied to PEF customers by the crippled reactor.

And then there is the cost of the new reactors. . . .

Wait, what?

Yes, based on the amazing success they have had managing Crystal River–and something called a “determination of need,” which was granted in 2008–Progress Energy holds out hope of someday building two of those trendy new AP1000 nuclear reactors at another Florida site, this one in Levy County.

And who is expected to pick up the tab? Who is on the hook, not just for repairs and replacement energy at Crystal River, but for PEF keeping its options open at Levy? Well, not surprisingly in “privatize profits, socialize risk” America, the plan was to stick Florida ratepayers with the bill (again Footprints provides the numbers):

Customer bills for instance, were expected to increase by $16/mo. in 2016; $26/mo. in 2017 and a whopping $49/mo. in 2020. Initially, Progress expected the proposed reactors to cost $4-6 billion each, coming online beginning in 2016. Just a few years later, the estimated costs have skyrocketed to over $22 billion and the online date, if the reactors ever even come online, has bumped back to 2021 and 2022. And the Office of Public Counsel believes that PEF may not intend to complete the reactors until 2027, if at all. The company has spent over $1 billion dollars on the Levy nuclear reactors and has yet to commit to build them. And the company is entitled to recover all its preconstruction and carrying costs from its customers before even a kilowatt of electricity is produced. In fact, even if the project is never completed PEF can recover all its construction costs from customers courtesy of the 2006 anti-consumer “early cost recovery” state law…essentially a nuclear tax scheme.

But now, as of this week, there is a new plan. . . stick Florida ratepayers with the bill:

The state Public Service Commission on Wednesday unanimously approved an agreement that will increase the power bills of Progress Energy Florida customers — who already pay among the highest rates in the state.

It is supposed to be a win for consumers.

The deal includes a $288 million “refund” of money customers were to pay to replace power from the crippled Crystal River nuclear plant, which has been offline since fall 2009 and might never return to service.

PSC staff concluded that customer rates still would increase. The average Progress customer’s bill on Jan. 1 is expected to increase $4.93 a month per 1,000 kilowatt hours of usage, from $123.19 to $128.12, subject to adjustments for fuel costs.

That’s a “win” for Floridians, it seems, because they are paying out something less for Progress Energy’s mistakes–at least in the near term. But even that caveat is subject to scrutiny:

While the agreement provides a replacement power cost refund over 3 years of $288 million to PEF customers (due to the CR3 outage) – it comes packaged with a base rate increase of $150 million and it precludes the parties from challenging up to $1.9 billion (yes, billion) fuel and replacement power costs from 2009 to 2016.

And that’s not all. Also in the agreement is a requirement that PEF start (yes, that is start) the latest repairs on Crystal River by the end of 2012; if they do not, Progress has to “refund” an additional $100 million to consumers. Missing, however, from the agreement is any new estimate (given the latest revelations, not to mention any post-Fukushima upgrades required) of the cost should PEF actually try to remedy all of Crystal River’s problems–and perhaps even more glaring, questions remain as to who will pay (and how much it will cost) should PEF decide to stop throwing good money after bad and decommission Crystal River reactor 3.

Also missing from the calculation is any determination of what PEF’s insurance will cover–Crystal River’s insurer stopped paying out in early 2011, and they have yet to decide if they will pay anything more. . . at all.

The agreement also fails to put an end to what is now becoming a regular part of the nuclear power finance scam–collecting public money for plants that will never be built. As the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE, which is affiliated with CleanEnergy Footprints) observed when it opted not to sign on to the Florida rate agreement:

PEF hasn’t committed to actually building the Levy Co. reactors. Having customers pay for the company just to maintain the “option” at a later date to build reactors is unfair to today’s customers – and runs counter to the Commission’s “intent to build” standard. The agreement allows the company to collect another $350 million from customers, presumably for pursuing their Nuclear Regulatory Commission license (without any prudency review) for reactors it hasn’t committed to build? In fact, the agreement contemplates that the company will cancel its engineering and procurement contracts as well, further demonstrating the unlikelihood of project completion.

If something sounds familiar here, it should. Southern Company has been using heaping helpings of Georgia ratepayer money to do all kinds of preliminary work on their Vogtle site, purportedly the future home of two new AP1000 reactors, just granted a combined construction and operating license by the NRC in January.

The big difference so far between Levy and Vogtle has been Southern’s ability to line up some financing for its Georgia construction–thanks to $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees granted the project by the Obama administration almost two years in advance of the NRC approval.

PEF does not have this kind of guarantee, but that did not stop them from trading on the possibility:

Progress Energy Florida officials said Thursday that President Obama’s plan to offer federal loan guarantees to encourage investment in nuclear power plant construction will be a strong incentive to move forward with the company’s proposed Levy County plant.

The project, however, is facing delays of between 20 to 36 months due to economic and regulatory problems, making the plant’s future uncertain despite the company’s insistence the project isn’t cancelled.

“It (the loan guarantee program) will definitely play a role in that decision (whether to continue with the project). It is one of many, but a very important one,” said Progress Energy spokesman Mike Hughes.

That was in 2010, right after President Obama announced the new Department of Energy loan program–but two years later, PEF has not secured a federal guarantee, and so has not secured any financing. . . and thus has also not committed to ever building the Levy plant. But none of that has stopped Progress from collecting money from Florida consumers just to keep hope alive, as it were. And none of that has apparently stopped any of Florida’s public service commissioners from telling PEF that this practice is just jake with them.

Even with NRC approval and some federally guaranteed money, it is still not a sure bet that the Vogtle AP1000 reactors will ever come on line. PEF’s Levy project has no license and no loan guarantee.

The folks at Progress Energy are not stupid–at least not when it comes to short-term financial gain–they know how very slim their chances are of ever pushing even a single kilowatt out of Levy County, but they also know where the profit is in the nuclear power game. It is not, quite obviously, in the construction of nuclear power plants–rife as that process is with lengthy delays and massive cost overruns–and it is not, some might be surprised to learn, so much in electric generation, given that plants in the US are now suffering “unusual events” that force one or more of them offline pretty much every week. Unusual events cost money–in parts and labor, and in time lost to repairs and inspections–and, as has been demonstrated at Crystal River, there is the cost of replacement energy.

No, the real profits in the nuclear racket come from the ability to collect on services not rendered and a product not delivered, or at least not delivered regularly. Because the system backstops the financing of nuclear facilities while also allowing plant operators to pass both real and anticipated costs onto ratepayers, many American taxpayers are poised to pay twice for nuclear power plants that don’t produce power.

And it would be remiss to close without adding a few more points.

Much has been made of the failure of solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which also received aid from the federal government in the form of loan guarantees. Solyndra ultimately got $527 million from the government; contrast that with what has been granted to Southern for Vogtle. Or, starker still, look at the entire alternative energy loan program, now projected to cost out at under $3 billion, and then look back to 2010, when Barack Obama pledged $54.5 billion to the DOE loan guarantee program designed to foster investment in nuclear power.

In addition, while the government will actually recoup most of the money lost on Solyndra when the factory and inventory are auctioned off, the “leftovers” from a failed nuclear plant–even the parts that are not contaminated with radioactivity–are much harder (if not impossible) to move.

The focus of this story has been on the costs–because the case of Progress Energy Florida is such a glaring example of how nuclear operators fleece America–but the fact that a company so focused on the bottom line, regardless of its effect on public safety, is still allowed to play with something as dangerous as a damaged nuclear power plant should not be overlooked. Alas, as was exposed last year, nuclear regulators and the nuclear industry seem to agree that safety should be addressed with an eye toward cost. So, while Crystal River is a scary mess, the reactor in question is actually offline right now. The same cannot be said, for example, about Ohio’s Davis-Besse plant, which has cracking problems of its own, but was allowed by the NRC to restart in January–over the vociferous objections of industry watchdogs, engineers, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH).

And then there is Palisades, on the shores of Lake Michigan, where numerous events and releases of radioactivity in the last year caused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to issue a downgrade of the plant’s safety rating–but the NRC did not order the plant to shut down. Palisades is owned by Entergy Nuclear, who was recently cited for “buying reactors cheap, then running them into the ground.” In addition to Palisades, Entergy owns nine other plants–Arkansas Nuclear One, Nebraska’s Cooper Nuclear Station, Fitzpatrick in upstate New York, Grand Gulf in Mississippi, Indian Point, just north of New York City, Pilgrim, outside of Boston, River Bend and Waterford, both in Louisiana, and Vermont Yankee.

The case of Vermont Yankee is especially upsetting. Yankee is a GE boiling water reactor, similar to the model that failed so catastrophically at Fukushima–but the NRC voted to extend its operating license just days after the Tohoku quake. The state of Vermont had a better idea, declaring that the nuclear plant should shut down by March 21, 2012. However, in January, federal district court judge J. Garvan Murtha ruled Entergy could ignore Vermont’s order and continue operating. The state is appealing the ruling, but in the meantime, Yankee continues to operate. . . and continues to leak tritium into the groundwater, and into the Connecticut River.

It is not clear who will be paying for any attempt to clean up the Vermont Yankee leak–though one can guess–nor is it clear what will happen to new nuclear waste produced after March 21, since the Vermont statehouse has forbidden any new waste storage on the site. Indeed, storing used nuclear fuel is a nationwide problem that poses real dangers in the near term, and will likely cost billions of public dollars in the long term.

And that’s the bottom line–the real bottom line–for the industry’s oft-ballyhooed “nuclear renaissance.” Plant operators and captured regulators can try to obscure the safety concerns with diversionary dustups and magical thinking, but economic realities, like facts, are stubborn. Without huge injections of public money, nuclear power simply cannot continue to function–and the public is in no mood for another multi-billion dollar government bailout.

NRC Vogtle Reactor Approval Should Blow Lid Off Nuclear Finance Scam

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Work is well underway on the Vogtle Unit 4 turbine building. The bottom of the Unit 3 containment vessel can be seen in the background. (photo via the Southern Company)

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Thursday vote to approve the combined construction and operating license application (COLA) for Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle cleared the way for adding two AP1000 nuclear reactors to the two existing units near Augusta, Georgia, but it should also shine a light on the elaborate shell game that masquerades as nuclear-powered electrical generation.

Coming almost exactly two years after the Obama administration granted the project $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees, the NRC’s OK for the project did not signal a groundbreaking at Vogtle. Thanks to a redefinition of what constitutes construction, drafted under a former NRC commissioner who now works for the nuclear industry, Southern started building on the site long before the AP1000 reactor design was finally approved by the NRC last December. And foundations were poured into the Georgia earth before environmental impact surveys were even required to be filed. So, Thursday’s move did not actually start construction, but it did start the roulette wheel turning on a massive financial gamble where Southern Company is pretty much assured of winning, and US taxpayers and Georgia utility customers are guaranteed to lose.

How much those Americans who don’t happen to own a power company will lose is an issue of some question–a question that the Department of Energy and Southern Company is making very hard to answer.

As this month marks two years since the government agreed to the loan guarantees, it will mark almost as long a time since the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the details of the deal the DOE struck with Southern Co., and thus it also marks almost two years of stonewalling by the Obama administration and the energy consortium:

To date, DOE has produced heavily censored documents that have provided little or no information in an effort to frustrate any analysis that would be useful to taxpayers. Based on the limited information produced to date, it appears that the power companies had to put almost no “skin in the game,” only promising to pay a token credit subsidy fee of what could be as little as 0.5 or 1.5 percent of the total loan principal.

Perhaps the once-pledged-to-be-the-most-open-in-history-but-now-proving-to-be-just-as-secretive administration thinks it can hide behind the idea that it is only a guarantee, and, at that, a guarantee of a private business plan, but that would be doubly troubling.

The DOE has indeed tried to use the confidential business argument, but Mindy Goldstein, acting director, Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law, who is representing SACE in its FOIA case, explains just how disturbing that argument is:

DOE claims that the loan guarantee terms and credit subsidy fee estimates are confidential and may only be viewed by Georgia Power and its utility partners. Let’s hope DOE is wrong. For such information to be withheld as confidential, it must have been obtained from the utilities themselves. If the power companies are literally writing their own guarantees and credit subsidy fee estimates, the Loan Guarantee Program is more flawed than anyone could have imagined.

Alas, given the long history of industry representatives “helping” the DOE and NRC draft their regulations, Goldstein’s legal conundrum isn’t hard to imagine as the actual state of affairs.

And neither the government nor the taxpayer should take comfort from the guarantee angle:

Private lenders have declined to finance new reactors because of the enormously high cost of new nuclear power and the substantial risk that any such investment will fail. In 2003, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the chance of a loan for new nuclear reactor construction resulting in default would be “very high – well over 50 percent.”

And for the folks at Vogtle, the risk is likely much higher. The two reactors now at the Georgia site took over 15 years to complete, came in 1,200 percent over budget, and resulted in an enormous rate hike for Georgia power consumers.

The fact that even with taxpayers already shouldering the risk ratepayers are also on the hook is the remarkable second slap in the face that comes with the nuclear power con:

[Southern’s subsidiary and largest utility, Georgia Power] customers already are paying down the [Vogtle] project’s financing costs through a fee that will increase to $8.74 a month by 2015. The fee will end once reactors start producing power in 2016 and 2017.

Well, the fee is supposed to end when the reactors start producing power, which is supposed to be in 2016 and 2017. But no nuclear project comes in on time or on budget–and as was just noted, history is not Vogtle’s friend here–and not only will ratepayers continue to cough up cash while construction drags on, it is certainly not unprecedented to see them continue to get fleeced for overruns after the plants are finished (just ask the good citizens of Florida).

These, of course, are just the costs incurred if everything goes more or less right. And these, of course, are just the costs of building the reactors–it has nothing to do with the fueling, the maintenance, the waste removal and clean up should anything get, you know, “unusual.” But since the taxpayers and ratepayers pretty much built the new reactors for them, those costs should come out of Southern Co/Georgia Power’s profits once they start charging for the actual power, right?

Uh. . . wrong. As George W. Bush was headed out the door, he made sure that the Department of Energy would be liable for all costs from any high-level radioactive waste generated at the new Vogtle units. And, of course, as is true for all facilities in the US, the Price-Anderson Act indemnifies the industry against claims arising nuclear accidents.

And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval–coming when it does–does nothing to make those accidents less likely. The NRC voted for Vogtle’s COLA over the objections of its chairman, Greg Jaczko, who thought safety rules that should come from the post-Fukushima recommendations should have been stipulated as essential to any new license. And the AP1000’s design, which Toshiba-Westinghouse likes to tout as safer than its close cousin, the pressurized water reactor, is suspected to be anything but.

Meanwhile, trouble at nuclear reactors worldwide continues apace. At Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi, unit two, which was said to have been brought to a “cold shutdown” in December, has experienced what is called a “re-criticality”–in other words, the temperature inside the ruptured containment vessel has begun to rise again, up more than 20 degrees Celsius since February 1. Officials from Japanese power company TEPCO have done a poor job of explaining why this might be happening or what it might mean for the future, but they do admit to the necessity of increasing the amount of water and boric acid pumped into the damaged reactor to counteract the warming. And, since there are holes and cracks in the reactor vessel, that means more radioactive waste water pouring out of the building and into the basements and surrounding plant grounds–more water on top of the 95,000 cubic meters already believed to be there, and on top of the 220,000 cubic meters that TEPCO has claimed they “processed” (and then dumped back into the environment).

And something else quite troubling has been observed in Japan–bird populations in Fukushima prefecture have taken a bigger dip than was expected from studies of similar species around Chernobyl after that nuclear disaster.

Speaking of the former Soviet Union, there was a fire last weekend at the Alikhanov Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in southwestern Moscow. The building contains an atomic collider and is home to Russia’s very first heavy water reactor, built in the 1940s, and now decommissioned. Government officials said there was no danger of a radiation leak, but others, like Greenpeace Russia, beg to differ.

Back in the USA, the San Onofre plant remains completely shutdown after one reactor was found to be leaking tritium on January 31. Meanwhile, the other reactor, offline for refueling and repairs since January 9, was discovered to have alarmingly excessive wear inside its almost new turbine tubes.

And at Prairie Island, a nuclear facility in southeastern Minnesota, Xcel Energy has copped to two separate toxic chemical and radiological spills. One happened last November, but Xcel did not alert residents of the Prairie Island Indian Community–a whopping 600 yards from the power plant–till last week. The second happened just last Friday, February 3, but Xcel waited to give notice till Monday because the leak happened “‘after business hours’ just before the weekend.”

This is but a small sample–less than a week’s worth–of the nuclear world the NRC has now voted to expand. With each of these items should come a list of questions and a cavalcade of caution, but the NRC’s rulings on the AP1000 have defied the facts on the ground. Meanwhile, the entire federal government seems hell-bent on ignoring the fiscal realities, instead choosing to guarantee that money flow from the pockets of taxpayers into the coffers of nuclear energy corporations, whether or not those corporations ever provide a kilowatt of power to those taxpayers.

It is a sad state of affairs–that almost goes without saying–but perhaps sadder is the relative silence around such a multi-layered scandal.

Political activists were rightfully outraged when the Bush administration fought tooth-and-nail to keep the minutes of Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force secret. Now, aside from the good people at SACE, who else is working to uncloak an equally secretive–and equally offensive–Obama energy deal?

Some look to leverage a scandal off the failure of Solyndra–but the loan guarantees to Southern Company are over 15 times larger than those made to the small solar manufacturer, and frankly, even today, more risky. (Solyndra may have failed, but its assets can and will be sold, and its plant will be repurposed. Very little of that potential exists for a failed nuclear endeavor.)

Many who are outraged by the bailouts of the banks should see each of these nuclear facilities as a little version of the same “socialize the risk, privatize the profit” model. A nuclear facility might only lose billions of dollars instead of trillions, but as Everett Dirksen observed in a cheaper era, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

And, of course, nuclear failures aren’t just toxic to the economy, they are toxic to the environment, too.

And for those that think this week’s $25 billion settlement with the five big financial institutions guilty of mortgage fraud is somehow a grand amount–just remember that you can’t get two new nuclear power stations for that. . . and after typical delays and cost overruns, $25 billion likely won’t even get you one.

So, take a good look at what is happening in Georgia–even if the Obama administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission won’t. . . even if the Obama administration and the NRC don’t want you to. The nuclear industry, its acolytes, its lackeys, its supplicants and subordinates want to make the Vogtle reactors the first of many, the first of an irresistible nuclear renaissance, the start of a hard-charging, government-subsidized pushback–against activists and environmentalists, sure, but in reality, against the truth.

The truth, of course, is that without the lobbyists and the grease they spread, without the captured regulators and the purchased elected officials, the nuclear industry would be relegated to the past, right alongside its antiquated technology. The truth is that nuclear power is not clean, nor safe, nor too cheap to meter–it is dirty, dangerous, and a financial sinkhole of epic proportions. Banks and investment houses know it, ratepayers in Georgia and Florida know it, many of the residents of Japan know it, and even the government of Germany knows it–and now you know it, too. Now is the time to make sure your representatives in government–your president, your members of Congress, your state and local officials–know that you know it. Now is the time to stop this boondoggle and bailout, and then get to the business of safely uncoiling the nuclear serpent’s grip on our leaders and our imaginations. The AP1000 is not a first glimpse of the future, it is the last gasp of the past–and the sooner we stop subsidizing the old ideas, the sooner we can start investing in some new ones.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Ignores Fukushima, Green-Lights First New Reactors in 34 Years

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Current containment buildings and cooling towers at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Burke County, GA. (photo: NRC)

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted a construction and operating license to Southern Co. for two reactors to be added to its Plant Vogtle facility in Georgia. The OK is the first granted by the US regulator since 1978.

The NRC approved the license over the objections of its chairman, Gregory Jaczko, who wanted the license to stipulate that the units would meet new standards recommended by the agency’s Fukushima Near-Term Task Force (NTTF) report:

“I think this license needed something that ensured that the changes as a result of Fukushima would be implemented,” Jaczko said in an interview after the vote. “It’s like when you go to buy a house and the home inspector identifies things that should be fixed. You don’t go to closing before those things are fixed.”

The NTTF recommendations, geared toward improving safety and preventing another disaster like the one still evolving at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, have still not become official government rules–some are projected to take up to five years to draft and implement–and so, for now, the new reactor construction will get to pretend the Tohoku quake and tsunami, and the resulting core meltdowns and widespread radioactive contamination, never happened.

The Vogtle reactors are of a new (or, let’s call it “new-ish”) design. The AP1000 reactor was just approved by the NRC in December, over the objections of numerous scientists and engineers, who saw claims of innovation insufficient to counter the dangers native to any Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) design. Upon examination, many of the “improvements” to the AP1000 look more like ways to cut construction costs. Even so, a single new AP1000 is expected to cost anywhere from $8 billion to $14 billion dollars–and, it should be noted, no US nuclear facility has ever come in anywhere close to on time or on budget. The US government has already pledged over $8 billion in federal loan guarantees to cover construction of the Georgia reactors, since without the government backstop, no private financial institutions will invest in such a high-cost, high-risk project. Southern Co. has already spent $4 billion preparing the Vogtle site for the anticipated new construction.

“I cannot support this licensing as if Fukushima never happened,” said Gregory Jaczko after the Thursday vote–but thanks to the four other commissioners of his captured agency, licensing as if Fukushima never happened is exactly what the NRC did.

Aftershocking: Frontline’s Fukushima Doc a Lazy Apologia for the Nuclear Industry

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There is much to say about this week’s Frontline documentary, “Nuclear Aftershocks,” and some of it would even be good. For the casual follower of nuclear news in the ten months since an earthquake and tsunami triggered the massive and ongoing disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, it is illuminating to see the wreckage that once was a trio of active nuclear reactors, and the devastation and desolation that has replaced town after town inside the 20-kilometer evacuation zone. And it is eye-opening to experience at ground level the inadequacy of the Indian Point nuclear plant evacuation plan. It is also helpful to learn that citizens in Japan and Germany have seen enough and are demanding their countries phase out nuclear energy.

But if you are only a casual observer of this particular segment of the news, then the Frontline broadcast also left you with a mountain of misinformation and big bowl-full of unquestioned bias.

Take, for example, Frontline correspondent Miles O’Brien’s cavalier treatment of the potential increase in Japanese cancer deaths, courtesy of the former property of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO):

MILES O’BRIEN: When Japanese authorities set radiation levels for evacuation, they were conservative, 20 millisieverts per year. That’s the equivalent of two or three abdominal CAT scans in the same period. I asked Dr. Gen Suzuki about this.

[on camera] So at 20 millisieverts over the course of a long period of time, what is the increased cancer risk?

GEN SUZUKI, Radiation specialist, Nuclear Safety Comm.: Yeah, it’s 0.2— 0.2 percent increase in lifetime.

MILES O’BRIEN: [on camera] 0.2 percent over the course of a lifetime?

GEN SUZUKI: Yeah.

MILES O’BRIEN: So your normal risk of cancer in Japan is?

GEN SUZUKI: Is 30 percent.

MILES O’BRIEN: So what is the increased cancer rate?

GEN SUZUKI: 30.2 percent, so the increment is quite small.

MILES O’BRIEN: And yet the fear is quite high.

GEN SUZUKI: Yes, that’s true.

MILES O’BRIEN: [voice-over] People are even concerned here, in Fukushima City, outside the evacuation zone, where radiation contamination is officially below any danger level.

There was no countervailing opinion offered after this segment–which is kind of disgraceful because there is a myriad of informed, countervailing opinions out there.

Is 20 millisieverts (mSv) a year a conservative limit on exposure? Well, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the average annual dose for those living in the United States is 6.2 mSv, half of which is background, with the other half expected to come from diagnostic medical procedures. And according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the maximum additional dose for an adult before it is considered an “unacceptable risk” is one millisievert per year.

Then, to assess the cancer risk, O’Brien, practically in the same breath, changes exposure over a single year to “over the course of a long period of time”–an inexcusable muddying of the facts. One year for those who must live out their lives in northern Japan might wind up seeming like a long period of time, but it would actually be a small fraction of their lifetimes, and so would present them with only a fraction of their exposure.

So, is Dr. Gen Suzuki assessing the increased cancer risk for 20 mSv over a lifetime, a long time, or just one year? It is hard to say for sure, though, based on his estimates, it seems more like he is using a much longer timeframe than a single year. But even if his estimate really is the total expected increase in cancer deaths from the Fukushima disaster, what is he talking about? Miles O’Brien seems almost incredulous that anyone would be showing concern over a .2 percent increase, but in Japan, a .2 percent increase in cancer deaths means 2,000 more deaths. How many modern nations would find any disaster–natural or manmade–that resulted in 2,000 deaths to be negligible? For that matter, how many of the reporters, producers or crew of Frontline would feel good about rolling the dice and moving their family into an area that expects 2,000 additional fatalities?

Further, the exchange doesn’t say anything about the person who is supposed to casually endure the equivalent of three abdominal CAT scans a year (something no respectable professional would recommend without some very serious cause). The effects of radiation exposure on children are quite a bit different from the effects of the same exposure on adults–and quite a bit more troubling. And young girls are more at risk than young boys. Though the Frontline episode features many pictures of children–for instance, playing little league baseball–it never mentions their higher risks.

Also missing here, any mention that in a country now blanketed north to south in varying levels of radioactive fallout, radiation exposure is not purely external. The estimates discussed above are based on an increase in background radiation, but radioactive isotopes are inhaled with fallout-laden dust and dirt, and consumed with food from contaminated farmlands and fisheries. Outcomes will depend on the isotopes and who consumes them–radioactive Iodine concentrates in the Thyroid and has a half life of a couple of weeks; Cesium 137 tends to gravitate toward muscle and has a half-life of about 30 years. Strontium 90, which concentrates in bones, lasts almost as long. The affect of all of this needs to be factored in to any estimates of post-Fukushima morbidity.

So, as one might imagine, Dr. Suzuki’s cancer estimate, be it from his own deliberate downplay or O’Brien’s sloppy framing, is widely disputed. In fact, a quick survey of the literature might call the estimate in Frontline an absurdly low outlier.

By way of example, take findings compiled by Fairwinds Associates, an engineering and environmental consulting firm often critical of the nuclear industry. Using data from the National Academy of Science’s report on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR), Fairwinds explains that one in every 100 girls will develop cancer for every year they are exposed to that “conservative” 20 mSv of radiation. But Fairwinds believes the BEIR also underestimates the risk. Fairwinds introduces additional analysis to show that “at least one out of every 20 young girls (5%) living in an area where the radiological exposure is 20 millisieverts for five years will develop cancer in their lifetime.”

It should be noted here that five years of 20 mSv per year would equal 100 mSv lifetime exposure–the newly revised lifetime maximum set by Japan after the start of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. And some cities in northern Japan, uncomfortable with this blanket prescription, have set limits for children at one millisievert per year.

None of this information was hard to find, and all of it stems from data provided by large, respected institutions, yet, for some reason, O’Brien and Frontline felt content to let their single source set a tone of “no big deal.” Worried Japanese residents featured just after the interview with Dr. Suzuki are portrayed as broadly irrational, if not borderline hysterical.

The dismissive tenor of the medical segment carries over to several other parts of “Nuclear Aftershocks.” Take Frontline’s assessment of the German reaction to the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has pledged to entirely phase out their reliance on nuclear power within the next decade. O’Brien call this decision “rash” and “hasty,” and he doesn’t qualify those adjectives as the viewpoint of one expert or another; instead, he uses them matter-of-factly, as if everyone knows that Germany is a nation of jittery, irresponsible children. The political reality–that the German government is actually pursuing a policy that is the will of the people–is treated as some sort of abomination.

Japanese anti-nuclear protestors get similar treatment from Frontline. That large demonstrations like those seen over the last ten months are a rare and special occurrence in Japan is not considered. Instead, the documentary, time and again, hints at a shadowy doomsday somewhere in the near future, a sort of end-of-civilization scenario caused by an almost instant cessation of nuclear power generation. Indeed, as the program ends, O’Brien declares that every nuclear plant in Japan will be shut down by May–and as he says this, the camera peers out the window of a slow-moving elevated train. The view is a darkened Japanese city, and as O’Brien finishes his monologue, the train grinds to a halt.

Ooh, skeddy. Was this Frontline, or Monster Chiller Horror Theater?

Yes, the end seemed that absurd. “Nuclear Aftershocks” paints a picture many members of both the nuclear and fossil fuels lobbies would love to have you believe: a sort of zero-sum, vaguely binary, cake-or-death world where every possible future holds only the oldest, dirtiest and most dangerous options for electrical power generation. You get coal, you get gas, or you get nuclear–make up your mind!

But the show, like the handmaidens of those out-dated technologies, perverts the argument by glossing over the present and omitting choices for the future. As much as many concerned citizens would like to see nuclear power disappear overnight, it will not. Germany is giving itself a decade, the US is looking to run its aging reactors for another twenty years, and even Japan, dream though they might, will likely not decommission every reactor in the next four months. There is a window–big or small depending on your point of view–but a decided period of time to shift energy priorities.

Even the nuclear advocates who appear on Frontline call nuclear power “a bridge”–but if their lobby and their fossil fuel-loving brethren have their way, it will likely be a bridge to nowhere.

“Nuclear Aftershocks” does mention Germany’s increased investment in a wind- and solar-powered future, but the show calls that shift “a bold bet” and “a risk.”

Likely the producers will argue they did not have time for a deeper exploration, but by allowing fissile and fossil fuel advocates to argue that renewables cannot meet “base load” requirements, while failing to discuss recent leaps forward in solar and wind technology, or how well Japan’s wind turbines weathered the Tohoku quake and tsunami–or, for that matter, how much Japanese citizens have been able to reduce their electrical consumption since then through basic conservation–Frontline’s creators are guilty of flat-earth-inspired editing.

Indeed, missing from almost every discussion of the future of power generation is how much we could slow the growth in demand through what is called efficiencies–conservation, passive design, changes in construction techniques, and the replacement and upgrading of an aging electric infrastructure. The Frontline documentary highlights some of the potential risks of an accident at New York’s Indian Point nuclear generating station, but it contrasts that concern with nearby New York City’s unquenchable thirst for electricity. Missing entirely from the discussion: that New York could make up for all of Indian Point’s actual output by conserving a modest amount and replacing the transmission lines that bring hydroelectric power from the north with newer, more efficient cable.

No single solution is a panacea for every region of the globe, but many alternatives need to be on the table, and they certainly ought to be in any discussion about the “aftershocks” of nuclear’s annus horribilis. It should be seen as impossible to evaluate nuclear energy without considering the alternatives–and not just the CO2-creating, hydrofracking alternatives that are the standby bugbear of those infatuated with atomic power. Coal, gas, and nuclear are our links to the past; renewables and increased efficiency are our real bridge to the future. Just as it is dishonest to evaluate the cost of any of the old-school energy technologies without also considering environmental impact and enormous government subsidies–and now, too, the costs of relocating hundreds of thousands or millions of people and treating untold numbers of future health problems–it is also misleading to treat energy funds as permanently allocated to entrenched fuels.

The billions pledged to the nuclear industry by the Obama administration dwarf the budgets and tax incentives for conservation, alternative fuels, and green technology innovation combined. Factor in the government-shouldered costs of cleanup and waste storage, not to mention the sweetheart deals granted to the hydrocarbon crowd, and you could put together a program for next-generation generation that would make the Manhattan Project look like an Our Gang play (“My dad has an old barn!” “My mom can sew curtains!”).

It is a grave disappointment that Frontline couldn’t take the same broad view. The producers will no doubt argue that they could only say so much in 50 minutes, but like Japan, Germany, and the United States, they had choices. For the governments of these industrialized nations, the choices involve their energy futures and the safety of their citizens; for the Frontline crew, their choices can either help or hinder those citizens when they need to make informed choices of their own. For all concerned, the time to make those choices is now.

It is a shame that “Nuclear Aftershocks” instead used its time to run interference for a dirty, dangerous and costly industry.

The Party Line – December 30, 2011: The Party Line, Nuclear Style

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As we close out 2011, readers of this space will likely not be surprised to hear the following:

  • The crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility continues and continues to poison the planet;
  • Accidents and events at nuclear reactors across the United States continue at a headshaking pace (something goes wrong somewhere pretty much weekly);
  • The nuclear industry continues its full-court press against any new safety rules that might spring from lessons learned from Fukushima or the domestic events;
  • Industry-friendly regulators continue to help slow-walk new rules while also working with allies in Congress to oust the slightly more safety-minded Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair, Gregory Jaczko;
  • Chairman Jaczko continues to hope his faith in a moderate path and a captured regulatory agency will guarantee a safe nuclear future and help save his job; and
  • All of this has happened before.

Last point first: Ryan Grim has a great follow-up on this month’s attempted coup at the NRC–where four commissioners, in coordination with members of congress and nuclear industry lobbyists, have gone public with complaints about the NRC chairman, Greg Jaczko. While the commissioners have stopped short of calling for Jaczko to step down, several GOP congressmen are pressing for just that result.

As Grim reports in the Huffington Post, the effort to oust Jaczko not only continues in the wake of two congressional hearings on the matter, the whole ugly putsch closely resembles moves in the 1990s to discredit another regulation-minded nuclear regulator. And the stories even include some of the same players.

Like with the current “scandal,” the plot is not a simple one to summarize (so please read Grim’s detailed story), but the highlights include a former National Resources Defense Council scientist, Terry Lash, who was appointed by the Clinton administration to run the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, his deputy, one William Magwood, and a staffer for the very nuke-industry-financed Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) named Alex Flint.

Thanks to an exploited possible gaffe in protocol and the coordinated work of Domenici, Magwood and Flint, Terry Lash was eventually pushed aside. And Magwood would take over the nuclear division at DOE, first as acting director, and then, under George W. Bush, as the office’s permanent head.

And yes, you’ve read two of those names here before. Bill Magwood is a commissioner at the NRC, a former consultant to the nuclear industry, and one of the most vocal critics of Chairman Jaczko. Alex Flint has run through the classic DC regulatory revolving door, moving between Senate staffer, nuclear industry lobbyist and back, most recently settling in as the top lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industry’s largest trade association.

The story is as troubling as it is tired. A government agency manipulated by the industry it is supposed to regulate. An industry, protected by bought politicians, avoids accountability while profiting from government largess. Some of that profit is then turned around to lobby and buy another administration’s worth of officials.

And an agency chief who is maybe too slow to realize that the industry and its surrogates will work relentlessly to undermine him and the regulatory body he tries to command.

The lessons here seem obvious and familiar. . . and yet they seem to be lost on so many.

It has been all-too-rare to see broad coverage of the US nuclear industry in the establishment press, yet, during the first week of December, nearly every news organ was Johnny-on-the-spot, repeating the industry storyline. Gregory Jaczko, it seems, was a temperamental leader, so difficult to work with that the NRC’s mission had been compromised.

Beyond the unremarked upon humor inherent in seeing Republican Senators and Representatives suddenly so concerned with nuclear safety, Jaczko himself provided under-reported frame-relief by proving so difficult to work with that he was able to secure the NRC’s unanimous approval of the new Westinghouse AP1000 reactor (despite some very serious concerns about that design and no financial support for construction without billions in federal loan guarantees). And the rest of the commission was able to out-vote Jaczko, four to one, to fast-track the construction and licensing of the new reactors, slated for plants in Georgia and South Carolina.

But perhaps most remarkable is that despite the industry push-back and power-politics, Jaczko still seems to think and act as if nuclear power can be regulated to a safe and prosperous future. The viciousness of the industry attacks and the seriousness of the events of nuclear’s annus horribilis should really disabuse him of that notion.

And the horrible year is not yet over. The last two weeks have seen the first of the debris from the Japanese tsunami hitting US shores, Pacific seals being tested after showing up in Alaska with skin lesions and other symptoms consistent with radiation poisoning, and a report from the International Journal of Health Services linking some 14,000 excess deaths in the US to the fallout from the Fukushima reactors.

Then there is the Japanese interim report on their nuclear disaster describing a regulatory agency unable and unwilling to take control of the crisis. There is the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) contention that they are not legally responsible for fallout once it lands on someone else’s property. And here in the United States, there was a valve leak at Mass Pilgrim, a condenser leak at New York’s Fitzpatrick plant, and an event at Vermont Yankee where both of the cooling system’s backup power generators were offline at the same time.

Still, the nuclear industry pushes the notion of an impending nuclear renaissance. It wasn’t true before Fukushima, and it certainly isn’t true after, but with even their supposed nemesis on the NRC helping them build new reactors and relicense old ones, why not keep working the system?

As noted here (but few other places), the December hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that was so dominated by the Jaczko cause célèbre was originally scheduled months earlier to track the progress of recommendations from the Fukushima taskforce. An August admonition from Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) seemed to move the commissioners to put some of the recommendations on what passes for a fast track at the NRC, but even that has now been reversed by a majority of commissioners who voted themselves the ability to reject the very rules they previously ordered up. But all the attention in oversight hearings has been focused on Jaczko and his management style–learning the lessons of Fukushima and how that might improve US nuclear safety has been less than a footnote.

So, though Jaczko continues in his job with the public support of the White House, the nation’s regulatory agenda has already been altered. The nuclear industry may not yet have their head, but they’ve demonstrated they own the body.

And now a new year is upon us. The flip of the calendar will not wrap up the Fukushima disaster any more than it will end the parade of lesser events at American nuclear facilities. The nuclear industry will not decide to embrace safety upgrades and stricter regulation any more than the financial community will embrace nuclear power as a good risk. And no matter how many moves Gregory Jaczko makes in the direction of Bill Magwood or his industry masters, neither will ever like him. . . or consider calling off their well-practiced campaign to oust him.

Happy New Year.

Regulatory Meltdown Goes Nuclear: Will Attacks on NRC’s Jaczko Kill Post-Fukushima Upgrades?

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NRC Chmn. Jaczko testified Wednesday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

If you like politics as blood sport, this is great stuff. On the other hand, if you worry about people, their lives, their health, how their money is spent and how their government protects their lives, their health and how their money is spent, well, then, this sucks.

If you had been waiting for the three-month follow-up to the Senate Environment and Public Works committee hearing on the Fukushima Near-Term Task Force recommendations–the one Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) promised in August at the last hearing on this issue of vital importance to US nuclear safety–well, that hearing was yesterday, Thursday, December 15. . . and whether you watched them or not, you are still waiting.

Though this hearing was, indeed, scheduled months ago, and was introduced Thursday by Boxer with the insistence that the committee should focus on the progress of post-Fukushima lessons learned, the Senators instead behaved much like some of their House brethren had the day before, spending over two-and-a-half hours debating whether Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko was either a bad chairman. . . or the worst chairman ever.

As has been detailed so many places, the four other NRC commissioners sent a super-complainy letter to the White House essentially accusing Jaczko of making decisions they disagreed with. . . oh, and yelling, banging his gavel, and causing three unnamed female NRC employees to cry. Not to belittle any real problems with real bullying, harassing, martinet bosses, but given the context–seeing this letter “leaked” by House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) just before the scheduled release of a report (PDF) from Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) accusing members of the NRC (most notably industry loyalist and Obama appointee Bill Magwood) of conspiring to slow-walk and/or submarine safety upgrades that Jaczko wanted to see adopted after the Fukushima disaster–it is hard to see this dustup as anything but a distraction and a witch hunt.

And it is hard to see the Representatives and Senators (all of them Republican) who spent the last two days berating Jaczko as anything but clumsy puppets of a nuclear industry hell-bent on seeing that nothing more is required them, memorable nuclear nightmare or no.

Look no further than Rep. Issa’s introductory statement at his Wednesday hearing, in which he so badly butchered the names of four of the five NRC commissioners seated in front of him. Issa did OK with “Magwood,” but the verbal Play-Doh that he substituted for “Jaczko,” “Svinicki,” “Apostolakis” and “Ostendorff” demonstrated either a purposeful slight of those “fereign” soundin’ names, or a complete and total ignorance of the matter at hand.

Now, I will cop to having botched the pronunciation of Chairman Jaczko’s name (I now have it on good authority that it is pronounced YAHTZ-ko), but in my defense, I was just going by what I heard on radio and television. Issa, on the other hand, should, in his role as a House member tasked with oversight of the NRC, and as a man who has pushed this apparent scandal as the single most important thing confronting nuclear regulation right now, have a familiarity if not a close working relationship with these people. His demonstration that he did not seemed to say that rather than have any deep knowledge of the matter at hand, Issa was likely just reading what had been placed in front of him by folks who had paid for the right to put words in the mouth of a US Congressman.

Now, as has been mentioned before, it is hard to find the energy to go to the mat for Chairman Jaczko, who may be the most liberal commissioner at the NRC, but is still not seizing this Fukushima moment and truly rethinking US nuclear policy. Perhaps Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear put it best: “He’s not ‘our guy’ by any means, he has voted to re-license plants that should probably be shut down. But he does care about safety, in ways that the others do not.” It is hard not to wish that Jaczko were the worst commissioner at the NRC instead of the best. But it is easy to be outraged by what has happened to Jaczko, and more importantly, what has happened to the fight to improve the safety of America’s nuclear facilities.

And it was hard, while watching the House and Senate hearings within the boundaries of a TV screen, not to think you were seeing some colorized clip from the McCarthy era. The innuendo, character assassination and countless hours of self-righteous grandstanding from Republicans that all-of-the-sudden were oh-so-concerned about supportive work environments and reactor safety went beyond politics-as-usual–it was business as usual, and politics as business. A naked power play by an entrenched, privileged, presumptuous and protected industry.

But now what? This round goes to the nuclear industry–hats off–they made a week that should have been about following up on Fukushima taskforce recommendations, and made it instead about the regulator that dared to regulate. Big nuclear put reformers on their heels at a time when the literal and political fallout from Fukushima should have nuclear apologists running for the hills.

But this is far from over. Darrell Issa, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), commissioners Magwood, Svinicki, Ostendorff and Apostolakis, and the nuclear lobby that buttresses all of them will not stop here. The two days of hearings may have ended with a plea for a bunch of smart and dedicated public servants to “work it out,” but watching the events of the last week (and reading the emails included in Markey’s report) make it clear this is not just a war on Jaczko, this is a war on regulation. It may look on the surface like so much bread and circuses, but big nuclear’s henchmen are prepared to feed Christians to the lions all day long. Pro-nuclear forces will accept nothing short of an unobstructed path to privatized profits with socialized risks.

So, the ball’s in your court, Chairman Jaczko. Will you try to give the industry some of what it wants–go ahead with approval of the new AP1000 reactors, the restart of derelict facilities like Davis-Besse and Crystal River, and the relicensing of aged, Fukushima-class plants–in the hopes that somehow this will make the masters of the nuclear universe like you more? Or will you stand fast, indeed, stand faster–pause the relicensing, stop new construction, accelerate post-Fukushima safety upgrades–and stare down the lobbyists and wholly owned elected officials?

If they want to pose as Joe McCarthy, then you, Chairman Jaczko, channel your inner Joseph Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Thanks to a rare alignment of personal interests and election-year politics, it appears the White House has the NRC chairman’s back (at least for now)–Jaczko should use the opportunity to look forward.

The War on Gregory Jaczko: Attempt at NRC Coup Evidence of Bigger Problems

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NRC, nuclear

NRC Chair Gregory Jaczko (photo: Gabrielle Pffaflin/TalkMediaNews)

Readers of this space know that the pace of safety reforms for America’s nuclear facilities, especially in the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima disaster, has been alarmingly slow. The recalcitrance–if not active hostility–exhibited by the nuclear operators and their government handmaidens borders on the criminal. So, it might sound more than a little bit shocking to hear that the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, is now under attack. . . for trying to implement new safety standards too quickly.

That’s not how House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is putting it, of course. In doublespeak that would make Orwell proud, Issa has written to the White House, issued a report, and fallen just shy of calling for Jaczko’s head:

“The current Chairman, through his blatant disregard for the Commission and its core beliefs, is testing this resolve,” the report says. “The NRC has survived thus far but the cracks are forming and all symptoms point to catastrophe.”

The report comes several days after Issa released a mid-October letter from the NRC commissioners to the White House that alleges that Jaczko is causing “serious damage” to the agency that could harm the body’s ability to protect health and safety.

The reality, of course, is that Issa–who has summoned Jaczko and fellow commissioners to appear at hearings this very day–has a vested interest in obstructing new health and safety rules, and the hubbub and hearings he is now orchestrating do not in any way focus on post-Fukushima lessons learned, unless that lesson is that the nuclear industry must engage a full-court press to preserve their privilege and profits in light of a new global awareness of the true cost and real dangers of nuclear power.

Since taking the gavel at Oversight, Issa has used his authority to disrupt government’s regulatory roll in the service of his corporate benefactors. In the case of the nuclear industry, Issa’s district includes the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), and Edison International, which owns nearly 80 percent of SONGS through its subsidiary, Southern California Edison, is Issa’s third largest source of career campaign contributions:

[Edison’s] political action committee has given Issa’s campaigns $46,000 over the years, including $5,500 during the last cycle. The PAC has also given $10,000 to Issa’s own PACs.

A company–in this case a nominally public utility–paying the piper and calling the tune is, sadly, not necessarily breaking news in 21st Century American politics, but when it comes to the nuclear sector, the level of influence and the nakedness of the quid pro quo should offend everyone.

And the ties don’t stop at the electoral level. Many regulators today come with strong connections to the industries they are supposed to regulate, but few demonstrate a closer relationship or a more unsettling affinity for their private-sector counterparts than NRC commissioner William Magwood, IV.

As reported in October, Bill Magwood, an Obama appointee, spent many years in the Bush administration’s Department of Energy as director of the Office of Nuclear Energy. During that time, Magwood was alleged to have had regular private meetings with Marvin Fertel, then-Senior Vice President and now President and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the lobbying arm of the nuclear power industry. (Not, coincidently, Fertel is quoted in several of this week’s stories hostile to Greg Jaczko.) FOIA requests were filed for records of those meetings, but Magwood’s email correspondence and calendars were destroyed just one month after he left the DOE in 2005.

After leaving the Bush administration, Magwood formed a consulting firm, Advanced Energy Strategies, which had as clients many of the nuclear power companies he dealt with at the Department of Energy and is now tasked with regulating as a commissioner at the NRC. One of those clients, as was uncovered this week by The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, was TEPCO, the Japanese power consortium that officially still owns and operates the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility. And that’s not all:

Magwood’s recent client list makes up a who’s who of Japanese power and nuclear companies, and included CLSA Japan Equities Division, the Federation of Electrical Power Companies in Japan (FEPC), IBT Corporation, Marubeni Corporation, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, RW Beck, Sumitomo Corporation and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, which was roundly criticized for its response to the crisis.

It is Jaczko’s use of his authority to push for new rules based on the post-Fukushima Near-Term Task Force (NTTF) recommendations that reportedly triggered the discord that motivated Issa’s current attack. But the controversy is deeper and more complicated.

First, Magwood and other NRC commissioners were vocally differing with Chairman Jaczko before the Fukushima nightmare started. Most notably, some of the commissioners and much of the nuclear industry were upset when Jaczko removed the unfinished Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility from the NRC budget after President Obama announced an end to the troubled Nevada dumpsite. Magwood was a strong proponent of Yucca Mountain during his years at the DOE and after, when he worked in the private sector. US nuclear facilities face a spent-fuel disposal crisis, and desperately need the federal government to take the hazardous waste off their hands.

Second, though the commissioners’ complaint was written and delivered to the White House in October, it was only made public by Rep. Issa last Friday. A slot usually reserved for news dumps seems like bad timing if Issa and his allies wanted to create a splash, unless you consider that Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) had planned to release a report on Monday showing how NRC commissioners had coordinated with pro-nuclear legislators to slow or stop post-Fukushima safety reforms. Markey’s report (PDF) includes emails revealing commissioner Magwood and staffers for pro-nuclear Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) worked together to discredit Jaczko for taking the lead on the US regulatory response to Fukushima.

Magwood, it should be noted, is thought to be next in line for NRC chief, if attempts to unseat Jaczko are successful.

Still, as internecine as all this sounds, this story would be easier to grasp if it were a simple tale of strong regulators vs. industry shills. Alas, as has often been the subject of these columns, the Jaczko-led NRC is far from the zealous industry antagonist depicted in pro-nuclear critiques. While Greg Jaczko might be the most regulation-friendly member of the current commission, his positions and policies are hardly progressive.

Those post-Fukushima recommendations, while all positive moves, are still weak tea when compared with the crisis that motivated the report. The speed at which they will be adopted–if they are ever adopted–can only be described as glacial. Despite Jaczko’s expressed wish that post-Fukushima realities be considered in the design, licensing and re-licensing of US reactors, the approvals of new construction and the renewals of operating licenses for aged reactors continue without any additional, Fukushima-influenced requirements. Further, disturbing domestic nuclear power events have not been met with the level of scrutiny they deserve.

November alone saw the approval of new reactors in South Texas, the refusal to consider the Fukushima report in the proposed relicensing of Seabrook, and reactor restarts of the quake-damaged North Anna facility and of the troubled Davis-Besse plant, even after its owner was forced to admit the presence of new cracks in its reactor building.

In October interviews, Jaczko expressed an interest in increased safety, but he also hid behind a regulatory process that quite plainly was not accomplishing his stated goals. The chairman also made assertions about the lifespan of reactors and the long-term safety of on-site spent-fuel storage that seemed cavalier and contrary to both existing evidence and current science.

While Jaczko might wish to see the Fukushima taskforce recommendations become rules, his pronouncements on the need for progress were weaker than the demands made by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) before her Environment and Public Works Committee (one of the committees charged with oversight of the NRC) during August hearings on the NTTF report:

The California Democrat said that if the industry wanted to operate and expand, it had to demonstrate that it could do so safely. Boxer stressed that it was important that citizens saw regulators as their defenders, able to act quickly in response to a crisis and honestly assure the safety of nuclear facilities. It takes a trusted regulatory regime for an industry to prosper.

. . . .

Boxer, to her credit, vowed to hold hearings every 90 days to push for action on the task force report.

The decision to stop construction on the Yucca Mountain waste facility, while the right one, was as much a victory for NIMBY politics as it was for progressive values. Indeed, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid (D), long an opponent of putting a nuclear dump in his state, was once Jaczko’s boss. The end of Yucca Mountain and Jaczko’s NRC job likely owe much to Reid’s early support of Obama in 2008.

Now Reid and Obama (through his Chief of Staff, Bill Daley) have come out for Jaczko again. But is this enough to counter the nuclear industry’s attempt at a coup?

While it would not be a surprise to see “no drama” Obama–who has benefitted greatly from nuclear industry campaign contributions–abandon his NRC chief, especially in the run-up to the 2012 election, it would be more difficult if anyone outside the Beltway felt moved to fight on Jaczko’s behalf.

It’s been the same story for Democrats for years now–Jaczko’s fight is just the latest example. Democrats from the president on down have repeatedly leaned right, disheartening and alienating their activist base, while gaining no measurable concessions from Republican opponents. Nothing Jaczko has done to appease the nuclear industry (or their government surrogates) has made them like him any more–to them, any regulator is a bad regulator. The nuclear lobby wants their loan guarantees, their tax breaks, and their Price-Anderson indemnity without any strings attached.

While it is very possible that any chair that replaces Jaczko will be even friendlier to the nuclear industry, there still exists little pro-Jaczko excitement on the left. Fukushima is a signal moment (well, in actuality, it is a never-ending series of signal moments), one that demands a much broader rethink of US nuclear policy than the regulatory tweaks in the taskforce report. If Jaczko and his elected allies want to energize America’s very-energize-able anti-nuclear community, then they need to seize the Fukushima moment with more than a proposal that better backup power systems be in place at some nuclear plants by 2016.

In the wake of the Japanese earthquake, the nuclear industry mobilized to secure their bottom line. Before there were recommendations to oppose, the industry had a plan in place to oppose them. If Jaczko and his backers want to see a mobilized response to this industry putsch, then they have to give people something to fight for. They can’t just make a few ripples and hope pro-nuclear forces will let it go; Jaczko, and Markey, and Boxer–and any others in government that grasp the meaning of nuclear’s “annus horribilis“–have to make waves.