Dismissing pleas from citizen groups in local U.S. communities where General Electric’s Fukushima-style reactors operate and ignoring expert testimony from independent nuclear engineers, the NRC voted earlier this month against a plan to require utility owners to upgrade nuclear plant filtering systems with vents —  “radiation scrubbers” — intended to reduce (not eliminate) radiation levels when the vents are opened in a severe accident.

The nuclear industry’s Congressional allies fought the proposal — “Safety gains should be significant enough to outweigh additional costs” to be paid by industry, said Representative John Shimkus (IL), chairman of an Energy and Commerce subcommittee — while Sen. Barbara Boxer (CA), in a letter sent to the NRC last month, wrote, “The tens of millions of Americans who live near the affected reactors located in 15 states should not face additional delays.”

“This is not just a Fukushima-Daiichi issue–the issues in the United States are in some ways much worse,” warned Arnie Gundersen, a week before the vote was taken, in the kick-off presentation at a symposium on the Fukushima disaster held in mid-March at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City. It was sponsored by the Helen Caldicott Foundation and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Gundersen is a former nuclear industry engineer turned whistleblower, and his ongoing reports over the last two years on the Fukushima disaster in Japan (here) repeatedly raise warnings about the GE reactors and their vulnerability to accidents.

The main difference between US and Japanese GE plants is the extreme amount of highly radioactive spent fuel stored in reactor spent fuel pools, which are located five stories above the reactors. The U.S. spent fuel pools in GE’s Fukushima-style reactors each contain more irradiated fuel than the total in all four reactor pools at the Fukushima plant.

Following the initial news reports of explosions at the Fukushima plant inside the GE reactor containment buildings, stories quickly appeared reporting that federal nuclear safety regulators who licensed the reactors knew about their design flaws but did not to stop GE from selling them.

“Scientists in the United States recognized in 1965 that this Mark 1 had design flaws,” Gundersen said. But GE threatened to pull out of the commercial reactor business if forced to make costly design changes. Gundersen recalled a comment by Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, who said in an interview years later: “I didn’t think we had the power to stop them.”

“Think about that,” said Gundersen. “This is the United States government and it didn’t have the power to stop General Electric’s faulty design in 1966.”

At the time both GE and Westinghouse were in fierce competition for top place in the new commercial reactor industry. GE was willing to take a loss on sales of its Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor — and it did. “GE lost millions,” Gundersen said. (“Our people understood this was a game of massive stakes and that if we didn’t force the utility industry to put these stations on line, we’d end up with nothing,” a GE VP told Fortune Magazine in an interview in 1970.)

AEC documents reveal that federal safety experts recommended banning the Mark 1’s pressure suppression containment system and cited its vulnerability to an explosion that would follow a loss-of-coolant accident.

The concerns were dismissed by Joseph Hendrie, then the AEC’s top safety regulator who was later appointed NRC chairman. In a 1972 memo, Hendrie thought such an action “could well be the end of nuclear power,” and would “create more turmoil than I can stand thinking about.”

“So the turmoil that Hendrie chose to avoid in 1972 became the turmoil that Japan suffered 40 years later,” Gundersen said.

But for GE, the sun shines bright. Despite the fact that its reactors at the Fukushima plant brought “a steady stream of allegations suggesting that problems were fixed ad hoc, or in some cases not at all,”  GE is home free under Japanese laws, according to the recent Greenpeace report, “Fukushima Fallout: Nuclear Business Makes People Pay and Suffer.”

Because Japan’s nuclear accident law limits liability to TEPCO and blocks victims from going after TEPCO’s suppliers, “all suppliers that were involved in the Fukushima nuclear power plants, including GE, Hitachi and Toshiba, are currently exempted from responsibility for the March 11 disaster,” the report states.

Fukushima’s victims also face a three-year time limit on applications for compensation. “Sixty-seven years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there are still people who claim their health has been harmed. Three years is clearly not long enough,” said Yasushi Tadano, a Tokyo-based lawyer who filed a compensation lawsuit against TEPCO last year.

New York State’s $1.2 million penalty against the owners of the Indian Point nuclear plant points a finger once more at failed oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The penalty against the Louisiana-based Entergy Corporation for violations of the Clean Water Act results from the 2010 transformer explosion and fire that caused an emergency shutdown of the plant’s Unit 2 reactor and an oil spill of more than 10,000 gallons into the Hudson River.

The fine was set in a consent decree from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation that is contesting relicensing of the Indian Point plant. DEC has denied Indian Point a state-required water quality permit to operate the plant — the decision was based on a history of radioactive leaks from the plant into the Hudson River that include strontium-90 and tritium.

The 2010 transformer fire is a replay of events that occurred in 2007 when a fire followed an explosion of Unit 3’s transformer.  Both fires are linked to failed bushings—ceramic insulators on top of the transformer.

Environmental groups, who have joined with New York State in fighting relicensing of the 40-year-old plant, spoke out in response to the $1.2 million fine against Entergy and said the 2010 transformer fire and oil spill could have been prevented if the NRC had taken proper regulatory action following the 2007 fire.

“When the first transformer fire occurred years back, it should have signaled the need to change out all the transformers in this aging system,” said Manna Jo Green, Environmental Director for Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. “Failure to insist on this mechanical upgrade demonstrates Entergy’s wait-and-see attitude, and faulty oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

Philip Musegaas, Hudson River Program Director at Riverkeeper, agreed. “The facts show that the fire and oil spill could have been prevented, had the NRC done its job of safely regulating Entergy.”

Riverkeeper conducted its own investigation into the cause of the 2010 transformer explosion and found that Entergy had failed to properly notify the state about the spill within the required time limit and downplayed the significance of oil spill in a misleading status report that said contractors “were on-site within hours after the [transformer] failure-to ensure there would be no environmental impact.”

Musegaas said, “The facts show that Entergy was aware of problems with the transformer part that failed, but did nothing to address it.”

Indian Point’s transformer problems continue. In late February, Unit 3 was shut following a buildup of hydrogen and other gases in transformer oil and the transformer was taken offline.

Clearwater said: “Entergy’s reluctance to replace aging, malfunctioning equipment is intolerable in the post-Fukushima world.  While an oil leak is not comparable to the disastrous meltdown in Japan a year ago, transformer explosions are very dangerous events, and Entergy’s track record of longstanding, repeated violations and preventable mishaps at Indian Point indicates a cavalier attitude towards legal and regulatory compliance that ignores and denies the lesson of Fukushima, that ‘it could happen here.’”

Together Riverkeeper and Clearwater have filed 20 legal contentions raising issues over legal and regulatory violations in the relicensing battle. Indian Point’s current licenses for its two operating reactors expire in 2013 and 2015. Relicensing hearings will be scheduled later this year.

In February, the NRC dismissed contentions brought by both groups that called for the NRC to suspend the relicensing process until “lessons learned” from Fukushima are reviewed and integrated into new safety regulations for nuclear plants. The NRC has claimed that such lessons would be “generically addressed” and are not within the scope of the license renewal process.

In response, Musegaas said, “The limited steps the NRC is taking on a national basis are too generic to be effective – so this ruling leaves us without an adequate evaluation of severe accident mitigation at either the national level or on a case-specific basis.”

The NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which reviews and rules on contentions, announced Thursday (April 5) that board members will tour the plant on May 8.

Musegaas said the visit would be “a key step in the process leading up to historic relicensing hearings for Indian Point” when New York State and groups fighting to shut down the plant “present what we are confident is a winning case that will lead to the judges’ denial of Entergy’s relicensing application.”

The ‘lesson’ from Fukushima? Nuclear safety does not exist in reality.

That’s the conclusion in a new report from Greenpeace International on the ongoing nuclear catastrophe in Japan that erupted at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant a year ago.

“There are only nuclear risks, inherent to every reactor, and these risks are unpredictable,” the report warns. “At any time, an unforeseen combination of technological failures, human errors or natural disasters at any one of the world’s reactors could lead to a reactor quickly getting out of control.“ Continue reading →

Today’s groundwater is tomorrow’s drinking water.

So warned a far-reaching 2010 report on the rising number of leaks and spills from nuclear power plants and their spreading threat to water resources – groundwater, surface water, and drinking water wells — from radioactive contamination.

Leak Now, Fix Later, published by Beyond Nuclear, investigated a series of massive leaks at nuclear plants and found that its close ties with the nuclear industry kept the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission from taking needed enforcement action to address the problem. Continue reading →

“Imagine the scene: more than 300,000 people are running and driving away from the stricken reactor along winding Westchester roads, trying to reach their children, their spouses, and their mates. Then they begin to taste a strange, metallic flavor in their mouths. The radio blasts out dire warnings, yet nobody knows what they are doing and nobody is in control.”

So writes Dr. Helen Caldicott, long-time anti-nuclear activist, in her book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, in describing the scenario of a ‘Manhattan Meltdown’ at the Indian Point nuclear power plant on the Hudson River, 30 miles from New York City. Continue reading →

“Indian Point spent fuel storage has about three times more radioactivity than the combined total in the spent fuel pools at the four troubled Fukushima reactors,” according to a new report, Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools in the U.S.: Reducing the Deadly Risks of Storage (Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies).

New York State and a statewide coalition of environment and public service watchdog groups have filed legal motions with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission challenging the re-licensing of Indian Point. They cite, among a list of safety hazards, the leaks and other risks presented by spent fuel storage at Indian Point. The current licenses for the plant’s two reactors expire in 2013 and 2015. Continue reading →

The long-troubled Indian Point nuclear power plant outside New York City sits on an active seismic zone and has the highest probability of core damage from an earthquake disaster of any nuclear plant in the country. (What are the odds? US nuke plants ranked by quake risk).

A 2010 report by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission – obtained by MSNBC earlier this year and published in the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe in Japan – updates earlier studies on earthquake risk at nuclear plants. It shows that Indian Point’s Unit 1 reactor (there are two operating reactors on the site) is the U.S. plant most at risk to reactor core damage from an earthquake disaster. Continue reading →