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By Roger Witherspoon

 

          The large black sailor was naked in the middle of a roped-off area below decks, and he was none too happy.

“He kept saying ‘Not my boots, too. My wife just bought them for me.’ But they made him take them off anyway, and he was just there, naked. Then they made him scrub,” recalled Maurice Enis, navigator of the USS Ronald Reagan, one of the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers.

“They gave him this really abrasive stuff that we use to clean the hull of the ship. It’s sort of like liquid sandpaper. And he had to scrub all over while everyone watched. Then he walked over to the sink and rinsed it off, then came back and stood while they ran the Geiger counter over him. He had to keep doing it till the Geiger counter was quiet.

“Then it was my turn.”

There was a dark turn to Operation Tomodachi, the massive search and rescue effort launched March 11, 2011, off the northern coast of Japan which had been ravaged by an earthquake and giant tsunami. The combined natural disasters left some 20,000 Japanese dead and the coastal infrastructure destroyed. Tomodachi, the Japanese word for “friend”, was an 80-day mission requested by the Japanese government and coordinated by the US State Department and the Department of Defense.  The DoD quickly mobilized its 63 Japanese bases and called in the USS Ronald Reagan, carrying 5,500 sailors and Marines, along with its Strike Group consisting of  four destroyers – The Preble, McCampbell, Curtis Wilbur, and McCain – the Cruiser USS Chancellorsville, and several support ships (     http://bit.ly/11bfTqS  ).

          But the rescue mission quickly detoured down a dangerous, uncharted path. The earthquake had cracked Unit 1 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, and the tsunami had knocked out all power to the safety systems controlling Units 1 through 4.  Control of the mission was expanded to include the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy.

The fuel in Units 1 through 3 was quickly melting down. The fuel in Unit 4 had been offloaded to the spent fuel pool – which was located above the reactor itself – due to a planned refueling. By March 15 explosions had blown the roofs off and the walls out of all four reactor buildings and radiation was spewing into the air.

          There was no power to circulate water in any of these buildings, so the Japanese had to improvise. They borrowed high powered pumping trucks from the Americans and poured water onto the buildings, let it run through the spent fuel pool and reactors, and out the bottom, where it flowed into the ocean.  All the while, however, the Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese government sought to minimize the radiological disaster. TEPCO would declare there was little or no radiation when, in fact, contamination was high and out of control.

          There were some 70,000 American service members and their families in Japan and Defense officials were worried that they might all have to be evacuated. Family members were evacuated from Yokosuka Naval Air Base, 188 miles south of Fukushima, when radiation was detected in increasing amounts there. It was that detection which convinced American officials that the Japanese were not being honest. By calculating the amount of radiation that must have been released in order for Yokosuka to be threatened, NRC officials correctly deduced that despite Japanese assurances, the reactors had been breached.

          But the overriding concern was for the Americans in the land based installations – the men and women of Operation Tomodachi were overlooked. And at times, they were just two miles off the coast of Fukushima as helicopters went back and forth, seeking survivors and transporting food and supplies.

          The Americans at sea were on their own.

 

A Growing Fear

For Quartermaster Enis, the wait for decontamination was a completely unexpected turn of events. The quartermasters had two main responsibilities: navigating the ship, and operating the signal flags attached to the mast, which let others in the fleet know what the flagship was doing. Enis had been ordered to bring down the American flag, which had been flying atop the mast for two weeks, and bring it to the Captain’s quarters.

“I brought it down,” he said, “and folded it respectfully and tucked it under my right arm, next to my body. I carried it inside, put it away, and thought nothing of it.”

After dinner, he was walking past a sensor “and the alarms all went off,” he recalled. “And they began yelling at me not to touch anything or anyone and to go straight to the decontamination area.”

There was a line in the cordoned-off “decon” area with men and women waiting to be checked. But Enis didn’t have to wait – he was already marked and was ushered to the front, where a tableau was playing out under the watchful eyes of the Reagan’s executive officer and senior medical officer. The naked sailor in the center of the room was given a towel to cover himself and left. They called Enis.

“They had told us that there was no radiation,” said Enis. “When they started putting up the stations along the ship to check for radiation they didn’t say why they were there. They checked my boots and nothing happened. Then they checked my hands and the machine goes crazy.

“The guy doing the checking freaked out and said to ‘Step away from him!’ Next thing I know, I got plastic bags on my arms and they are telling everyone to get away from me. I almost had an anxiety attack because they were treating me like I had the plague. They weren’t touching me. They were yelling commands to where I had to walk and what I had to do. I had to scrub my hands and my right side with this gritty paint remover and it took off a couple of layers of skin.”

Enis was not told, then or later, exactly what his radiation reading was.  They did say his was the highest level recorded among personnel on the ship. At that time, however, the radiation level was not his main concern. Fear of the unknown consumed his attention.

The officers were watching him and barking orders. His fellow sailors – men and women – silently watched him from the edges of the decon station while waiting their turn to be checked for radiation.

“It was pretty embarrassing,” said Enis. “You’re half naked and getting yelled at and scrubbing in front of all sorts of people and I’m scared because they are not telling me what is going on. The way they acted, I thought I must be in real trouble. And it scared the crew. None of us were experts on radiation. You ask yourself are you going to die? Are you going to get cancer? Are you going to be shipped off? I didn’t know if my skin was going to bubble up or something. I didn’t know anything.”

          The Navy had been assured that radioactive particles could be washed away with soap and water. That was partly true. Particles emitting alpha rays, the weakest sort, could be washed away from smooth surfaces. Those emitting beta rays, which are stronger, can also be washed away as long as there are no breaks in the skin providing pathways to enter the body. The abrasive paint-removing soap used by the Navy, however, removed the top layers of skin.  In addition, the carrier’s flight deck is not made of smooth plastic or glass. Merely scrubbing would not remove particulates from such porous surfaces.

The Reagan’s crew had been assured that there was no radiation to worry about over the open ocean and, as the ship’s navigator, Enis had been led to believe that the radiation was a distinct plume that they could avoid.  It was now apparent that the radiation cloud was everywhere, and avoiding it would not always be possible.

On the quarter mile long deck there was another alarming note.

“I had a digital watch,” said quartermaster Jaime Plym, “and it suddenly stopped working.  Somebody made a crack that radiation would do that. There were five or six of us on deck and everyone looked at their watches – and all the digital watches had stopped. There was one that was real expensive, and it wasn’t working either.

“We were laughing at first. But then that petered out and we just sort of looked at each other because it wasn’t funny anymore.”

And those who worked below decks had even less information to go on. The jet mechanics, said Jennifer Micke, had most of the aircraft parts brought down to them for testing. There was limited access to the huge hangar elevators.

“They set up a hatch watch,” Micke recalled, “which was people from the air squadrons sitting in folding chairs and making sure no one went on deck through the catwalk.  They were to enter and exit only through the front of the ship because they wanted to reduce the level of contamination in the rest of the ship.

Jennifer Micke

“So they would pretty much sit there all day and yell at people who went the wrong way.”

Micke knew the jets on the flight deck were in a radioactive environment.  “Every time we came off the flight deck,” she said, “some guy would have to scrub your boots and toss them in a pile and take them away. When you were going up on deck you would put on a pair of boots over your regular boots so they would have to throw those away. Then we had the chemical, biological, radiological suits that we had to put on.

“We were issued masks and canisters, but we never ended up actually using them.”

How well these precautions worked is an open question. An aircraft carrier is a complex industrial town and, at any given time, major and minor pieces of equipment are broken.  Some of the damage came from normal wear and tear, and other damage came from accidents.

During Operation Tomodachi, the effectiveness of putting rags under the doors to limit the spread of air-borne radiation was compromised by the fact that there were broken doors, broken door jams and seals and, in some places, water-tight doors which had been removed and taken to the Reagan’s machine shop for repairs. On paper the USS Ronald Reagan was a series of closed compartments. In reality, it was more of a floating catacomb with the air flowing freely through it.

Nothing to Worry About

 

          The official position of the US Navy is that there was very little radioactive contamination of any of its personnel.  The Defense Department created the Tomodachi Medical Registry ( http://bit.ly/14ABPuj )    over a two year period, compiling the medical records of  some 70,000 military personnel and their families who could have been exposed to varying amounts of radiation during the crisis in Japan.

          The Registry was completed in December, 2012. One month later, the Department concluded that their estimates of the maximum possible whole body and thyroid doses of contaminants were not severe enough to warrant further examination. The Registry, the only epidemiologically valid way to determine over time if there is a pattern of illnesses which could be traced to that exposure, was abandoned.

          Overlooked, however, is the fact that the Navy’s Registry, as a tool to accurately chronicle medical anomalies among the 70,000 contaminated Americans, was flawed in its inception. The Navy did not conduct a thorough medical examination of each person to establish an accurate baseline of their health. Instead, the Registry is an amalgam of all their latest health records.

          In practice, that meant there was no real way to know what the actual baseline health condition was for each individual. Without that baseline, Veterans Administration physicians could not tell if the development of a tumor, or asthma, or cyst inside the body or on the skin represented a radical departure from the patient’s condition at the time of exposure to radiation or if the condition predated Operation Tomodachi. Without that baseline or an active registry showing similar medical issues among many service men and women, there is little chance for veterans to successfully claim that exposure to radiation lay at the root of their health problems.

          The decision that the Americans in Japan were probably safe was not unreasonable. Ed Lyman, a nuclear physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, who is

Ed Lyman – Nuclear Physicist

writing a book on the meltdowns with nuclear safety engineer Dave Lochbaum and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Stranahan, said that both government and independent researchers have tried to calculate the level of contaminants from the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi.

          “The consensus was it wasn’t as bad as it could have been,” said Lyman. “It would be hard to see that anyone could have acquired a serious dose in that short a period of time. The dose rates were only high enough, from what’s publicly known, to cause that kind of injury fairly close to the plant grounds to have lasting health effects.

          “Still, I am always in favor of collecting data.  Five years may not be enough time for radiation –induced cancer to appear in most cases. But more data is always better.”

          Others are more skeptical.

          “I had no faith in the Registry to begin with,” said Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer and specialist in the spread of radiation in the environment. “With the atomic bomb survivors from the military program in the Utah desert, the registry that the Defense Department put together was bogus. The exposure they got was much greater than the Defense Department calculated.

          “Knowing that the Defense Department has a history of putting people into harm’s way and then minimizing the exposure, I had no faith in this latest effort.”

          Gundersen said he is “disappointed, but not surprised” that the Tomodachi Registry has been shelved. “It’s pretty clear that those on the Ronald Reagan got higher exposures than their commanding officers are claiming. Too many people had common symptoms that I can’t attribute to mass hysteria.

          “One of the big uncalculated numbers are from the noble gasses. These blew over the carrier and they didn’t stick, but they are inhaled by personnel when you see the guys swabbing the decks to clear out particulates.  That was a bad sign. You are not supposed to get particulates 100 miles offshore.  So what the hell did the sailors breathe in? Their lungs have to have the same crap that was on the deck and in the water, and none of the Defense Departments exposure assessments take into account the hot particles in the sailors’ lungs.”  (  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCzuPm4T4qo  )

          And those who participated in Operation Tomodachi know that there are problems.

Collateral Damage

 

“My health started going south at the beginning of last year,” said Micke, the F-18 structural mechanic and hazmat coordinator on the USS Reagan. “On March 30, I was standing in formation during the change of command in California, and I passed out for the first time.

Jennifer Micke

“They told me I was just dehydrated, so I sat there in the medic area and drank a bottle of water. Then, on April 29, I passed out once more and this time they took me to the emergency room and I told them I had a headache.

“They said ‘Maybe you hit your head’. So they did a cat scan and came back and said ‘We found this mass in your brain’. I’ve had two surgeries since then and I’m out of the Navy.”

Technically, what the doctors found was a level 2, Oligoastrocytoma   cancer (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligoastrocytoma  ) in Micke’s frontal lobe. It is a pernicious, incurable cancer which lodges in the area of the brain responsible for coherent speech. Removing the bulk of the growth leaves a cavity which, in some cases, can collapse and cause collateral damage.

After Micke’s second surgery last fall she was informed that “it’s not active right now. The parts they left up there are just sitting there, dormant.   I know they are up there, and it’s not as bad as it could be since they aren’t doing anything and it doesn’t hurt.

“I go back to the hospital every two months to have it checked. It’s pretty stressful, but it’s definitely livable.”

Living means she is back where it all began, on her parents’ farm in Thorp, Wisconsin, waiting for the next eruption of her cancer.  “At this point,” said Micke, “I have so many doctors’ appointments that it is difficult to really do anything as far as getting a job 5 days a week. I don’t have a car so my parents are driving me everywhere.”

Micke has reconciled herself to living with the unpredictable. “My future plans haven’t changed severely,” she said. “I still plan on going to college, getting a good job, and continuing life. As for the cancer, it’s a part of me, like living with your hand. You  come to terms with it and live with it.

“You live for today and be yourself and enjoy life for as long as you can.”

She is part of the group suing TEPCO for misleading the American government about the conditions of its reactors and the true release of radiation, which she blames for her condition.

“I’m just mainly doing it so it doesn’t happen to anybody else, just so somebody is held accountable,” she explained.  “Hiding stuff messes with people’s lives in the long run, and I don’t want to see this happen to anybody else.

“As for the Navy, I don’t see where they could have done much more. It’s not something you train for. They did the best they could with the information they had.  And I have great memories of the people I worked with, and the places I’ve been.”

To some degree, Micke is fortunate that she passed out and was diagnosed while still in the Navy. At the moment, her medical expenses are being covered. But that may change.

“The doctors have not determined yet if it is service connected,” Micke said.

Since the Defense Department has pre-determined that radiation did not cause any illnesses among its personnel and has cancelled the Tomodachi Medical Registry – which is the only epidemiological way to determine patterns of health problems – Micke may yet become a Navy veteran with an incurable cancer and no health care.

Ageing Fast

 

          Michael Sebourn had seen a lot of parts wear out during 17 years as a naval aircraft mechanic. Many of the helicopters he serviced at Atsugi saw heavy use and parts were replaced to ensure safety and maximum performance. But during Operation Tomodachi helicopter parts – particularly the radiators and air ducts – were replaced after just about every flight because of the huge amounts of radioactive particles they sucked into the engine.

“You couldn’t put the radiator back in,” said Sebourn. “It had to be replaced. We dumped it into a barrel full of water and soap and set the barrel behind a barrier, like a police line. Then every day we would take measurements to see if any of the radiation was seeping through.

“The barrels gave off radiation, and it takes years and years for the radioactive material to decay on its own.  We would take off our Tyvek suits and cut them off and put them into the barrels, too. Everything that had seals or were dirty had to go into the barrels, since that’s what the radiation sticks to.  The more we put into the barrels, the more the radiation grew. It seemed to feed on itself.”

That was a hectic 80-day period in the spring of 2011 which Sebourn thought was behind him forever.  He was wrong. His eight-year-old son, Kai, got mysteriously ill in May, 2011.

“He went through vomiting fits and missed three weeks of school,” said Sebourn. “They had a rule then that if you threw up you were sent home, and he would throw up 10 – 15 times a day.  He didn’t feel bad, but he couldn’t stop vomiting.

“Eventually they just wrote it off as stress.  He still has those episodes and they never have been able to evaluate why he does it.”

But Sebourn was fine, until last year.

“In March of 2012 I got some medical problems which the Navy doctors couldn’t explain,” he said. “The right side of my body is at 40% to 50% of its normal strength.  I’ve had two MRIs, had X-rays, ultrasound, and they can’t figure out what is wrong with me.

“My arm, chest and shoulder are sore and I’m getting disproportionately big on my left side, which is odd since I’m right handed and use that side more.”

Neither he nor Kai received genetic counseling or monitoring. After 17 years of service the Navy covers only Sebourn’s health care for five years, “and after that I’m on my own. Once you get out of the military you are still covered for a little while, but your family members are not.”

And after those five years are over? “That’s a wonderful question,” said Sebourn, who continues to get weaker on his right side, as if that part of his body is ageing prematurely.

“I understand that the Tomodachi Registry for the 70,000 servicemen and family members was supposed to help with that, and if we came down with health problems 10 or 15 years down the road we would be eligible for health care since it is related to our service.

“But at the last moment DoD scrapped the program, so I don’t know what will happen to us.”

Part of his reason for joining the suit against TEPCO was to ensure that the nuclear power company took responsibility for the damage it caused, and covered future health care needs.

“I’m not upset with the Navy about the radiation – they had no idea what was going on because we had never dealt with this. The navy never lied to us. The navy did the best they could. We were all flying blind.”

Navigating the Bureaucracy

As the USS Ronald Reagan and its attendant Strike Force 7 sped away from Japan at the conclusion of Operation Tomodachi, navigators Plym and Enis felt a sense of relief. It was over and they were told by radiation inspection teams that they were safe.

“They didn’t test us for any internal contamination or anything,” said Plym.  “They just ran a machine over our skin. They never did any blood tests or any other type of tests.”

“We were out there for 80 days,” said Enis, “and towards the end  I realized I had a small lump on my lower jaw.  I went to see if I could get it checked out, but by then the radiation expert had been flown off the ship.

“After that, I started getting bad stomach ulcers and two more lumps appeared – one on my lower thigh, and one between my eyes.”

The Reagan headed for Peugeot Sound for a year of decontamination and general overhaul. Enis, who had enlisted for just four years, enrolled in Olympic College in

Enis & Plym at Olympic College

Bremerton, Washington, to productively pass the time while waiting for Plym, who had signed up for a five year tour.

“One of the big things you say in the navy,” Enis recalled, “is when I get out I’m gonna let my hair grow, and have a big beard.  That’s because while you’re in the Navy you have to have that skin-tight face and hair.

“Well I grew out my hair and had a goatee, and then my hair started falling out. I rarely comb my hair now because if I do, gobs of it come out on the comb.  And I find my right hand shakes when I’m writing.”

Enis, a strapping six-foot two –inch athlete was MVP of Olympic’s college football team, and his time in the 400-meter dash was within two seconds of the 2012 Olympic qualifying time. Now, he has trouble finding the energy to make it through the day.

“I’m only 25,” he said, “and my body is breaking down. I shouldn’t be hurting like I’m hurting now. I went out of my way to take care of my body, and now it’s like switches are being turned off inside me. It makes me feel like an old man, and I don’t like it.

“I don’t know what radiation may have done. But I know I didn’t bring this upon myself.”

He has been informed by the Navy that they “lost” his medical records and, there is no way to trace his current problems to his service on the USS Ronald Reagan. His medical needs, therefore, will not be covered.

For Plym, the problems at first seemed to be a nuisance. “My menstrual cycle completely went away for the six months,” she said. “They gave me a hundred million

Jaime Plym

pregnancy tests because they couldn’t figure out why it stopped.  But I wasn’t pregnant.

“Then, six months later, it came back so heavily I went to the emergency room because I was hemorrhaging and losing so much blood I was fainting.”

It is, she said, a recurring phenomenon with no apparent medical explanation. A normal menstrual period suddenly morphs into rapid, uncontrolled bleeding requiring medical intervention in a hospital. In March, 2012 she developed asthma and had the first of six bouts of bronchitis before she left the Navy in December.

The Navy does not consider gynecological problems to be service related. The possibility that inhaling radioactive particles might affect Plym’s lung problems was ruled out when the Defense Department decided that there were no health problems caused by participation in Operation Tomodachi.  So she, too, has no health insurance.

The former navigators have settled in Jacksonville, Florida and are attending St. Johns River State College with the hope of transferring to the University of North Florida. Both have fond memories of their Navy years.

“Part of me wants to believe that the Navy wouldn’t deliberately do something to hurt the crew,” she said.  “I remember the few bits of news we got during that period, and the Japanese said there was no danger from the power plant, the radiation didn’t leak out and they had it all under control.

“The Japanese lied, and I put the blame on them.”

Enis, however, is a torn. “The Japanese lied to our government,” he said. “And a part of me wants to think that the Navy wouldn’t do that to the crew, that they wouldn’t put us in a dangerous situation like that on purpose.

“But then, there’s a part of me that says they just did.”

Enis & Plym – Hudson Riverside Park

–Winifred Bird contributed reporting from Japan

–Roger Witherspoon writes Energy Matters at www.RogerWitherspoon.com

A Lasting Legacy of the Fukushima Rescue Mission;

Part 1: Radioactive Contamination of American Sailors

http://bit.ly/12dzbLe

Part 2:  The Navy Life — Into the Abyss

http://bit.ly/Y5jXCJ 

Part 3:  Cat and Mouse with a Nuclear Ghost

http://bit.ly/VWSmFm 

Related Posts:

Japan’s Throwaway People and the Fallout from Fukushima

http://bit.ly/wMMiSK 

White House Moves Swiftly to Replace NRC’s Jaczko 

http://bit.ly/YsPqgF

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USS Ronald Reagan

 

 

By Roger Witherspoon

          For several days, the winds from the destroyed nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi crashed head on into the myth of the radioactive plume.

It is the most enduring falsehood of commercial nuclear power, promoted heavily by both the industry and its watchdog, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It is a myth with two conflicting premises:

Projected Fukushima Plume 3-11-11

• Radioactive gasses spewing from a stricken reactor or spent fuel pool have an inherent property which holds them in a tight, thin stream which prevents widespread contamination.
• At 10 miles the plume disperses like steam from a teapot, leaving traces that are either too small to measure or are so minute as to be “below regulatory concern.”

 

The contradiction between being tightly bound and widely dispersed is never challenged. It was most clearly enunciated at a public hearing April 8, 2002, in White Plains, New York, on the evacuation plans for the two Indian Point reactors, located about 30 miles north of Manhattan, owned by Entergy Corp. There was no dissent from NRC officials as Entergy’s Larry Gottlieb said, glibly, “the easiest way to avoid a radioactive plume is to cross the street.

“It’s kind of like someone pointing a gun at you and all you have to do is step to the left or right to get out of the pathway of the bullet. That’s all you have to do.”

During the frenetic first week after the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami destroyed the infrastructure of Japan’s northeast coast, killed some 20,000 people, and set four of the six Fukushima Daiichi reactors on an irrevocable path to meltdowns, officials from the U.S. Departments of Defense, State, and Energy, as well as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission clung to the notion that the situation was manageable as long as the “plume” held true to the myth and blew out to sea.

That was paramount to DoD, which had 63 military installations throughout the Japanese islands containing some 60,000 men and women and their families. It was a relief, therefor, when the aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan reported March 13 that its sensors were picking up radioactive material on its flight deck, 130 miles off the coast.

Projected Fukushima Plume 3/12/11

According to the NRC Status Report, “The measureable radioactivity was consistent with the venting of the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 reactor. The Navy also collected air samples having activity above background from the ‘plume’. Analysis, the report states, would show the Reagan contaminated with “iodine, cesium and technetium, consistent with a release from a nuclear reactor.”

 And that was good, because the plant operator, TEPCO, maintained that the reactors were under control and radiation stemmed from planned venting of built-up gasses, not from a complete meltdown. As long as the radiation was staying in a plume blowing out to sea, there would be no need to evacuate all the American bases, or the millions of residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

In reality, Fukushma Unit 1 began to meltdown as a result of the earthquake, before the tsunami hit and destroyed all backup power.  The molten core of the reactor would melt through the reactor vessel and containment, crashing into the water below the reactor and sending radioactive steam surging out of the damaged building. Monitoring stations, which were not analyzed till January, 2013, found radiation rose more than 700 times the background levels at least an hour before the venting. Officials assumed the Reagan detected a controlled plume which, in fact, had not yet been created. Instead, the ships were in a radioactive cloud which had not been anticipated.

What TEPCO did not say – and what American officials overlooked in that hectic period – was the fact that the venting did not work.

“The difference between Chernobyl and Fukushima,” said nuclear safety engineer Arnie Gundersen, “was that the fire at Chernobyl sent the radiation high into the atmosphere and it was widely dispersed.  There was no fire at Fukushima. You had those beautiful venting towers, but the vents were inoperable because there was no power to activate the industrial fans.

     “So the radioactive steam just rolled out and over the countryside like ground smog. About 80% of it blew out to sea.”

And the discrete plume was a myth. The Reagan and its attendant warships constantly attempted to dodge a solid plume when, in reality, there was a spreading cloud continually overhead and increasing amounts of contaminated  currents all around them. 

Radiation Spread from Fukushima 3/11/11 – 3/24/11

By March 16, after explosions had destroyed the buildings housing Fukushima Units 1-4, Kurt Campbell, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs, officials at the NRC and DoD were increasingly upset with the Japanese government for relying on TEPCO for information rather than taking charge.

Asahi Shimbun, the Japanese newspaper, reported that an internal report on the issue sent to Campbell and   “secretly circulated among top State Department officials on that day contained one word – ‘FUBAR’—or Fu**ed Up Beyond All Recognition.” (  http://bit.ly/Wb87Lc  ). Among those receiving the report was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

          The NRC was also focused on preventing contamination on land. They were baffled when radiation was detected at the Yokosuka naval base 180 miles south of Fukushima, because all of their models were designed to show the radioactive “plume” going out to sea. What was lost in the concern over the millions of Japanese and thousands of Americans on land was the impact of the radiation going out to sea, where the USS Reagan’s strike group was providing search and rescue assistance under Operation Tomodachi.

          In the midst of a disaster, that oversight was understandable. “I would have been in the same camp,” said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “I would have known there were people on land and, vaguely, out to sea. But given the choice of which way the wind was blowing, I would have had a sigh of relief that it was blowing offshore.

          “Somewhere the light should have gone off that there was a Navy out there. But it didn’t.”

          And the sailors of Operation Tomodachi were on their own.

The Nuclear Guessing Game Begins 

          In the military, information is amassed at the top, and then parsed out in pieces on a need to know basis.  As the crisis developed off the coast of Fukushima, it was decided that most navy personnel needed to know very little. That stratification of knowledge was evident on the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, and accompanying Strike Group 7 was deployed to conduct search and rescue operations along the stricken Japanese coast. The navigators had to be given enough information to work with.

“We knew there was a leak of radiation on land,” said navigator Jaime Plym, “and common sense meant it would be close to shore. Most of the time our ship was about two miles from shore because our helicopters were going back and forth.”

“In our position as navigators,” added Maurice Enis, “they let us know more about what was going on. But they didn’t want to cause a panic and get the crew scared. So they didn’t put out much information about the radiation leak.

“But we had to plot it on the charts, and guess what the danger zones were, and how far the plume clouds were going to travel. We didn’t know for sure, but we had sensors going off in the Pilot House on the bridge, and the actual helo guys they were sending out were doing testing of the air. “

In an effort to dodge a radioactive “plume” the admirals and captains in the carrier strike force ordered the navigators to plot the exact location of the Fukushima Daiichi plants. Then they plotted a nautical “T” from the plant site, by drawing a line 50 miles straight out to sea, and then crossing it with a line stretching 25 miles north and south of that spot. Lines from the end of the T back to the nuclear plant formed a triangle which the Navy assumed contained and confined the radioactive plume.

“They were just guessing,” said Plym. “We were supposed to avoid the triangle, but there were times where we had to go through the plume to deliver supplies to the Japanese, and aid and food and water. We just couldn’t or didn’t have the time to go all the way out and around the triangle and come back on another side.

“When we pulled into shore to give them supplies it was pretty much in the plume area. We were only two miles off the coast and even if we were outside the triangle that they had us draw, we did pass through the triangle.”

But the triangle wasn’t their only problem.  Frequently, helicopter or jet pilots would return with data showing radiation in the area, and the ship would take a detour from the unseen menace.

“We stayed offshore about 80 days,” said Enis, “and the way it worked was we would stay close to shore and then sail away. It was a cat and mouse game, depending on which way the wind was blowing.  We were never sure where it was. Then came the first scare, and we found there was radiation when the Japanese had told us there was none. So we went on lockdown and had to carry around gas masks.”

Navigator Enis in Hazmat suit

Yet the lack of concrete information and the lack of trust in the Japanese led to a ship full of rumors and fears. Transcripts of conference calls centered in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Emergency Operations Center reveal that the captain of the Reagan was ordered to take hourly readings of radiation and send them to the American Embassy for processing.  The ship was contaminated with cesium, iodine, and technetium, all products of nuclear reactors. The Defense Department did not want to rely on information from the Japanese government or TEPCO.  Navigators like Enis and Plym were given some information from the data collected by the pilots.

“We could actually see certain parts of the sea chart where radiation was actually found,” said Enis. “And to try and navigate through that was nerve wracking. There was no absolute way for us to know how much radiation was out there, though, because we were still being told by the power company that we shouldn’t worry.

“For the rest of the ship, who didn’t even know what we knew, there was just word of mouth and rumors.”

When the helicopters and jets returned from their missions they were met by personnel in radiological suits who would scrub the craft down with soap and water. They never knew if it was useful.

“I was aggravated the whole time,” said Plym.  “It doesn’t matter what is happening, because it’s not like you can say ‘Forget this! I’m going home!’ So you turn into a zombie and say OK, I’m going to wash now and it will be all right.  But we were scared the whole time we were over there.

“None of us knew anything about radiation. We were thinking we’re going to grow extra arms! It was funny. We talked about those that used to make the digital watches, and how they all died of cancer and wondered if that would be us. We didn’t really know. We went back and forth between freaking out and ignoring it.”

In a sense, the military discipline helped the sailors work through their fear.

“You get an order and you follow it,” said Enis. If they tell us to spray the ship to clean it, we do that and think we’re cleaning it. But if someone at the top was given wrong information about cleaning radiation from the ship, then we were pretty much going in circles.

“So you think of the greater good that  you’re doing – especially when you see entire houses floating by the ship and wonder if there is a family dead inside. And you think about the small children on land and how happy they are when the helos come to give them food. You focus on that more than on your own self or your own fears.”

Mechanics and Hot Engines 

Jennifer Micke

There were no windows below decks on the Reagan, where Jennifer Micke and her crew worked to keep the F-18 jets in top condition. The Reagan, with a crew of 5,500, was five times larger than Thorp, Wisconsin, the little farming community where Micke grew up on a dairy farm down the road from her grandparent’s farm. It had been expected that, one day, she’d have a farm of her own a bit further down the road.

“We went on a family trip to the Osh Kosh Airplane Museum when I was in high school,” said the 22-year-old jet mechanic. “And that got me hooked on aircraft. I chose the Navy because I wanted to be on a boat, and the Air Force didn’t feel like fun.
She actually signed up in 2009 during her senior year at Thorp High School and left after graduation for the Navy’s Great Lakes training center. She was 18.

“Boot camp was terribly easy,” she said in an interview from her parents’ living room. “It was definitely the experience of a lifetime.  In high school I played golf and was a solid C student. Honestly, they were trying to teach me a bunch of stuff I really didn’t care about.

“Once I got into Navy school I was tops of my class. I was class leader. I was awesome. In the Navy, they were teaching me stuff I had a passion for and really enjoyed. We had a metal fabricating course and the mock section of a wing. And they would knock a huge hole in the side of it and we had to patch it and make it air worthy again.

“I enjoyed that a lot! That’s not like milking cows. Not at all!”

She came out of the school a certified air frames mechanic and was flown to San Diego to join the USS Reagan. “When I first saw the Reagan, I was expecting it to be bigger. I saw it pull up to the dock and said ‘that’s it?’ The movies made it look like this huge thing. How in the hell does a plane land on this thing? I was quite shocked.”

Under normal conditions, one doesn’t feel confined on a ship a quarter of a mile long. But everything changed for the rescue mission. “Once we started Operation Tomodachi,” Micke said, “it was very limited as to who went up on deck.  We went up for mandatory inspections of the planes bolted to the flight deck. Otherwise, everything was brought down to the hangers and had to be passed by Geiger counters.

“I remember having to wear everything – rubber gloves, goggles, and we were supposed to be wearing aprons.  We were issued masks and canisters, but we never ended up actually using them. They were considered dirty jets because of the radiation. We would take the brakes off and take them over to a special area to be tested because they were dirty. We had cleanup routines we went through and washed everything over and over to the point where you could stop testing and setting off alarms.

“For every panel we took off, we had to turn a part in and take it to someone for testing. If the radiation was higher than allowed, you had to call other people to take care of it. It made the work more difficult.”

There were no manuals on how to keep radiation from spreading through the ship – inevitably, particles clinging to clothes or shoes, or blown in with the air would contaminate interior sections and set off alarms.  The sailors, said Micke, improvised:

“The method of keeping radiation out, to keep it from seeping under the doors, was to stuff all the door jams and cracks with rags and there were signs all over the place saying ‘Do Not Remove Rags’. I thought that was pretty interesting.

“I was always scared.”

It was interesting, but ineffective.

Up on the captain’s bridge it became clear that the ship was contaminated. It had snowed and sailors had a snowball fight – till the sensors revealed that the snow itself was contaminated, having scrubbed skies of radioactive particulates. Turning on the high pressure hoses, which take water from the sea, to clean off the decks only made matters worse.

“TEPCO, the nuclear plant operator, was telling our representatives that they weren’t leaking radiation at all. But the entire ship got contaminated.  They made the entire crew get chemical, radiological, and biological warfare suits. Then we had to use gas masks in case the air was contaminated.

“We ran out of water for a day and had to cut out showers. They had to pretty much discharge all the water we had in our tanks and scrub out the tanks. They couldn’t do that till we were way out to sea.”

          The problem lay in the ship’s water system, which relied on uncontaminated ocean water.

“We make our own water using desalinization plants on board,” explained Plym. “So they had to get rid of all the water throughout the ship and keep testing till it was clean.  That was hard. We had been getting water from the ocean and the ocean was contaminated. And on ship, water was in everything. “

Cleaning an aircraft carrier while on maneuvers is not a simple task. “You pretty much have to lock down the ship,” said Enis , “then scrub down anyone who is infected, and scrub down all the tools and everything in each section. Then you go through three checkpoints to make sure there is no radiation in you or on you before you can go to the clean part of the ship.”

And power on the carrier was reduced because the Reagan’s own nuclear power plant needed clean water for its cooling system, which was essential for the actual power generating turbine. Contaminating the “clean” side of the nuclear power plant would make it impossible for sailors to work there.

“They just shut off all the water and drained it till all the contamination was gone from the ship,” said Enis.

          –Winifred Bird contributed reporting from Japan

 

A Lasting Legacy of the Fukushima Rescue Mission

Part 1:

Radioactive Contamination of American Sailors

http://bit.ly/12dzbLe

Part 2:

The Navy Life – Into the Abyss

Part 4 

Living with the Aftermath

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By Roger Witherspoon

 

          To the US Government, Operation Tomodachi was just another big humanitarian aid and rescue mission in which the nearest Navy fleet and  many land-based personnel rushed to the aid of an ally in need. In this case, the northeast coast of Japan had been flattened by a massive earthquake and tsunami which destroyed infrastructure and killed some 20,000 citizens.

          Operation Tomodachi – named after the Japanese word for Friend – began as a large logistical exercise. It seemed that way to the American sailors, both land based and in the USS Ronald Reagan Aircraft Carrier Strike Group. The view from Washington was that Operation Tomodachi would enhance the long ties between allies.

Then everything changed.

The nuclear fuel in reactors 1,2, and 3 at Fukushima Daiichi overheated and melted down, creating a hydrogen cloud in the process which exploded, spiking radiation readings on detection monitors across Japan.  Hydrogen from Unit 3 migrated through a shared venting system into Unit 4 and blew off its roof as well, exposing the spent fuel pool and its 1,500 bundles of fuel rods containing a lethal mix of cesium, iodine and plutonium.

Transcripts of meetings and conference calls hosted by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko showed steadily increasing concern as newer data contradicted previous data and measurements of radiation from the Navy differed markedly from the information coming from the Japanese government and TEPCO, the giant utility which owned the stricken reactors. (   NRC’s Operation Center Fukushima Transcript  )
         

The NRC itself was flying blind. The agency had believed it was virtually impossible to have multiple meltdowns at the same site. As a result, their emergency models all involved the healthy plant using its working systems to control critical systems in the stricken plant until the problems were solved. Jaczko had publicly urged calm and for Americans in Japan to follow the guidelines of the Japanese government. NRC press releases in the United States all stated prominently that there was no danger from radioactive fallout.

But the transcripts tell another story.

On March 14 Jaczko’s conference call was interrupted by  Jack Grobe, Deputy Director for Engineering  in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, with bad news:

“JACK GROBE: Okay, guys, I apologize for bothering you, but things are degenerating quickly. This reminds me of the drill. [...]

what’s really troubling is that we, we have had that wind shift — the Chairman’s here, by the way — we’ve had that wind shift and the wind is out of the northeast blowing towards the southwest. That’s inland and towards Tokyo. And there’s an aircraft carrier in the port just south of Tokyo. It’s about 180 miles from the site, about 10 miles southwest of Tokyo, and they’re measuring on the order of 10 to 20 millirem over a 12-hour period total effective dose and roughly five to 10 times that, thyroid. [...]

JACK GROBE: The, the answer is the dose rates don’t seem to be consistent either with what would be released or with the timing that it would take for a plume to get 180 miles away from the site to the southwest.

MIKE WEBER: Yeah, well, that’s what I struck me when you told us what’s going on.

JACK GROBE: Yet, but the, the feedback through Trapp from the admiral is that they used multi* instruments and confirmed this in multiple ways [BLACKED OUT]

MIKE WEBER: Wow.

JACK GROBE: They do operate nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, so they must have a level of competence that’s fairly decent. [...]”

 This was new territory, and they could not trust data from the Japanese.

For the Americans in Operation Tomodachi, this meant they would be improvising throughout the crisis. They faced the dual needs to conduct search and rescue missions in a devastated landscape with little functioning infrastructure while guarding against unseen contamination from the stricken reactors.

To officials at the Defense and State Departments, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Operation Tomodachi was a successful, limited duration event in which the military worked in a civilian humanitarian mission. It was requested, logged, and finished.

But military operations are carried out in real time by people implementing orders from half a world away who have to live with the consequences of making the mission succeed.

          And for some of the Americans sent into action, Operation Tomodachi would mean the end of a career and dream of service in the US Navy, and the start of a new life laced with anxiety.

The Junkie’s Kid

 

          Michael Sebourn was just another kid nobody wanted, from a neighborhood nobody cared about, with a future leading towards jail or death and a life nobody would have missed. Then he met the US Navy.

“My mother was a drug addict and my father was killed when I was 18 months old trying to rob a drug dealer,” he said. “We lived in the housing projects in Charleston, South Carolina. My stepfather was abusive and spent all the money my mother made on drugs and alcohol. I was malnourished and underweight.”

At age five he was sent to live with his grandparents, who died two years later. He moved in with an aunt in Gary, Indiana, a poor white kid in a predominantly poor, black part of a decaying city.

“I never thought I would ever be able to accomplish anything,” Sebourn said.  “I knew college was out of the question because I was poor. I worked in a factory for a while after high school, but that didn’t work out and I was homeless for three months, living out of a truck and driving to Wal-Mart parking lots to sleep.”

He moved back in with his aunt. He had a bad attitude, made bad choices, and “had a couple of run-ins with the law. I needed something new. I had nothing going for myself at all and I wanted a fresh start. I asked my aunt if I should join the military and she ran into the kitchen and got her car keys and said ‘let’s go’. Two days later I was gone.”

He did well in the Navy’s Great Lakes training station and when he was offered a choice of assignments, it turned out to be administrative. “Something clicked,” he said of his entry into the Navy in 1993. “I got my pride back. I got a sense of worth and I started succeeding. I decided serving in the Navy was something I needed to do.

“It was the first time I felt I had a home. It was the first time I felt I had a family.”

It would not be his only family.

He landed in Japan 17 years ago, loved it and stayed at the Navy’s Misawa naval air base, working his way up to head mechanic for the helicopter squadrons based there. He married a Japanese woman and, eventually they had a son. He was half a world and a full life away from the drug dens of South Carolina. He was a Navy man.

The Athlete and the Musician

 

          Maurice Enis was a tall, strapping kid from the frost belt of Rochester, Minnesota whose world revolved around sports and physical fitness. “I was running track at Century High School in Rochester,” he recalled, “doing the 400 and 200 meters and wanted to continue.

“My coach was an ex-Marine who had traveled the world, competing for the military.  It sounded like a great life and I wanted to compete for the Navy, too. When I was 19, we went down to the recruiting station and talked about the opportunities they had, and I enlisted.   It was 2007, but there was a lot of crying at home because my Mom was afraid I would get hurt because of the war and 9/11. But I told her that this is what I want to do with my life.

“And it was good. It saved me, in a way. I was aimless and it taught me a lot more about my time and what you can do and accomplish.  Being deployed, you have no time to do anything extra. Every minute of the day is accounted for. When you get out and have 24 hours to play with, I can accomplish so much more now because I can manage my time and I learned how to prioritize.

“I really did grow up in the Navy. They didn’t have track and field in the Navy anymore, so I chose navigation and general quartermaster. There is the old school way, navigation using different celestial bodies, and the new way, which is all math and computers. You learn to use all the different navigation systems that we have. You apply it to the paper nautical charts and use the satellites and you can actually figure out exactly where we are in the water.”

He also fell in love.

Jaime Plym came from as far away from the snow as one can get without swimming in the Caribbean, which she also enjoyed. She grew up in St. Augustine, Florida, one of the nation’s oldest cities and went on to attend Jacksonville University for two years as a music major, playing bass clarinet.

I decided I wanted music in my life,” Plym said, “but I didn’t want it as my job. I quit school and just worked as a pre-school teacher in Gainesville.  I wanted to go back to school, but I had been on a music scholarship and I didn’t have the money for any other major.”

She felt aimless, and went home and loafed on the beach as 2007 drew to a close.  She had a brother who was in the Marines and decided she, too, could join the service. “But I wanted to be out to sea,” she said. “I wanted to be on a big ship.”

Plym and Enis were in the same class at the Great Lakes training center and came together at the end. “I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do,” she said. “They told me about quartermaster, which meant we worked at the command center and were responsible for navigation. I signed up for it.”

Navigation is critical, especially on an aircraft carrier. Other naval craft can move and shift to be in the most favorable position regarding the wind and the currents, with their navigators finding the best and quickest routes to take. That is especially important if there is danger approaching, like a slow moving radioactive cloud.

Navigators on an aircraft carrier do not have that luxury. Their quarter-mile deck slowly rolls side to side, and up and down in accordance with the sea. They must find the smoothest spot and hold it for the duration of the mission, regardless of what comes. After the aircraft leave the deck, the ship must remain at that spot so they can find their way back.

That makes dodging dangerous winds and radioactive currents problematic.

But they didn’t know that when they graduated from the training camp and began life as quartermasters and navigators on the USS Ronald Reagan, head of a carrier battle group plying the South Pacific.

“We had a lot of fun,” said Plym. “We were friends at first, and then we started dating.”

On March 11, 2011, the USS Ronald Reagan and Carrier Strike Group 7 were headed for port in South Korea as a tsunami struck the northeastern coast of Japan.

“We knew right away they were going to redirect us to go to Japan and provide aid,” Plym said. “We were there by 5 AM the next morning.

“We didn’t know about the reactors,” said Enis. “We didn’t have outside contact like the internet or cable to know what was going on on land.  We just knew there was a major crisis. We had no idea about the nuclear plants till they notified the captain of a possible radiation scare. That’s when we found out that there might be a possible radiation leak.

Something New: Radiation

 

Operation Tomodachi began with the request for help from the Japanese Embassy to Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs who quickly turned to Gregory Jaczko, then chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who would regularly brief President Barak Obama on the escalating difficulties on land.

What had begun as a rescue mission was being increasingly complicated by spreading radiation from Unit 1 at the six-reactor, Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear complex. At least three other reactors were in danger of failing, including the spent fuel pool of reactor Unit 4, holding 1,535 bundles of irradiated fuel.

On March 12, as the USS Ronald Reagan and Carrier Strike Group 7 arrive two miles off the coast, Fukushima Unit 1 blows up. Unit 3 will explode March 14, and the hydrogen gasses migrating through a shared vent will also destroy the containment building at Unit 4, exposing the spent fuel pool to the air. Unit 2 will explode March 15. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) will announce that most of the fuel in Units 1,2, and 3 are intact. They are not. They have fused into a molten mass and are oozing through the bottom of their destroyed reactors.

The Japanese government, not wanting to acknowledge that the situation was getting out of control, did not activate its military, the Special Defense Forces, to airlift water to the stricken Unit 4 and continuously drop it on the spent fuel to keep it from exploding in a nuclear fuel fire. According to Asahi Shimbun, a leading Japanese newspaper which obtained the communications between Tokyo and Japan’s embassy in Washington, Mullen sent a cable to Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan’s ambassador to the US, stating that the SDF should be used to cool the reactors:

“The U.S. military believes the No. 4 reactor is in danger. It feels every step should be taken to cool the reactor, including using the SDF,” the cable said. “The United States has made various preparations to deal with the nuclear accident. The president is also very concerned…” (  http://bit.ly/WS7rXG )

At the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Jack Grobe is leading a crisis team in the 24-hour Operations Center in nearly constant conference calls with Jaczko and a team in Japan. Their previous scenarios – including the long held belief that it was impossible to have multiple meltdowns in a single nuclear complex, and that the containment structure would stop radiation from spreading from a reactor to the environment – have proved explosively wrong and their scenarios for keeping people safe from spreading radiation are being called into question.

The NRC’s redacted transcript of those conversations shows that after the explosion at Unit 4 Grobe says in exasperation “The projections on releases with the containment intact are completely insignificant now.

“I mean, this is beginning to feel like an emergency drill where everything goes wrong and you can’t, you know, you can’t imagine how these things, all of them, can go wrong.”

But the NRC released several daily press releases, all reassuring the public that there was no danger to the public.

And on the high seas and at the American naval installations, the sailors of Operation Tomodachi were on their own.

–Winifred  Bird contributed reporting from Japan

 

Next: Part 3

Cat and Mouse with a Nuclear Ghost

 

 

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By Roger Witherspoon

 

          The Department of Defense has decided to walk away from an unprecedented medical registry of nearly 70,000 American service members, civilian workers, and their families caught in the radioactive clouds blowing from the destroyed nuclear power plants at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan.

The decision to cease updating the registry means there will be no way to determine if patterns of health problems emerge among the members of the Marines, Army, Air Force, Corps of Engineers, and Navy stationed at 63 installations in Japan with their families. In addition, it leaves thousands of sailors and Marines in the USS Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group 7 on their own when it comes to determining if any of them are developing problems caused by radiation exposure.

The strike group was detoured from its South Pacific duties and brought to Fukushima for Operation Tomodachi,which was named using the Japanese word for “friend.” It was an 80-day humanitarian aid and rescue mission in the wake of the earthquake and massive tsunami that decimated the northern coastline and killed more than 20,000 people. The rescue operation was requested by the Japanese Government and coordinated by the US State Department, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Departments of Defense and Energy. In addition to the USS Ronald Reagan with its crew of 5,500, the Strike Group included four destroyers – The Preble, McCampbell, Curtis Wilbur, and McCain – the cruiser USS Chancellorsville, and several support ships (  http://bit.ly/11bfTqS  ).

It was the participants in Operation Tomodachi – land based truck drivers and helicopter crews, and carrier based aircraft and landing craft – who were repeatedly trying to guess where the radioactive clouds were blowing and steer paths out of the way. It was unsuccessful on more than one occasion, according to Defense Department records and participants, resulting in efforts to decontaminate ships travelling through contaminated waters and cleansing helicopters only to send them right back into radioactive clouds.

So far, more than 150 service men and women who participated in the rescue mission and have since developed a variety of  medical issues – including tumors, tremors, internal bleeding, and hair loss – which they feel were triggered by their exposure to radiation. They do not blame the Navy for their predicament, but are joined in an expanding law suit against the Tokyo Electric Power Company, TEPCO, for providing false information to the US officials about the extent of spreading radiation from its stricken reactors at Fukushima. And the decision by the Defense Department to abandon the registry leaves them on their own. (  http://bit.ly/XpfJW5  )

Jobs are compartmentalized at sea explained Navy Quartermasters Maurice Enis and Jaime Plym, two of the navigators on the carrier Reagan. Few of those on board knew there were dangerous radioactive plumes blowing in the wind and none knew what ocean currents might be contaminated. They did know there were problems when alarms went off.

“We make our own water through desalinization plants on board,” said Plym, a 28-year-old from St. Augustine, Florida. “But it comes from the ocean and the ocean was contaminated.  So we had to get rid of all the water on the ship and keep scouring it and testing it till it was clean.

“You have a nuclear power plant inside the ship that uses water for cooling, and they didn’t want to contaminate our reactor with their reactors’ radiation.”

But avoiding it was not easy. It meant going far enough out to sea where there were no contaminated currents, washing down the ship and its pipes, and then going back towards shore.

“We could actually see the certain parts of the navigation chart where radiation was at, and to navigate through that was nerve wracking,” said Enis. “The general public, like the ship, didn’t really know where it was or what it was and relied on word-of-mouth and rumors. We have more information, but there was no absolute way for us to know how much radiation was out there because we were still being told by the (Japanese) power company that we shouldn’t worry.

“We stayed about 80 days, and we would stay as close as two miles offshore and then sail away. It was a cat and mouse game depending on which way the wind was blowing. We kept coming back because it was a matter of helping the people of Japan who needed help. But it would put us in a different dangerous area. After the first scare and we found there was radiation when they (the power company) told us there was none, we went on lockdown and had to carry around the gas masks.”

When it came to getting timely information on radiation, the Americans on land were just as much at sea. Gregory Jaczko, then Chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, urged the evacuation of all Americans within 50 miles of the stricken reactors.  And the Defense Department evacuated women and children from the Yokosuka Naval Base, located about 185 miles south of Fukushima, after sensors  picked up increases in background radiation.

Information was hard to come by, exacerbated by the rigidity of the Japanese bureaucracy. Two nuclear experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists, David Lochbaum, who has worked as a consultant for the NRC and industry, and Ed Lyman, a nuclear physicist, have examined thousands of government emails and cable traffic during a confusing period where the data base shifted by the hour and concrete information was hard to come by.

“After the explosion in Fukushima Daiichi Unit #4 the Japanese were not able to get enough water into the building to keep the spent fuel pool cool,” Lochbaum said. “So the US airlifted a concrete pumper truck all the way from Australia to an American naval base in the northern part of the island. And the Japanese would not let it leave the base because it wasn’t licensed to travel on Japanese roads. Given the magnitude of their problems, that seemed to be the wrong priority.

“But the Japanese culture is more like a symphony, where everyone follows the conductor’s lead. Whereas American society is more like a jazz ensemble where everyone is playing together, but improvisation is prized.”

The inability to get cohesive, trustworthy information from the Japanese hampered the American rescue effort.

Michael Sebourn, senior chief mechanic for the helicopter squadron based at Atsugi,  about 60 miles from Fukushima, recalled that  “after the earthquake and tsunami we were given one day notice to pack up the command and go to Misawa, Japan Air Base to provide relief efforts to the Sendai and Fukushima areas. All of the other squadrons were evacuating to Guam. There was a big possibility that the base at Atsugi would be shut down and we would never be returning. We were told to put our names and phone numbers on the dashboards of the cars because we would probably not get them back.

“We were in Misawa  3 ½ weeks, working every day, flying mission after mission after mission to pick  people up, rescue people, ferry supplies and things like that. There were a few nuclear technicians scanning individuals coming back from missions. Many times they would cut off their uniforms.”

Sebourn was sent to Guam for three days of intensive training and became the designated radiation officer. It wasn’t easy.

“This was a completely unprecedented event,” he said. “We had never dealt with radiation before. We were completely brand new to everything and everyone was clueless. We had had drills dealing with chemical and biological warfare. But we never had any drills dealing with radiation.  That was nuclear stuff and we didn’t do nuclear stuff.  The aviation guys had never dealt with radiation before. We had never had aircraft that was radiated. So we were completely flying blind.”

There were rules for Sebourn’s group of mechanics. They scanned the returning helicopters for radiation, and then removed any contaminated parts and put them in special containers filled with water and stored on an isolated tarmac. It began snowing in Misawa so the group moved back to their base at Atsugi, closer to Fukushima. Sebourn tracked varying radiation levels in units called Corrected Counts Per Minute on their electronic detectors.

“Normal outside radiation exposure is between five and 10 CCPM,” he said. “And that’s from the sun.  At Atsugi, the background readings were between 200 and 300 CCPM in the air. It was all over. The water was radiated. The ground was radiated. The air was radiated.

“The rule was if there was anything over a count of 500 you needed special gloves. Over 1,000 CCPM and you needed a Tyvek radiation suit. And if it was over 5,000 you needed an entire outfit – suit, respirator, goggles, and two sets of gloves.  You couldn’t put a contaminated radiator back into the helicopters – they had to be replaced. I remember pulling out a radiator and it read 60,000 CCPM.”

But in the end, the safety equipment may not have been enough.

The Tomodachi Medical Registry, developed over a two year period and completed at the end of 2012, was a collective effort of the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Veterans Affairs launched at the insistence of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. ( http://bit.ly/14ABPuj )

It was an exhaustive registry essential to develop a medical baseline from which to determine if there were any long lasting repercussions from exposure to radioactivity – particularly iodine and cesium – spewing for months from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor units 1 through 4 into both the air and the sea.

The Registry was unparalleled in its depth. The Defense Department’s 252-page assessment of radiation doses the 70,000 Americans may have been exposed to  is broken down by a host of factors, including proximity to Fukushima, the type of work  being done and its impact on breathing rates, changing weather patterns, sex, size, and age. In the latter category children were divided into six different age groups, reflecting their varying susceptibility to radiation. (  http://bit.ly/U42a1X  ).

In addition, the report states “over 8,000 individuals were monitored for internal radioactive materials and the results of those tests were compared with the calculated doses.”

In the end, however, the Department concluded that their estimates of the maximum possible whole body and thyroid doses of contaminants were not severe enough to warrant further examination.

Navy spokesman Lt. Matthew Allen, in a written statement, said “The DoD has very high confidence in the accuracy of the dose estimates, which were arrived at using highly conservative exposure assumptions (i.e., assuming individuals were outside 24 hours a day for the 60 days in which for environmental radiation levels were elevated and while breathing at higher than normal rates).

“The estimated doses were closely reviewed by the Veterans’ Advisory Board on Dose Reconstruction and by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements who both agreed that the methods used to calculate the estimates were appropriate and the results accurate. In addition the dose estimates were consistent with the estimates made by the Japanese government and by the World Health Organization.”

Defense Department spokeswoman Cynthia Smith added that as a result of the agency’s decision that there was no serious contamination, “There are no health surveillance measures required for any member of the DoD-affiliated population who was on or near the mainland of Japan following the accident and subsequent radiological release from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station beginning on or about March 11, 2011.”

But there are skeptics of the Defense Department’s blanket conclusion that there was not enough radiation poured into the environment to warrant continuous monitoring of the men, women, and children living and working there.

“Radiation does not spread in a homogeneous mix,” said Lochbaum. “There are hot spots and low spots and nobody knows who is in a high zone or in a low zone. Who knows what the actual radiation dose to an individual is? There are no measurements of what they consumed in water and food.

“This is the Navy’s best attempt to take a few data points they have and extrapolate over the entire group. They took a lot of measurements, but those represent just a point in time. It’s like taking a strobe light outside to take a picture of a nighttime scene.  Every time the strobe flashes you will get shots in spots of the area. But do you really capture all of the darkness?”

–Winifred Bird contributed reporting from Japan

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By Roger Witherspoon

 

William Holston was obviously exasperated.

For nearly two hours he had fielded the brunt of increasingly detailed queries from the three Administrative Law Judges, on the adequacy of a deliberately vague set of guidelines to oversee the operations of the Indian Point nuclear power plants for the next 20 years.  And though Entergy had four of its own experts on the extended witness stand, most of the judges’ queries were directed at the chief examiner for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The hearing in Tarrytown was focused on the Aging Management Plan (AMP) put forth by Entergy Nuclear, owner of the twin reactors on the Hudson River, which is intended to document how the company will ensure its 16,000 feet of buried pipes will be safe if the Indian Point operating licenses are extended 20 years by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Entergy insisted they would be able to detect corrosion and leaks if they occurred anywhere in the more than three miles of pipes – many carrying radioactive liquids – even though some of it was locked in concrete underneath the foundations of permanent buildings.

It was complicated by the fact that when Entergy applied for a license extension in 2007, the company asserted there were no buried pipes subject to aging management review because they did not carry radioactive liquids.  But a leak of thousands of gallons of water containing radioactive material in 2009 proved them wrong.

As a result, the New York Attorney General contended that, for all intents and purposes, “Entergy’s AMP for buried pipes contains virtually no enforceable provisions or specific commitments. Any specific details Entergy has offered have come in the form of documents which will not become part of the license and are unenforceable.”

“I’m looking for specificity in the planning,” said Chief Judge Lawrence McDade. “There is inadequate information from an engineering standpoint about what they are going to inspect, how they are going to inspect, and where they are going to inspect.

“Is there any document that would show that level of specificity aside from general guidance that they will inspect selected piping once every 10 years?”

“Those procedures will be determined by what they find,” said the NRC’s Holston. “This plant is going to have 30 inspections over the 20 year period, and if they find corrosion they will do another 12 at selected sites. We could ask them to commit to spreading them out over time, but that is not necessary.”

“Why not,” asked the chief judge. “Shouldn’t they have guidance as to how they will go about examining them? Something that says it will be done at five month intervals, 10 month intervals, or some sort of guidance? Shouldn’t that part of the documentation that can be checked for compliance?”

“That’s not needed,” said Holston, a towering, six-foot, five-inch marathon runner who still has his Merchant Marine, ramrod erect bearing. “I have 30 years’ inspection experience. I’m pretty comfortable with what Entergy provided me. At a minimum, inspections cost $100,000, and no plant is going to wait till the last minute, and put $4.2 million into one years’ worth of inspections.

“We could specify that since you are doing 30, make sure X amount are done in two year intervals. But that isn’t necessary.”

McDade, who had been leaning forward on the judge’s dais, sat back, paused thoughtfully, and said “Entergy has a big investment and they want it to work well. If they are going to do an inspection, they want it to be meaningful. But in viewing whether or not their plans are adequate, how can we do that without knowing what it is they are going to do?”

That exchange provided a microcosm of the nation’s longest running, most complicated battle of efforts to extend the life of nuclear power plants. So far, the NRC has issued 20 year license extensions to 71 of the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants. The four in neighboring New Jersey – Salem 1&2, Hope and Oyster Creek – were each relicensed in just two years. The difference, however, is that in New York, the state itself is challenging the new licenses.

            But the hearings have made clear that the environmental unit of Attorney General Schneiderman’s office is not just going up against Entergy: they are also openly fighting against the staff of the nation’s nuclear regulatory agency, which has recommended renewing their 40-year operating licenses for another two decades. The license for Indian Point 2 expires at the end of 2013, and the license for Indian Point 3 expires two years later.

The license extensions have been challenged by New York, and the environmental groups Clearwater and Riverkeeper.  New York’s challenges, or contentions, are backed up by Connecticut Attorney General Robert Snook, whose office is also represented at the legal proceedings.

Collectively, the contentions challenge different aspects of Entergy’s plans for ensuring the safe operation of the twin nuclear reactors over the next 20 years and the maintenance of the spent fuel pool for decades after the plants finally retire. Under current NRC rules, the highly radioactive fuel rods could sit at the plant site for a century after the plants shut down, whether or not Entergy, as a company, is still in existence and capable of taking care of them.

The key hurdle for the opponents is the conviction of the professional staff at the NRC that the plants can be safely operated for another 20 years and the licenses should be granted.  The final decision is up to the five appointed members of the Commission itself. But the staff has enormous authority within the agency.

Earlier this year, for example, the staff of the Office of New Reactors, headed by Michael Johnson, recommended approval of the construction and operating license for the new AP-1000 reactor at the Vogtle plant site in Georgia. It is the first new nuclear power plants constructed in a generation and culminated more than six years of analysis in which the staff rejected more than 20 safety systems and innovations in the new reactor as unworkable.

  Since it could take a decade for the plant to be built and begin operating, then NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko wanted the license to have “binding obligations that these plants will have implemented the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident before they operate.”

The Chairman directed the staff in February to prepare language for the full Commission to consider reflecting that condition. Johnson refused on the grounds that it cast aspersions on the hard, detailed work the staff had done over the preceding six years, and the ability of the staff to monitor any new developments and incorporate them in the inspection process.

Jaczko resigned shortly after the unprecedented rejection by his staff, and Johnson was promoted to Deputy Director of the entire agency, a move roundly criticized by many nuclear watchdog groups.

“People who think that Johnson and the other professionals are in the pocket of the industry are mistaken,” said David Lochbaum, of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “These are professionals with a Navy background who are confident in their ability and used to putting a lot of trust in their various systems.

“They are not the type who can be pushed around by industry. Their views, however, often coincide.”

Indeed, Johnson, his boss, Director William Borchardt, and Victor McCree, head of Region 2 which includes all southern reactors and oversight of all new reactor construction, came out of the nuclear program at the Naval Academy. It is that military mindset and professionalism at the civilian regulatory agency which most confounds opponents of Indian Point.

“I have become increasingly aware of this alignment between what should be an oversight agency and the nuclear industry they regulate,” said Manna Jo Greene, environmental director of Clearwater.

“It’s disappointing to see New York State having to protect the well-being of its citizens from a federal agency whose job it should be to primarily protect the public.  It is so extreme that there have been times during the pre-trial hearings when it seemed that Entergy was being more reasonable and generous and amenable to negotiations than the NRC staff. . There were things that we requested or Riverkeeper requested, or New York State requested, motions that were filed, that the NRC was more in opposition to than Entergy.”

The allied views of the NRC staff and Entergy will face their stiffest test beginning today when hearings resume in Tarrytown. New York, led by Assistant Attorney General John Sipos, is challenging the proposed exclusion of transformers from the purview of the Aging Management Program.  It is the most contentious issue of 12 being reviewed by the judicial panel, and the one with the most far reaching implications.

Transformers are huge pieces of equipment which change the voltage of electricity and, according to the state’s brief, “are intended to function passively, just as electric cables and water-carrying pipes do.”

There are four to 12 transformers at a nuclear power plant, some increasing the voltage and others decreasing the voltage. Not all are involved in powering safety-related systems. The State contends “they have the critically important function of providing power to equipment that is necessary for accident prevention, accident management, and accident mitigation at nuclear power plants.”

But precisely because they are passive, it is extremely difficult to know when their components are wearing out. There are no “leaks” of electricity, as if they were pipes, and they transmit all the electricity they are supposed to transmit until something breaks. At that point, they don’t transmit anything.

It is the state’s contention “that failure to effectively manage the aging of electrical transformers could compromise the integrity of the reactor coolant pressure boundary, the capability to shut down the reactor and maintain a safe shutdown condition, or the capability to prevent or mitigate the consequences of accidents.”

Because these are passive systems, it is difficult to predict when they will fail. NRC records show that there have been 88 transformer failures at nuclear power plants since 1983. There have been 18 transformer failures in the past five years, including explosive failures at Indian Point 2 and 3.

During Superstorm Sandy, a transformer blew up at Entergy’s FitzPatrick nuclear power plant upstate New York and oil spreading into various conduits proved too difficult for the plant’s resident fire brigade to handle. The local fire department had to be called in to extinguish the blazes.

Still, it is the position of both Entergy and the NRC staff that there is no need for an Aging Management Plan for transformers. If they break, that can be dealt with at that time. Both the NRC staff and Entergy opposed the inclusion of the transformer issue in the formal ASLB hearings. But the judges ruled that “neither Entergy nor Staff provided any legally binding justification to exclude transformers from an aging management review.”

Now, however, Entergy and the NRC staff are seeking to reclassify transformers – which have no moving parts – as “active” pieces of equipment because the electricity changes voltage as it goes through it.

That is a novel definition of an “active” piece of equipment.

New York, in its brief, contends “if Staff and Entergy’s interpretation carried the day, pipes, containment domes, electrical cables … to name only a few, would be considered active systems because things inside them change…

“…the electric current is no more a part of the transformer than is the water in a hose a part of the hose, or the water in a steam generator a part of the steam generator, or the electricity flowing in a cable part of the cable.”

If the three judge panel ultimately agrees with the NRC staff and Entergy, much of the Indian Point infrastructure – from its three miles of inaccessible, underground pipes to the reactor dome itself – could be exempt from a mandatory oversight program.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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By Roger Witherspoon

 

The two utilities providing electricity to New York City and Westchester County have been ordered by the State Public Service Commission to plan for a future without electricity from the Indian Point nuclear power plants.

In the first concrete action taken by a state agency to move towards a non-nuclear energy future in the lower Hudson River Valley, the PSC ordered Consolidated Edison and the New York Power Authority “to develop and file a contingency plan to address the needs that would arise in the event the Indian Point units shut down.”

The order from the state’s regulatory body is a major step towards implementing a series of recommendations generated by state agencies under direction of Gov. Cuomo, who is seeking to close those nuclear plants, as well as assessments from independent agencies about the feasibility of closing the plants.

With this order, the PSC is following through on recommendations in the Governor’s New York Energy Highway Blueprint to push for development of upgrades in transmission capabilities to add 1,000 megawatts of electricity to the NYC/Westchester County portion of the state’s electric grid. That would more than cover any possible shortfalls in electricity needed in the region by providing access to large amounts of electricity generated in the northern and western portions of the state.

The Blueprint recommends the Department of Public Service “invite developers and transmission owners to file notices of intent to construct projects that would increase the capacity for transfer of electric power between upstate and Central New York and the lower Hudson Valley and New York City, thus relieving existing bottlenecks.”

 

In a statement following the PSC action, Commission Chairman Garry Brown said “a growing, vibrant economy requires an energy production and delivery system that provides a stable foundation companies need to invest in their facilities and workforce, to expand operations and hire new workers.

“In addition to strengthening the economy, the Energy Highway will enhance New York State’s investment in clean energy production.”

A byproduct of improving the state’s electricity transmission network is that it would encourage development of wind farms in the rural Great Lakes region at the state’s western edge, with the power being sold to the thirsty, New York City region in the southeastern tip of the state.

In addition, closing Indian Point would end the damage to the Hudson River caused by using billions of gallons of river water daily to cool its equipment – a process which kills billions of fish annually and violates the Clean Water Act.

ConEd transmits all the electricity used in the NYC/Westchester County service area of the state’s electric grid. The company has some 3.1 million residential customers and 200,000 commercial and industrial customers of its own. Prior to the deregulation of the electricity market in 1999, ConEd owned Indian Point 2, which produces a maximum of 1026 megawatts and whose license expires September 28, 2013.

NYPA, a state agency which owns and operates several upstate hydro plants, owned Indian Point 3, which can generate a maximum of 1040 MW and whose license expires December 12, 2015.  NYPA provides electricity – using its own power plants and electricity purchased under contract – to municipal customers. It is NYPA that is responsible for providing about 1,900 megawatts of electricity that keeps the MTA’s trains running, the street lights on, the schools and public housing lit, and LaGuardia and Westchester Airports operating. JFK Airport has its own power plant.

The plants were sold to Entergy in 2000. At that time, since deregulation was new and it was not known how effective the marketplace would be in ensuring a supply of affordable electricity, the sale required Entergy to sell the full output of the two nuclear plants to NYPA and ConEd for seven years. The ensuing contracts, however, reduced the role of Indian Point in powering the region since both utilities found cheaper electricity supplies elsewhere, and Entergy sought customers in an integrated grid stretching from Maine to Ohio.

Indian Point now provides less than 5 percent of the electricity used daily in the NYC/Westchester County region. ConEd’s current contract with Entergy calls for only 350 megawatts and NYPA’s contract calls for  just 200 MW.  The region uses about 13,000 MW during a summer day and 9,000 MW daily in winter. NYPA has already announced that when its current contract with Entergy expires next year, it will not be renewed.

“The current contract won’t be extended,” NYPA spokesman Paul DiMichelle said last month. “Energy prices are so low that we would go into the marketplace and purchase power as needed. There is an excess supply out there, and that would be the most cost effective way to handle power needs on behalf of our customers.”

NYPA’s conclusion that the nuclear plants on the Hudson River are not necessary are in line with the latest Reliability Needs Assessment ( http://bit.ly/TD5rSf   ) from the ISO that there is more than enough electricity available in the near future . While the plants’ contribution to the daily electrical needs of the NYC/Westchester County portion of the grid are small, the loss of the full 2,000 MW could affect pressure in the electrical system and overall reliability if not balanced in some way.

“If Indian Point 2 closed at the end of 2012 (when its license expires) it would not be a problem,” said ISO vice president Tom Rumsey in an interview last month. “Between 2013 and 2016 if one reactor went away we don’t foresee a megawatt shortage. We believe there would be adequate resources. Beginning in 2017 there would be a gap of 250 megawatts and that gap would continue to increase by 250 megawatts annually thereafter.”

The ISO analysis stated that any shortfall in power needs could be made up by a combination of new generation, electricity conservation, and new or expanded transmission capabilities. This week’s action by the PSC is directly aimed at addressing the increased transmission issue. Increasing access to 1,000 megawatts of electricity would more than offset the deficit created by the shutdown of the two plants.

The decision by the PSC commissioners, which is to be released in a formal order this week, directs the two utilities to  solicit actual proposals from companies which have submitted letters of interest to the state to  build or upgrade transmission facilities benefitting the lower Hudson River Valley region. According to the Energy Highway Blueprint, companies have contacted the state with preliminary plants for some 6,000 MW of new generation or upgrades to Alternating Current transmission lines, and another 5,700 MW to 7,000 MW of Direct Current, high power transmission lines “to terminate in the Hudson Valley or New York City.

“These responses demonstrate that the private sector is positioned to support proposed potential Reliability Contingency Plan for the Indian Point Energy Center.”

ConEd and NYPA are to look for projects which could begin construction in 2013 or 2014 and be completed by 2016, when both plants could be shut down. Entergy has applied to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to extend the operating licenses of the twin reactors for an additional 20 years each. The license extension is being challenged by NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, as well as the environmental groups Riverkeeper and Clearwater.  These challenges, called “contentions”, are currently being heard before a three-judge panel of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board in a series of hearings set to resume December 10 in Tarrytown.

 

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By Roger Witherspoon

 

Federal regulators have launched a special probe to determine if officials at the Oyster Creek nuclear power violated rules and waited too long to declare an emergency alert as rising waters threatened critical reactors systems.

Three inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began a “special inspection” Tuesday into the alert called by plant officials as waters driven by the storm rose to 7.4 feet in the plant’s intake structure.  The alert, the second level in the NRC’s four-part emergency notification system, was called shortly after the water rose past six feet above sea level at the plant site on Barnegat Bay.

The water, driven by winds from Superstorm Sandy which, at times, approached 100 miles per hour, first knocked out 36 of the plant’s 43 emergency Planning Zone sirens needed to warn the more than 100,000 residents within 10 miles of the site of any major emergency. Then just before 7 PM Monday, officials at Exelon, which owns the plant, declared an “Unusual Event,” the lowest of four levels of nuclear alert, due to high water in the  intake building controlling the plant’s cooling system.  At the same time, the regional grid shut down and the plant had to rely on its diesel generators to keep its safety systems operating.

Oyster Creek is a boiling water reactor, the same type as those at the ill-fated Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. Its spent fuel pool is on top of the reactor and both are in the same containment building. Exelon elevated the plant’s status to the second level “Alert” status as its generators took over efforts to keep the spent fuel pool cooled.

The rising water levels were of particular concern at Oyster Creek, explained NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci, because if it rose too far it could impact the plant’s service water pumps, which are used to shut down the reactor itself.

The three member team, said Screnci, “are looking at the response of the emergency preparedness at the site, and the circumstances surrounding the rising levels in the intake structure.  They are looking specifically at the timing of the alert declaration, and the company’s preparedness prior to the storm, the performance of its equipment, and their command and control during the storm. The onsite inspection should be concluded by the middle of next week, Screnci said.

    “We sent a special team because we want a better understanding of what happened and why it happened.”

The team is led by Jack Bower, the senior resident NRC inspector at the Hope Creek nuclear power plant. Working with him is an operations engineer who will examine management’s actions before and during the storm, and an emergency preparedness specialist.  The inspection was triggered by observations of the two resident inspectors at the plant, who raised questions about the handling of the emergency alerts. “The resident inspectors have been doing some follow up since the hurricane,” Screnci said, “and we decided we needed to send the inspectors there to take a closer look.”

There are specific regulations governing the declaration of emergency declarations at nuclear power plants. The lowest level, called “unusual events”, requires notification of the NRC as well as state emergency officials. Elevating the alarm to the second level, an actual “alert,” requires additional notifications and staffing of an emergency operations center. Ultimately, the plant operator and the NRC are responsible for conduct at the plant site and coordination with outside agencies. The state is responsible for all emergency actions outside the plant property. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie’s office would be responsible for making the call for any evacuations, while in New York, a home rule state, any evacuation orders would be up to the local county executives. The information flow to the NRC headquarters and state emergency officials, therefor, is critical.

In this case, Oyster Creek and 10 other nuclear power plants considered in the direct path of Sandy were already being monitored by special teams sent by the NRC the weekend before the Superstorm struck the New Jersey coast.

Salem 1 faced the most critical situation, but handled it by the book and do not need a special examination. Under NRC guidelines, Salem and Hope Creek, both on Artificial Island on the Delaware River, had to shut down if there were sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or the river reached 99 feet in depth.  The plants’ “design basis” states the sea wall would repel water up to 120 feet, a level only anticipated with a Category 4 hurricane.

Sandy pushed water levels in the Delaware River to 98 feet, and the winds created additional waves approximately 12 feet high. The high waves in the river swamped four of Salem’s six massive pumps in a building along the river’s edge which pull in the water through a 40-foot wide conduit. The loss of these pumps caused a chain reaction of events leading to a shutdown of Salem 1and a massive steam dump into the atmosphere. Officials later said the steam had little or no detectable radiation.

Screnci said that if the inspectors find that Exelon, the managers of Oyster Creek, did not respond to the situation properly, it is likely to trigger increased inspections and oversight of the plant. While the NRC can fine plant operators for violations, that is a remedy usually reserved for cases of willful disregard of safety rules, not for errors of judgment particularly if, in the end, there were adverse impacts on the public. In this case, Screnci emphasized, the public was never in danger.

“Typically, after an event like this, we do look at whether there are things we can improve,” she explained. “It’s not so much a formal lessons learned exercise. But we will look at what we did and how it worked. Do we need to have more people monitoring events in place earlier in the development of a situation like this, for example?

“We continually take a look at requirements to see if there is need for improvement.”

 

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By Roger Witherspoon

 

The roaring winds, at times approaching 100 miles per hour, were relentless as Hurricane Sandy pushed the Atlantic Ocean towards the eastern seaboard.

The sheer breadth of the Superstorm, with hurricane-force winds radiating some 250 miles from Sandy’s eye, meant 34 nuclear power plants from North Carolina to Vermont would experience extreme weather. While the winds themselves posed little danger to the primary physical structures at nuclear installations, the storm was bound to send trees crashing into utility lines and transformers, causing station blackouts which, along the coasts, could well be accompanied by flood waters. In the latter cases, Sandy would provide a test of some of the safety improvements ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the wake of the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011.

At particular risk were nuclear plants along the coastlines of New Jersey and New York, directly in the path of the strongest part of the hurricane.

Massive amounts of ocean water were pounded into storm surges sweeping up the Delaware River and other coastal tributaries along the Jersey Shore; or rammed through Long Island Sound and squeezed up the Hudson River. The combination of storm surge and wind would trigger the declaration of an “alert” at the Oyster Creek on Barnegat Bay, and a forced atmospheric steam vent at the nearby Salem 1nuclear plant along the Delaware River in New Jersey. In New York, the twin Indian Point plants rode out floods along the Hudson River, but Indian Point 3 and Nine Mile Point 2, upstate near Syracuse, were shut down by malfunctions caused by hurricane force winds.

In the view of the NRC, the plants all functioned as designed, even if the weather was unpredictable and some problems were not expected.  Eleven northeastern nuclear plants in the direct path of Sandy – including all four in New Jersey – were placed on a special alert status several days before the storm struck that featured additional federal monitors and plans to shut down if the winds or waves exceeded pre-determined storm limits.

That special watch list included Calvert Cliffs in Lusby, Md.; Peach Bottom, in Delta, Pa.; Three Mile Island 1, in Middletown, Pa.; Susquehanna, in Salem Township, Pa.; and Millstone, in Waterford, Conn. None of these were as hard hit as the plants in New Jersey and New York. Millstone 3 and Susquehanna 2 reduced power to 75 percent to accommodate strained regional power grids. But the others operated throughout the storm at 100 percent power.

New Jersey was a different case. As the Superstorm approached, plant officials tested their backup generators and topped off their diesel generator tanks in case they were cut off from the grid and had to rely on their own power to keep reactors and spent fuel pools cooled.

At high tide the Delaware River running past Artificial Island, home to PSE&G’s Salem 1&2, and Hope Creek nuclear power plants, has a normal depth of 89 feet. Salem 1 and Hope Creek were running at full power, while Salem 2 and Oyster Creek were shut for refueling and maintenance.     Joe Delmar, spokesman for PSEG Nuclear, said refueling operations were suspended Sunday at 6 PM and unnecessary workers had been sent home.

Under NRC guidelines, Salem and Hope Creek had to shut down if there were sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or the river reached 99 feet in depth.  The plants’ “design basis” states the sea wall would repel water up to 120 feet, a level only anticipated with a Category 4 hurricane.

But Delmar said the storm pushed water levels in the Delaware River Monday night to 98 feet, and “the winds created additional waves approximately 12 feet high.”

That was problematic.  Hope Creek has a massive cooling tower to cool the hot water and steam generated by its reactor. Salem, on the other hand, uses the Delaware River to form a critical third loop in a three-part, “once-through” cooling system.  The first, or primary loop, is the water superheated to 549 degrees within the reactor and piped through thousands of small tubes within the steam generators. The reactor system is pressurized to 2,235 pounds per square inch to keep the water liquid. The standard home water heater operates at 35 pounds per square inch of pressure.

The second loop is relatively clean water which flows over the tubes in the steam generator, is heated to steam, and then blows over the fans on the 40-ton electric generating turbine. The steam then flows over a heat exchanger featuring the third loop, containing cold Delaware River water. The steam is cooled, condenses back to a liquid, and is piped back to the steam generator to complete the power cycle. The warm water in the third loop is returned to the Delaware River.

But just after 4 AM Tuesday morning, while Sandy’s eye was barreling down on the Jersey Shore, the high waves in the river swamped four of the six massive pumps in a building along the river’s edge which pull in the water through a 40-foot wide conduit jutting into the river. The loss of these pumps caused a chain reaction of events:

• The loss of river water meant the steam in the secondary loop was no longer being condensed, sending hot steam back into the carefully calibrated system.
• The added work load, coupled with accumulating junk clogging Salem’s underwater intake pipe, caused the two remaining pumps to fail.
• With its cooling system compromised, operators stopped the fission process by slamming the boron control rods into the reactor.

Now, however, operators faced the problem of what to do with the heat in the reactor. The automated system opened a relief valve and thousands of gallons of superheated water from the steam generator were released in an “atmospheric steam dump.”

“It sounds like a train whistle from a steam locomotive,” explained David Lochbaum, nuclear safety expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former consultant to the NRC and Oyster Creek.  “People who live near the plant can hear it, and it looks like a steam blast. You can see it from quite a distance away.”

The steam may contain some radioactive particles which were in the reactor’s water and escaped into the secondary loop through minute cracks in the steam generator’s tubes. But the amount is small and, according to the NRC barely detectable.

“The irony is that the plant routinely vents radioactive gas into the atmosphere,” said Lochbaum, “and if Salem had stayed up and running the amount of radiation released through those pathways is almost always higher – and less dramatic – than anything in the steam vents.”

Oyster Creek faced a different problem. The wind and water knocked out 36 of the 43 Emergency Planning Zone sirens needed to warn the more than 100,000 residents within 10 miles of the site of any major emergency. Then just before 7 PM Monday, officials at Exelon, which owns the plant, declared an “Unusual Event,” the lowest of four levels of nuclear alert, due to high water in the  intake building controlling the plant’s cooling system.  At the same time, the regional grid shut down and the plant had to rely on its diesel generators to keep its safety systems operating.

Oyster Creek is a boiling water reactor, the same type as those at the ill-fated Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. Its spent fuel pool is on top of the reactor and both are in the same containment building. Exelon elevated the plant’s status to the second level “Alert” status as its generators took over efforts to keep the spent fuel pool cooled.

“It was a very quick switchover,” explained NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan. “The system sensed there was a problem with the loss of outside power lines, and switched over to the diesel generators. At the same time, it isolated the containment building and shut off venting valves.

“The problem with the rising water was that if the water got high enough the motors for the large pumps would be knocked out of service. If that occurred, they would have to go to other options, including the use of portable pumps, or connecting to the main fire suppression system using city water to keep the spent fuel pool cool.”

About 150 miles north, the Hudson River was rising rapidly.  There was virtually no rain in the region, an unusual occurrence with a hurricane.  The storm had been expected to dump a foot or more of rain on the region between Manhattan and West Point, and some 400 miles of streams feeding into the Hudson would have added to the storm surge rushing to Indian Point. As it was, a pair of Cougar Military Transport trucks headed for nearby Camp Smith stalled in four feet of river water two miles from the nuclear plants.  Yet the plant’s intake pipes remained clear and dry.

But Sandy’s winds hurled debris into the transformer yard at Indian Point 3, causing one of its main breakers to fail and cut the plant off from the grid. This triggered an immediate shutdown though its sister plant, Indian Point 2, was unaffected and the rising river rolled on by.

The following is a summary of U.S. nuclear power plant performance during Hurricane Sandy:

North Carolina:
Brunswick 1 and 2—continued operating at 100 percent power.

Virginia:
Surry 1 and 2—continued operating at 100 percent power
North Anna 1 and 2—continued operating at 100 percent power.

Maryland:
Calvert Cliffs 1 and 2—continued operating at 100 percent power.

New Jersey:
Oyster Creek—shut down for refueling outage; alert declared Oct. 29 due to high water level at water intake structure
Hope Creek 1—continued operating at 100 percent power
Salem 1—manual safe shut down from 100 percent power on Oct. 30 due to high water level at water intake structure
Salem 2—shut down for refueling outage.

Pennsylvania:
Peach Bottom 2 and 3—continued operating at 100 percent power
Three Mile Island 1—continued operating at 100 percent power
Limerick 1 and 2—safely reduced power from 100 percent to 50 percent and 22 percent respectively on Oct. 30 due to storm effects and at the request of the regional electric grid operator
Beaver Valley 1—continued operating at 100 percent power
Beaver Valley 2—shut down for refueling outage
Susquehanna 1—shut down for turbine inspection
Susquehanna 2—continued operating at 75 percent power.

Ohio:
Perry 1—safely reduced power from 100 percent to 91 percent on Oct. 30 at the request of the regional electric grid operator
Davis-Besse—continued operating at 100 percent power.

New York:
Indian Point 2—continued operating at 100 percent power
Indian Point 3—manual safe shut down from 100 percent power on Oct. 30 due to an electric grid disruption
Ginna—shut down for refueling outage
Fitzpatrick—continued operating at 100 percent power
Nine Mile Point 1—manual safe shut down from 100 percent power on Oct. 29 due to an electric grid disruption
Nine Mile Point 2—continued operating at 100 percent power.

Connecticut:
Millstone 2—shut down for refueling outage
Millstone 3—safely reduced power from 100 percent to 75 percent on Oct. 29 at the request of the electric grid operator.

Massachusetts:
Pilgrim 1—continued operating at 100 percent power.

New Hampshire:
Seabrook 1—shut down for refueling outage, but safely restarted Oct. 30 and is at 20 percent power.

Vermont:
Vermont Yankee—safely reduced power from 100 percent to 90 percent on Oct. 30 at the request of the regional electric grid operator.

Source: Nuclear Energy Institute (  www.NEI.org  )

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By Roger Witherspoon

 

Eleven nuclear power plants in the direct path of Hurricane Sandy – including all four in New Jersey – are on special alert status with additional federal monitors and plans to shut down if the winds or waves exceed safe storm limits.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission dispatched extra monitors this past week end to augment the two full-time resident inspectors at each plant to ensure that proper procedures are followed as the storm roars through the region and its impacts are felt.

“To ensure that lines of communications are maintained, the on-site inspectors are equipped with satellite phones,” said the NRC in a statement this morning. “The NRC will continue to track Hurricane Sandy using the resources of all federal agencies and several weather forecasting services.”

The nuclear plants in the path of the storm receiving added NRC attention are Calvert Cliffs in Lusby, Md.; Salem and Hope Creek, in Hancocks Bridge, N.J.; Oyster Creek, in Lacey Township, N.J.: Peach Bottom, in Delta, Pa.; Three Mile Island 1, in Middletown, Pa.; Susquehanna, in Salem Township, Pa.; Indian Point 1&2 in Buchanan, N.Y.; and Millstone, in Waterford, Conn.

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said in an interview that “all of the plants have criteria where they have to shut down were they to see winds at a certain level or high water past a certain level. And these vary from site to site.

“At Indian Point 2 and 3, the criteria are they have to notify us if there is a hurricane warning with winds in excess of 87 knots, or 100 Miles Per Hour, within 320 miles of the facility, and shut if it is within five nautical miles of the facility.”

Sheehan said  Indian Point would have to declare an “unusual event,” the lowest  alarm level, if  the Hudson River rose 14.5 feet above normal, and an “alert” if it rose more than 15 feet.”

While both Indian Point 2 and 3 are up and running, the picture is different in New Jersey. Salem 1 and Hope Creek are full power while Salem 2 and Oyster Creek are shut for refueling and maintenance.           Joe Delmar, spokesman for PSEG Nuclear, said refueling operations were suspended Sunday at 6 PM and unnecessary workers were sent home.

The criteria for shutting down New Jersey’s plants are lower than those for Indian Point, which is on the Hudson River and sheltered in the Hudson River Valley. “We are required to shut down operations when there are sustained winds of 74 miles per hour for 15 minutes or more,” Delmar said.

“With regards to the Delaware River, we have to shut down if the river reaches 99.5 feet in depth. It is normally 89 feet at high tide, and our design basis is 120 feet, a level that would be reached during a Category 4 hurricane. The Delaware River level at high tide at 11:30 this morning was 93 feet.”

Salem and Indian Point, which use the adjacent rivers to provide billions of gallons of water daily to cool their generating system, also face issues as flood waters recede.

“You can imagine the amount of debris in the river as a result of flooding,” said the NRC’s Sheehan. “At Indian point 3 they had issues with debris that they had to watch for. There were tree trunks, leaves, and other large debris at the intake pipes.”

The plants have procedures to follow in cases of a “station blackout” in which the regional power grid is down and there is no offsite power. “Their first line of defense is their emergency diesels,” said Sheehan, “and they would have topped off all their tanks and tried them as a test to make sure they were ready to go if needed.”

In New Jersey, PSEG has an advantage in that two of the four nuclear plants are currently shut down for refueling. Hope Creek has four diesel generators, and only needs one of them operating to run its safety systems for a week. At Salem 1 & 2, each plant has three diesel generators, and there is enough fuel on hand to serve each generator for a week, said Delmar.  “We have to test diesels on a routine basis.”

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By Roger Witherspoon

 

Robert Aleksick was emphatic.

“FAC is like roaches,” he said, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of exasperation. “Where you see one, there are bound to be more hidden away.”

Aleksick should know about these hidden pests. As president of CSI Technologies, Inc., he is one of the nation’s foremost experts on FACs, or Flow Assisted Corrosion, a condition of degradation on the inside of pipes carrying superheated, radioactive water under high pressure conditions. If undetected, FACs could lead to pipe ruptures and, in a worse case, loss of coolant to a nuclear reactor.

Whether or not technicians at the Indian Point nuclear power plants could spot where those roaches or FACs could be hiding, or predict where they might try to hide over the next 20 years was the subject of an intense dispute at the opening of months of judicial hearings last week. A three judge panel of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, meeting in Tarrytown, is wading through arguments over a dozen challenges to applications from Entergy Nuclear to renew the licenses of its twin plants, Indian Point 2 and 3, for another 20 years. Entergy purchased Indian Point 2 from Consolidated Edison and Indian Point 3 from the New York Power Authority in 2000, and their current 40-year licenses expire in 2013 and 2015, respectively. The board’s findings will be presented to the five members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who can accept or reject their ruling.

The challenges, buttressed by more than 1,400 exhibits, were filed by the New York Attorney General’s office, and the non-profit environmental groups Clearwater and Riverkeeper. New York’s challenges, or contentions, are backed up by Connecticut Attorney General Robert Snook, whose office is also represented at the legal proceeding.

Collectively, the contentions challenge different aspects of Entergy’s plans for ensuring the safe operation of the twin nuclear reactors over the next 20 years and the maintenance of the spent fuel pool for decades after the plants finally retire. Under current NRC rules, the highly radioactive fuel rods could sit at the plant site for a century after the plants shut down, whether or not Entergy, as a company, is still in existence and capable of taking care of them.

The opening arguments presented a sharp contrast between the confidence Entergy has in its approach to long term management of ageing pipes and wiring, and the skepticism the state of New York and the environmental groups have in those monitoring systems.

Aleksick, an expert witness for Entergy, dueled with Joram Hopenfeld, who testified for Riverkeeper and Clearwater that the primary system for predicting and detecting deterioration in the wall thickness in critical pipe systems was flawed. Hopenfeld a specialist in pipe corrosion, who once worked for the NRC, pointed to the results of sonic tests by Entergy showing wall thickness readings of 1.3 inches and .5 inches in a curve in a 1.5-inch thick pipe.

Hopenfeld said the data supplied by Entergy showed that “the tests Entergy is relying on are designed to show overall averages. But the actual sonic tests show there is uneven wear due to FAC and the pipe is not going to hold.”

But Aleksick said the uneven readings were due to lamination, or flaws in the metal, which caused the sonic probe to bounce back prematurely. “When you come across lamination,” Aleksick said, “it will give an erroneous reading. The example here of different thicknesses is due to lamination, not to actual wall thinning.

“I completely reject the assertion that this data set represents huge variations in the thickness and strength of the pipe wall.”

Whenever Entergy’s ultrasound probes find apparent variation, Aleksick explained, the company proceeds with a series of more extensive tests to determine for certain if the pipe wall has been corroded or if the metal has flaws that are similar to the way knots in a tree trunk would mar the symmetry of the wood.

The argument seemed to resonate with Judge Richard Wardwell, who holds a doctorate in civil engineering from ColoradoStateUniversity and has served as Maine’s Chair of the Board of Environmental Protection.

“It seems to me that this is an anomaly,” said Wardwell to Hopenfeld. “I’m thinking that what we heard from Entergy was that they took the data, looked at the anomaly, and they don’t believe that it measures wall thickness. I am struggling to see how you arrive at the different conclusion.”

Undeterred, Hopenfeld asked “supposed you were buying a new piping system for your home, Judge, and the plumbing company said they have this pipe system, but there were anomalies in the  metal pipes wall and the probes could not be relied upon to tell you how they were holding up over time. Would you buy it?”

It was a question which Wardwell, in his capacity as a law judge, could not answer. But the protracted exchange typified the complexity and minutiae facing he and his colleagues – Lawrence McDade, panel chairman and a former Department of Justice attorney specializing in hazardous substances; and Michael Kennedy, who holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the University of Virginia, and spent 30 years in the nuclear industry specializing in safety issues associated with light water reactors. McDade made it clear early on that the panel intended to hear all arguments, rather than allow either side to use technicalities to block arguments from their opponents.

As the hearings opened, Clearwater and Riverkeeper sought to withdraw a contention dealing with the negative impact the plants’ once-through cooling system has on the Hudson River’s aquatic environment.  Manna Jo Greene, environmental director for Clearwater, said that after three months of negotiations, they had reached an agreement with Entergy to drop their challenge if the company agreed to monitor radioactive contamination in the water and fish in Haverstraw Bay, on the opposite side of the river from the plants. Currently, the plant monitors radioactivity in the water and  fish upstream and at the plant site itself where the water leaks or is intentionally  discharged.

Indian Point is the state’s largest water user, pulling some 2.5 billion gallons of water daily from the river, nearly double the 1.3 billion gallons used by the nine million residents and visitors to New York City and Westchester County daily. The plants then run the river water through a heat exchanger to cool the steam used to turn its 40-ton, electric generating turbine. The heated water is then returned to the river. In the process, billions of fish are sucked into the plant’s 40-foot-wide intake pipes and killed. The National Marine Fisheries Service stated in an analysis that Indian Point’s massive fish kills are more to blame for declines in commercial fish stocks along the North Atlantic coastal seaboard than overfishing from factory fleets.

Those fish kills are the subject of a separate hearing before the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which has stated it will deny Indian Point a water use permit unless it changes to a closed cycle cooling system, which employs a radiator-like installation to recycle water. That system would drop the amount of water used and fish killed by 95%.

“Our board thought long and hard about this,” said Greene. “But in the end we had to look at what was the most economic thing for us to do. It costs a lot of money to fight Entergy and the state has a significant challenge here covering pretty much all of the issues.”

Riverkeeper president Paul Gallay said his organization needed to “get the biggest bang for their buck” and concurred in the decision to negotiate an agreement on this issue.

Their request, however, was not immediately accepted. Judge McDade to first talk with the town of Cortlandt and get their input. No decision would be made until Cortlandt agreed with the decision. It was a strong signal from the bench that the judicial trio believed the public has a significant stake in the outcome of these proceedings.

            The decision of Clearwater and Riverkeeper to seek a settlement, where possible, was not a total surprise. The NRC has approved the first 70 license renewal requests with no problems and no state opposition. All four of the nuclear plants in New Jersey, for example, were approved within two years because the state supported them.

Norm Cohen, head of the non-profit group, Salem Watch, said “we could not afford to challenge PSEG and Exelon,” the owners and operators of Hope and Oyster Creek, Salem 1 and 2 nuclear power plants.

“We had to limit our role to that of watchdogs.”

By contrast, the New York Attorney General, under Andrew Cuomo, set up an environmental division which has grown to some 28 members and has a budget to hire expert consultants including physicists, mathematicians, meteorologists, and even volcanologists to wade through the technical aspects of nuclear power plant operations. When Eric Schneiderman took over thee office after Cuomo became governor, he expanded the environmental division. As a result, Entergy has been fighting a protracted legal dispute to renew their licenses for more than five years.

A key part of the state’s challenge involves the Severe Accident Mitigation Assessment, a 300-page document in which nuclear plant operators look at the possible impacts stemming from a reactor meltdown and the steps they can take to minimize the damage should that accident occur.

While all nuclear plants have been required to have SAMAs as part of their license, the NRC never examined them in detail before the multiple reactor meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima reactors last year. The NRC found inadequacies in many of them.

At Indian Point, for example, the NRC found that while its reactor building was designed to withstand an earthquake of a magnitude 5.2, its fire equipment was in a concrete building that was not designed to withstand such an earthquake, nor were the water mains coming into the site from the town of Buchanan. As a result, if an earthquake caused a fire at Indian Point, the reactor building could survive, but there might not be any water to put the fire out or any usable equipment to fight a fire with.

In one major contention, the nuclear group in the NY Attorney General’s office, led by John Sipos, found that Entergy’s contention that a meltdown would cost about $403 million per square mile was flawed because:

• The company claimed through its mathematical meteorological models that winds from the east and west cancelled each other out, and winds blowing south to north were so predominant that they only had to consider the impact of radioactive fallout along the upper Hudson River. If so, that would exclude possible contamination of New York City, Connecticut as far east as Hartford; New Jersey south to NewarkAirport; and across the Delaware Water Gap into the Pennsylvania Poconos. New York contends that the winds, in fact, blow in all directions and contamination would impact urban New York City, costing trillions of dollars to clean up.
• Entergy contends that most of the heavy radioactive elements in an escaping radiation cloud would fall out within the first few miles, thus minimizing the extent and cost of the most rigorous cleanup. The Attorney General’s office states that experience from Chernobyl and Fukushima clearly show that that is not true and all of the region would be at risk.

The hearings will continue in Tarrytown this week and then will break until mid November.