by Linda DeStefano
The Alliance for a Green Economy (AGREE) and Beyond Nuclear have filed a petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) asking for an emergency enforcement action against the James A. FitzPatrick nuclear power plant in Scriba, New York.
The petition asks for the immediate suspension of the plant's operating license, public hearings on the safety of the plant, and the public release of a post-Fukushima safety reassessment. There are more than 900,000 people within 50 miles of this aged and especially dangerous facility, including residents of Syracuse and Oswego.
The Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club is one of several founding members of AGREE. As representative from the Chapter to AGREE, I spoke by conference call to a meeting of the licensing board of the NRC. Also speaking by phone were Jean Kessner, common councilor from Syracuse, and Tim Judson from Citizens Awareness Network. Speaking in person before the board, which was meeting near Washington, D.C., were Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear and Jessica Azulay, staffer with AGREE.
At issue is Fitzpatrick's emergency venting plan, which poses a severe health and safety risk to the public. In the case of an accident in the plant, Entergy, the FitzPatrick operator, plans to relieve pressure in the main reactor building by venting radiation, steam, and explosive gasses into another building, where the pressure is expected to rise until it blows open the doors of the building, releasing the radiation and gasses into the air at ground level. This increases the probability that workers and the public would suffer massive radiation exposure, as well as the possibility of a dangerous hydrogen explosion that could injure workers or damage the reactor.
This plan was approved by the NRC 20 years ago, and saved the operator $680,000. In approving the plan, the NRC wrote that it believed that combustion in the existing vent path was not a "significant risk." The explosions during the Fukushima nuclear disaster expose the fallacy of this assumption. In fact, a May 2011 post-Fukushima assessment of the plant suggests that the NRC and Entergy now believe the plant could be vulnerable to hydrogen explosions in the vent line in an accident scenario, but they have done nothing about it.
The FitzPatrick reactor has the same flawed containment design as the ones that melted down at Fukushima and is vulnerable to the same issues. It doesn't take an earthquake and tsunami to replicate the disaster. Instead, a severe weather condition, such as a heavy ice storm, could cause loss of power to the facility, eventually leading to a meltdown of the fuel rods and a catastrophic release of radiation. It is the only plant of this kind in the country with the venting strategy described above. All other GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactors in the U.S. followed a 1989 recommendation from the NRC to install a Direct Torus Vent System. (Unfortunately, these systems were also proved faulty by the Fukushima disaster, but it is important to hold FitzPatrick's owners accountable for not even doing the minimum that the other reactor owners did.)
Please sign the petition to the NRC at www.allianceforagreeneconomy.org. Click on "Take Action." And check
the website for updates. You can also contact me at (315) 488-2140 between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m. orLDESTEFANO3@twcny.rr.com for information or a hard copy version of the petition to sign.
Linda DeStefano is a member of the Chapter’s Energy Committee.