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Nuclear Plants Aid In Emergency Preparedness

Here's John Wheeler on one of the lesser known benefits enjoyed by communities that host nuclear power plants:
Since we're discussing Emergency Plans, I wanted to bring your attention to an event that speaks to the incredibly good brought about by the Sharon Harris nucear plant in North Carolina. About two weeks ago in Apex, NC there was a huge fire at a chemical storage facility in the middle of the night that caused a release of deadly chlorine gas. More than 16,000 people had to be evacuated from their beds, and it was done quickly and safely.

From everything I've read it was done with out panic, and without incident. What I didn’t hear was any mention of the fact that the emergency planning infrastructure in Apex and the surrounding communities was developed primarily by Progress Energy, the owners of Sharon Harris as part of their emergency plan. The citizens of Apex have Progress Energy to thank for the well-organized response that kept them informed and alerted them of the need to evacuate.

I've seen this repeated all over the USA. Communities that have nuclear plants have a well organized and well-funded emergency response organization that's had the benefit of training they get from the nuclear plant staff. They put that training to use in all kinds of emergencies.

The newspapers and other mainstream media rarely pick up on this, but if you talk to the state and county officials, and I have, they'll tell you they're much better prepared for all sorts of emergencies because of the funding, equipment, and training they get through the nuclear plant's emergency preparedness program.
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Comments

Anonymous said…
A similar thing happened with the evac plans developed for Shoreham by LILCO. A few years after idiot Cuomo and the other wackos trashed Shoreham, a hurricane came up the coast and broadsided LI. The same dimbulbs in Suffolk Co. who trashed Shoreham because they said LI couldn't be feasibly evacuated dusted off the plans for Shoreham and got everyone out safely and efficiently, which put the lie to the claim that Shoreham had to be trashed because LI couldn't be evacuated in time. But by then goofball Cuomo had punched a hole in the Shoreham pressure vessel.
Anonymous said…
On Monday, October 30, 2006 all 81 emergency sirens in the Harris 10-mile emergency zone were reported to NRC as being inoperable for at least two hours. Progress Energy says the cause was failure of a device that signals the sirens via a communications tower. Progress said that in an emergency, operators could manually override the device and activate the sirens.
Harris sirens are not fully backed up with emergency power should an accident or attack coincede with a electrical grid failure.

Gunter, NIRS
Anonymous said…
On Monday, October 30, 2006 all 81 emergency sirens in the Harris 10-mile emergency zone were reported to NRC as being inoperable for at least two hours. Progress Energy says the cause was failure of a device that signals the sirens via a communications tower. Progress said that in an emergency, operators could manually override the device and activate the sirens.
Harris sirens are not fully backed up with emergency power should an accident or attack coincede with a electrical grid failure.

Gunter, NIRS
Anonymous said…
Almost forgot on Tuesday the next day, Harris siren system fails again – all sirens were inoperable for several hours due to the same equipment failure. The tower, located on the Owner Controlled Area, is apparently the same one that an intruder hung a large flag on a year ago, when Progress downplayed the tower's importance.

Gunter
And yet, somehow, that didn't really affect anything.

How strange.
Anonymous said…
So the sirens were out of service for a few hours. How many hours were they operable? A few hours out of several thousand hours in any given reporting period is a pretty good availability factor, probably in the range of 99.9999999% or so. Not a bad number by most measures for engineered systems. Plus they have the manual backup. Contrast that with the availability of "alternate" or "renewable" energy sources, for example, something like wind, with capacity factors ranging from 5% to 30%. I'd say the sirens have a better availability.
Anonymous said…
Well, anonymous, the siren system failures only turn up when they are tested, so you all dont really know how long they have been inoperable before any one test.
So your 99.9999% is just made up...

Before you all start crowing about emergency plans around nuclear power stations lets look at this case in point.

As part of their licensed condition reactor operators committed to emergency plans that included operable public notification systems.

The fact is that siren systems routinely go down because of grid problems, adverse weather, equipment failure where the majority of US reactor emergency planning zones rely on public notification sirens that are solely powered by the grid not equipped with emergency backup power systems or even batteries.
There are just enough EPZs with fully backed up sirens systems to show how inconsistent and arbitrary the notification process is... any wonder with what the federal government demonstrated during Katrina?

Well it just so happens that Station Blackout is a big contributor to core melt frequency, just look at NUREG-1150.

So just when you might need public notification systems the most, let's say with an initiating event caused by the power lines going down because of adverse weather or as the first of a target set in an attack on a nuclear power station, the sirens wont work.

Its just another example of the absurd length that the nuclear power industry and its compliant regulator will go to to save money to the potential detriment of public safety.

Moreover, there is the issue that the emergency planning zone is absurdly small set at a politically arbitrary 10 mile EPZ and a 50 mile ingestion pathway.

The TMI 2 accident alone demonstrated that spontaneous evacuations of 120,000 people occured when only the evacuation for pregnant women and children under 5 was recommended (a population of 5000). In the event of an accident or attack where evacuation is ordered, or for that matter shelter-in-place, the populations out to 25 miles are going to be moving en masse and create a shadow evacuation phenomenon, causing a grid lock for populations in close.

Those that manage to get to these so-called "reception zones" which by an large are only 15 to 20 miles away from the nukes, will find that the resident population and much of the responder network have already left, spontaneously.

The actual studies on human behavior in response to a radiological release with the TMI event as a case study, found hospital emergency rooms out to 25 miles without doctors, nurses and technicians. NRC and industru doare in a state of denial re: the evidence of role abandonment and delay given real human behavior where police, medical and all those school teachers who are conscripted to stay in the schools or board buses with their classes, when in fact in all likelihood are going to leave to save their own families first, particularly in fast breaking events.

Real civil defense begins with stopping reactor construction and closing down existing reactors.

Gunter, NIRS
Anonymous said…
Well, anonymous, we dont know how long they were out of service as the failure was indicated by the test. So, you're 99.99999% number is a hat trick.

Gunter, NIRS
Anonymous said…
Hey, you brought this up, as if were some ominous, terrible thing. My point is equally valid. There probably was no major outage of this equipment. And in any case the system was operable via the manual backup, so what is the big deal?

The purpose of functional checks is to exercise the system, identify any deficiences, and correct them. That is exactly what happened here. The system worked. The problem was identified and corrected. The plant operators did precisely what the law and regulations required. They did what they were supposed to do.

There are many industries out there who do not do even that. I live near a private airport. It came to light that some of their emergency systems and equipment were non-functional, and had never even been tested. There is a railroad crossing a few miles from here that had a (fatal) accident because the warning equipment did not function. There had never been any maintenance performed on it. It cost lives (unlike the siren test outage). Yet no wackos were around complaining about the railroad. There was a train derailment a few months agao and the cars were carrying toxic materials. The cause was that the tracks there had not been inspected as they should have been.

So, my question is, why do the anti-nuke wackos hammer the nuclear industry for doing what they should, but never utter a whisper about other industries that do not do anything? Why are there no protests and lawsuits from the anti-nuke wackos about these other things? Why do you spend time hammering an industry that goes the extra mile for safety and turn a blind eye to these other things, many of which cost lives among the public, something the nuclear industry never has?

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