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Nuclear Power Fails as Big Business & Worsens Climate Chaos

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By Tim Judson and Linda Pentz Gunter

The climate crisis is upon us, and we have no time to lose. We cannot afford a single false step. Even as the UN COP26 climate conference failed to put us on the necessary path to keep the world within 1.5 degrees Celsius of increased warming, there are still important choices to be made as countries roll out their latest climate plans.

That is why the United States, in its pursuit of carbon reductions, must not allow itself to be misled by the false promises of nuclear power, both its continued use and illusory new programs. Either would be a mistake.

The push to develop new nuclear is focused on so-called advanced reactors and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), but the cost and safety uncertainties of these designs have not been satisfactorily addressed.

Yet Congress is already looking to award two “advanced” fast reactor designs — the Terrapower Natrium reactor, and X-energy Xe-100 reactor — and an extravagant $3.2 billion in subsidies, even though the former is a project of billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

SMRs, typically less than one-third the size of a traditional nuclear power reactor, would need to be brought on by the hundreds if not thousands to achieve the advertised cost savings, a factor that has left designs on the drawing board for decades and has not attracted buyers. Even if these unproven designs work, such a program could never be achieved at a scale or in time to make a dent in carbon emissions.

The likelihood of failure is increased by the recent experience of building new, traditional reactors. They consistently suffer lengthy delays and massive cost increases, which suggests that commercializing new, untested reactor designs will not go faster or be cheaper.

For example, another $1 billion was just added to the ever-escalating tab for two Westinghouse reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia — underway since 2013, yet still unfinished — with costs ballooning to over $33 billion and further delays likely pushing final completion into 2024.

The French-designed Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) is arguably a spectacular failure with massive cost-overruns, long delays, and endless technical flaws. Most recently, at the now-operating Taishan 1 EPR in China, vibrations damaged fuel rods, forcing its shutdown. The problem could be linked to a design flaw also found in the four still unfinished EPRs in Europe, causing a French nuclear lab to raise doubts about their safety.

 

False choice: climate chaos or cancer-causing pollution

Recognizing these challenges, the U.S. nuclear industry is focusing most of its energy on keeping its current fleet of 93 reactors running, arguing that they are carbon-free. This is patently false — and not true of any human-made energy source, including renewables, as long as mining, transportation, and manufacturing of these technologies are so reliant on fossil fuels.

However, the “zero-emission” mantra has been used to justify the inclusion of nuclear power in state and federal subsidies. If it had survived the machinations of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the promising Build Back Better Act may have still shot itself in the foot by including a massive $35 billion subsidy for already-operating nuclear reactors in its “Zero-Emissions Nuclear Energy Production Credit.” This subsidy would have funneled billions of dollars to corporations that own nuclear reactors, nearly all of which will continue operating with or without such support.

Subsidizing nuclear power siphons funds from real solutions, like renewables, just when these are needed most urgently, thereby making climate change worse.

Redirecting funds to old reactors further misses the point: even if reactors were carbon-free, nuclear power is not a good way to address the climate crisis, because it ignores the two biggest climate drawbacks — time and cost.

As Stanford physicist Amory Lovins has pointed out, to address the climate crisis expeditiously and effectively, we must choose energy sources that can reduce the greatest amount of carbon emissions most quickly and at the least cost. This is where renewable energy, energy efficiency, and conservation beat nuclear power — and new gas and coal as well.

A recent Sussex University study showed that countries that have focused on nuclear power have not significantly reduced carbon emissions, while countries with strong renewable energy programs have.

Nuclear power has no business case and takes too long. That alone should rule it out as useful to climate protection, even before we look at other disqualifying factors such as the environmental justice and health impacts of long-lived lethal radioactive waste and potential meltdowns. Our future should not hinge on the nuclear industry’s false choice between climate chaos and cancer-causing pollution. We can and must do better.

 

— Tim Judson is executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a non-profit environmental organization founded in 1978 that works for a just and equitable transition to renewable energy and a nuclear-free, carbon-free world.

— Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear non-profit organization working for a world free from nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

— This commentary ran originally in The Hill, December 21, 2021

 

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Nuclear Shorts

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
Shorts compiled by Christine Manwiller, Beyond Nuclear, Andrew Cockburn and John LaForge.

 

Scientists & NGOs to Biden: ‘Get Rid of ICBMs’

Almost 700 award-winning scientists have urged President Biden to cancel the $246 billion Air Force program to replace today’s 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and to “consider eliminating silo-based” missiles altogether. The Minuteman IIIs are the subject of Nukewatch’s 1988 book Nuclear Heartland, and its 2015 Revised Edition, which long ago made the case for abolition. Dated Dec. 16, 2021, the letter’s signers include 21 Nobel Laureates, who note that ICBMs are the nuclear weapons most vulnerable to being attacked and are also the ones most likely to be launched first — perhaps in response to a false alarm. The scientists’ letter neglected to mention that ICBM launch control crews and their commanding officers have been scandalized in the 2010s by convictions and expulsions in cases of domestic violence, drug trafficking, corruption, cheating on Air Force exams, and cover-ups. The open letter was followed a month later by a group of sixty U.S. nongovernmental organizations that issued “A Call to Eliminate ICBMs,” calling them a colossal waste of money and a threat to civilization. The January 12 declaration, organized by Roots Action and Just Foreign Policy, said “There is no more important step the United States could take to reduce the chances of a global nuclear holocaust than to eliminate its ICBMs.” 

— Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, and Roots Action, Jan. 12, 2022; Sputnik International, Dec. 18, 2021; and New York Times, Dec. 16, 2021

Santa Susana Meltdown Worst Ever in U.S.

The Sodium Reactor Experiment was operated by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, about 18 miles northwest of Hollywood. Andrew Cockburn reported on the little-known radiation hot spot near Los Angeles in his cover story in the January 2022 Harpers, “Spent Fuel: The risky resurgence of nuclear power.” This is a short excerpt: In July 1959, “the plant’s coolant system failed and its uranium oxide fuel rods began melting down. With the reactor running out of control and set to explode, desperate operators deliberately released huge amounts of radioactive material into the air for nearly two weeks, making it almost certainly the most dangerous nuclear accident in U.S. history. The amount of iodine-131 alone spewed into the southern California atmosphere was two hundred and sixty times that released at Three Mile Island, which is generally regarded as the worst ever U.S. nuclear disaster.* None of this was revealed to the public, who were told merely that a ‘technical’ fault had occurred, one that was ‘not an indication of unsafe reactor conditions.’ As greater Los Angeles boomed in the following years, the area around the reactor site — originally chosen for its distance from population centers — was flooded with new residents. No one informed them of the astronomical levels of radioactive contaminants seeded deep in the soil.” 

* Editor’s note: Worse than Three Mile Island was the 1979 Church Rock, New Mexico uranium mill collapse that released to the Puerco River over four times the estimated dispersal of radiation from TMI.

Report: New Small Reactor Design “too late, too expensive, too risky, too uncertain”

A new type of nuclear reactor that would provide electricity to at least four states in the Western U.S. poses financial risks for utilities and their customers, according to a report released Feb. 17 by the Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). The project’s owner and the company developing the reactor immediately criticized the report, which said the small modular nuclear reactor being developed by NuScale Power in Oregon is “too late, too expensive, too risky and too uncertain.” The NuScale design is the only small-scale reactor to win approval so far from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is poised to issue a rule this summer that would fully certify it. The report from the IEEFA says it’s likely the NuScale reactor will take longer to build than estimated and that the final cost of its electricity will be higher than anticipated and greater than the cost of power from renewables.

— AP, Santa Fe New Mexican, Feb. 18; IEEFA Report, Feb. 17, 2022 

China to Sign Southeast Asia Nuclear-Free Zone Treaty

China could become the first nuclear weapon state to sign the Bangkok Treaty which establishes a nuclear weapon-free zone in Southeast Asia. On Nov. 22, 2021, President Xi Jinping announced his intention to sign the agreement, which entered into force in 1997 after being signed by all ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. China’s support for the Treaty could be a political response to the new “AUKUS” alliance between the U.S., Britain, and Australia, under which the U.S. and Britain have agreed to equip Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. (See Winter 2021-22 Quarterly) Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi criticized news of the submarine construction plan calling it a threat to the efforts of the Bangkok Treaty to create a nuclear-free zone. According to Dr. Ryan Musto, a Fellow with the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the U.S. should consider joining the Treaty with a stipulation regarding articles it would not obey. Otherwise, Musto wrote for Lawfareblog.com, certain “submarine patrols would be outlawed,” because “under the treaty, the U.S. would be unable to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against an enemy vessel within the zone. It also would be unable to use a nuclear-armed submarine within the zone to attack a target elsewhere.” The Treaty zone covers the territories, continental shelves, and “exclusive economic zones” of the countries that have had it ratified. 

— Center for Air Power Studies, Jan. 7, 2022; Lawfareblog.com, Dec 9, 2021; CISAC, Dec 9, 2021; Nuclear Threat Initiative, “Bangkok Treaty”

Sea Monsters Multiplying

China is now the third country to invest in floating nuclear reactors, after the U.S. and Russia. The 30,000-ton reactor ship ACPR50S may be completed this year, the South China Morning Post said, and could be the first in a fleet. The reactors have been touted as means of reducing China’s carbon footprint, EurAsian Times reports, but they are headed to China’s east coast to power oil rigs! Russia launched the Akademik Lomonosov in December 2019, the first floating double nuclear reactor to be built since the 1960s. Nukewatch and others condemned the overwhelming dangers involved which we called “reckless endangerment of the public commons.” The most obvious risk is capsizing, especially considering the increasing intensity of storms caused by climate change. Ship engineers behind the program claim that the reactor can withstand hurricane-force winds, but they admit that the “ship body must not capsize under any circumstances.” This would lead to a loss-of-coolant and meltdown, which would devastate sea life and nearby coastal areas. Chris Gadomski, a nuclear analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told the Guardian, “It wasn’t so long ago that the Philippines was the site of a major tsunami, and I don’t know how you would hedge against a risk like that.” Jan Haverkamp, with Greenpeace, said floating reactors combine “all of the flaws and risks of larger land-based nuclear power stations” with “extra risks from the unpredictability of operating in coastal areas and transport over the high seas — particularly in a loaded state,” the Guardian noted. 

—EurAsianTimes, Dec 15, and South China Morning Post, Dec. 14, 2021; the Guardian, Dec 17, 2020; and Nukewatch Quarterly, July 2018.

U.S. Regulators Reject Application to Build and Operate ‘Micro’ Reactor

On January 6, 2022, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff denied the small start-up Oklo Corporation’s application for a “novel” combined “construction and operating license” for what Beyond Nuclear called an “atomic power cathedral in the woods” at the Idaho National Laboratory. The NRC’s denial was based on plain insufficiency in the details Oklo presented for its “Aurora micro-reactor.” Beyond Nuclear, in Tacoma Park Maryland, with the support of a coalition of safe energy and environmental advocate groups including Nukewatch, had petitioned to intervene in the sketchy reactor design last year but were denied intervener status by the NRC ,which called the petition “premature.” It would have saved staff time and taxpayer money to have scrapped Oklo’s application as the critics requested. — Beyond Nuclear, December 2021

Biden Urges Japan to Shun Nuclear Ban Treaty Meeting

The first “Meeting of States Parties” — countries that have ratified the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) outlawing the “development, testing, possession and use of nuclear weapons” — will take place this June in Vienna. According to U.S. government sources, President Biden has pressured Japan not to attend the meetings. In 2020, the Komeito Party, part of Japan’s coalition government, urged minister of foreign affairs Toshimitsu Motegi to participate as an observer. Biden’s pressure follows Germany’s announced intention to participate also as an observer, making it the only country that hosts nuclear weapons to do so, although both Germany and Japan have parroted the U.S. government’s rejection of the TPNW. Prime Minister Fumio Mishida has “no concrete plans” to join the Vienna meeting, according to a statement made last December. Biden’s action recalls the Trump White House’s attempts in October 2020 to force parties to the treaty to withdraw their ratifications. “That the Trump administration is pressuring countries to withdraw from a UN-backed disarmament treaty is an unprecedented action in international relations,” said Beatrice Fihn of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. “That the U.S. goes so far … shows how fearful they are of the treaty’s impact and growing support.” To date, 59 countries have ratified the TPNW and 86 have signed, although none of the nuclear weapons states have done so. — Kyodo News, Feb. 1, 2022; Dec. 27, and 21, 2021; and AP, Oct. 21, 2020

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US Reactors Operating Dangerously Using Counterfeit Parts

Clean-up workers, self-nicknamed “sponges,” worked inside the contaminated Three Mile Island reactor site in Pennsylvania, March 1979.
Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By John La Forge

See full NRC Office of Inspector General report

The lead paragraph from Reuters was originally correct: “Most, if not all, U.S. nuclear power plants contain counterfeit or fraudulent parts, potentially increasing the risk of a safety failure…”

This hair-raising news is just one of the shocking findings in a set of seven reports released February 10 by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), now headed by Robert J. Feitel.

Among the findings of the first of the seven reports were: “Counterfeit, fraudulent, and suspect items (CFSI) are present in operating plants.” • “The extent of CFSI in operating plants is unknown because the NRC does not usually require licensees to track CFSI” … “if done at all, tracking is voluntary and methods and data quality vary among licensees.” • The “termination of [some] rulemaking in 2016 that addressed CFSI oversight concerns” was questionable. • “Department of Energy staff identified more than 100 incidents involving CFSI in [Fiscal Year ] 2021 alone, including five incidents involving safety-significant components.”

“Counterfeit parts are safety and security concerns that could have serious consequences in critical power plant equipment required to perform a safety function,” the OIG report says in its understated bureaucratese. And, “According to the Electric Power Research Institute, counterfeit parts have been found in valves, bearings, circuit breakers, pipe fittings, and structural steel, and can be difficult to spot.”

The antiseptic euphemism “serious consequences” resulting from the failure of critical but counterfeit “safety function” parts means, in plain-spoken terms, nuclear reactors going out-of-control, suffering loss-of-coolant meltdowns, and causing massive radioactive releases with acute and long-term damage to environmental and human health.

The finding that “most, if not all” of the country’s 94 operating reactors are more dangerous than we thought is potentially so devastating to the environmentally toxic and financially bailed-out nuclear power sector (Reuters said the OIG’s reports are “a blow to a U.S. nuclear industry”), that public relations agents and industry allies in the media must have run headlong to the phones and demanded retractions. Somehow, they were rewarded almost immediately with a so-called “correction” which misstates and weakens the OIG findings — a “correction” that was placed at the beginning of most follow-up reports.

The retraction misleadingly states that it, “Corrects lead paragraph to say many counterfeit parts are in U.S. nuclear plants instead of most, if not all, plants contain counterfeit parts.”

In fact, the report from the OIG — based on confidential testimony from several industry and NRC whistle-blowers — says that “well placed NRC sources” allege that “most, if not all” nuclear reactors operating in the United States today have counterfeit or faulty, substandard parts essential for preventing disasters.

The lead paragraph in The Energy Daily improved on the Reuters report by including the word “operating” before “nuclear plant” — a salient point considering their increased potential for radiation disasters compared to the 23 shuttered units.

The “most, if not all” bombshell follows from the fact, as OIG found, that “the Nuclear Regulatory Commission may be underestimating the number of CFSI in plants and their impact because it does not require licensees [reactor operators] to report CFSI except in extraordinary circumstances” like “the failure of equipment that performs a significant safety function.”

One such fraudulently manufactured, purchased and installed part identified after it failed was a “service water pump shaft” that was found to be counterfeit after it snapped. The loss of cooling water circulation, either inside a reactor vessel, or in the deep pool of ferociously hot waste fuel rods, has caused some of the industry’s worse radiation release disasters.

Inspector General Savages ‘Misleading’ NRC Actions, Thanks Comley

The depth of deliberate malfeasance or deception by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is justifiably savaged in the OIG report. The investigation found that NRC staff had for more than 10 years dismissed, ignored and even misfiled written communications from whistle-blowers so as to hide allegations regarding CFSI. “This investigation revealed that the alleger communicated CFSI concerns to the agency staff via letters, e-mails, phone calls, and discussions at public meetings over 10 years. Most of the alleger’s concerns involved Seabrook Station.”

“[W]e found that the NRC did not investigate or pursue any substantive actions regarding an alleger’s concerns about the presence of CFSI, nor did the NRC process any of the information provided by the alleger over the last 10 years through its Allegation Review Boards.”

Indeed, the NRC’s Office Allegation Coordinator was found to have classified the alleger’s charges as “non-allegations,” and then kept secret the details of how such a designation is applied. The OIG politely condemned the agency’s action, writing, “Such missing information regarding the NRC’s approach to reviewing allegations could be construed as misleading to the public.”

“The alleger” is a reference to Mr. Stephen J. Comley, Jr., of the national whistle-blower protection organization We the People, in Rowley, Massachusetts. In a February 10 cover letter to Comley accompanying the reports, OIG director Feitel wrote: “Thank you for taking considerable time to bring your concerns to the OIG,” and noted that “my staff has completed its investigations” into “your allegations that CFSI are present in most, if not all, U.S. nuclear power plants.…”

Feitel confirmed to Comley that “OIG investigators interviewed several individuals you identified.” They are some of the over two-dozen whistle-blowers who have spoken with We the People, and who are referred to in the OIG reports as “a well-placed NRC principle” or “an NRC source.”

As Nukewatch reported last October, Comley has for 35 years been haranguing the NRC and its inspectors, demanding that they take the whistle-blowers’ charges seriously. So the OIGs’ damning and alarming February findings (too many to report on in one or two articles) are the long-awaited validation and vindication of Comley’s steadfast work that goes back almost four decades.

Feitel’s letter to Comley speaks to his group’s repeated warnings to the NRC about the impossibility of safely evacuating the Seabrook, New Hampshire reactor site during an emergency, and to the whistle-blowers’ startling allegations that State Patrol and National Guard forces have been gag-ordered by their superiors not to discuss the lack of a feasible Seabrook evacuation plan. (Nuclear reactors are the only industrial operations required to earn the approval of an emergency evacuation plan prior to startup.)

“The OIG also investigated your allegation that Seabrook Station’s evacuation plan is inadequate,” Feitel wrote. This report is complete, but a response from the NRC is pending, and only after the response is filed with OIG can the public “request a copy of the report via the Freedom of Information Act,” Feitel advised.

For now, the NRC can continue to hide behind slick public relations that manages major news services with bald-faced lies. One NRC public affairs officer named Scott Burnell told Reuters, “Nothing in the report suggests an immediate safety concern.” Burnell has a point. The report doesn’t “suggest” anything, it directly if politely condemns the deceitful, unscrupulous, deceptive, and duplicitous chicanery of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when dealing with its own whistle-blowers, and it warns against the reckless endangerment of continuing to operate nuclear power reactors using counterfeit, substandard parts and equipment.

– WBZ4, CBS Boston, March 8, 2022 

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Cape Cod Bay in the Crosshairs — Holtec’s Reactor Waste Water Threat

By John LaForge

Still dreaming of a nuclear reactor that is clean, safe and cheap? Holtec Decommissioning International Corp. is trying to turn that dream to a nightmare.

The newly minted subsidiary intends to dump roughly one million gallons radioactively contaminated nuclear reactor waste water into Cape Cod Bay, which happens to be a part of the protected Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The million gallons are stagnating in the shutdown Pilgrim reactor’s waste fuel pool, formerly used to cool extremely hot uranium fuel rods which are taken from the reactor core (at around 5,092 degrees Fahrenheit)  when fresh fuel is emplaced.

Holtec’s pollution plan has produced such a tsunami of public opposition that Massachusetts Senator Ed Marky convenes a congressional subcommittee field hearing in Plymouth, Massachusetts Friday, May 6, to air questions about an array of vexing problems with decommissioning the Pilgrim reactor, which is on the northwest shore of Cape Cod Bay. Markey is Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate, and Nuclear Safety.

Diane Turco is director of Cape Downwinders, a grassroots watchdog group working to protect local communities from the radiation risks created by Pilgrim. The group has helped bring critical attention to Holtec’s scandalous proposal and has organized gut-reaction outrage into a broad-based coalition of resistance that includes the fishing community, the labor movement, the real estate industry, as well as country’s major environmental organizations.

While Markey’s field hearing is being arranged, and Holtec works the bribery zone trying to win support, Turco has had to spend countless hours preparing to defend against trumped-up trespass charges resulting from a tour of the Pilgrim site she gave to a pair of National Public Radio reporters. The charge is crass political harassment, since neither of the reporters were charged, and attorneys have told Turco that a motion to dismiss based on selective prosecution is a no-brainer. But the court has not agreed to hold a motion hearing, so she has to prepare testimony and expert witnesses for a May 9 trial, even though the court could do the right thing and dismiss.

Waste water’s contents still secret

In a phone interview, Turco told me that Holtec has not even made public the radioactive character of the waste water it wants to spew to the public commons. If the state department of environmental protection has been informed, it has not divulged either the sorts of isotopes in the water or their concentration. This secrecy makes impossible an valid assessment of the risks involved and only aggravates public fear and hostility.

“If Holtec had true concern for public health and the environment and worked with transparency as they promised, it would halt any dumping until a viable solution is found acceptable”, Turco told the Cape Cod Times last December. “[D]umping into Cape Cod Bay just highlights the fact that the [US] Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Holtec don’t have a solution for what to do with nuclear waste. Contaminating our environment is …is immoral.”

The thought of Holtec’s river of poison being poured into Cape Cod brings to mind a wartime atrocity like poisoning wells. Holtec says it intends to dilute the radioactive waste water (like Tepco Corp’s plan to pour 1 million tons of radioactive waste water into the Pacific beginning next spring), but this is an irrelevant distraction.

The volume of radioactive chemicals, metals, or isotopes will not be changed or reduced at all by diluting. The same total of radioactive materials and their radioactivity are merely spread through a larger volume of water — all of which will then be poisoned for a very long time. Strontium-90 taints the water for 300 years (ten half-lives); iodine-129 for 160 million years; carbon-14 for 57,000 years. All such cancer-causing radionuclides cio-accumulate and bio-concentrate in the ocean’s web of life and can contaminate seafood like Cape Cod’s famous mussels, clams and oysters — becoming internal radiation emitters.

Last January 12, Sen. Markey and three other members of congress wrote to Holtec opposing the proposed discharge into Cape Cod Bay. The letter encouraged Holtec to consider alternative methods of disposal, none of which are good answers to nuclear power’s endless waste dilemma. Operators of the closed Vermont Yankee reactor shipped its poison water out of state, which moved the radiation risk to someone else’s water table. Evaporation is an option that risks spewing radionuclides on the wind. Nuclear power stories just don’t have happy endings. ####

— A version of this piece ran at CounterPunch (https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/06/cape-cod-bay-in-the-crosshairs-holtecs-reactor-waste-water-threat/) May 6-8, 2022

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“Most, if not all” US Reactors Dangerously Operating Using Counterfeit Parts

By John LaForge

The lead paragraph from Reuters was originally correct: “Most, if not all, U.S. nuclear power plants contain counterfeit or fraudulent parts, potentially increasing the risk of a safety failure…”

This hair-raising news is just one of the shocking findings in a set of seven reports released February 10 by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) Office of Inspector General (OIG), now headed by Robert J. Feitel.

Among the findings of the first of the seven reports were: 1. “Counterfeit, fraudulent, and suspect items (CFSI) are present in operating plants”; 2. “The extent of CFSI in operating plants is unknown because the NRC does not usually require licensees to track CFSI” … “if done at all, tracking is voluntary and methods and data quality vary among licensees”; 3. The questionable “termination of [some] rulemaking in 2016 that addressed CFSI oversight concerns”; and 4. “Department of Energy staff identified more than 100 incidents involving CFSI in FY 2021 alone, including 5 incidents involving safety-significant components.”

“Counterfeit parts are safety and security concerns that could have serious consequences in critical power plant equipment required to perform a safety function,” the OIG report says in its understated bureaucratese. And, “According to the Electric Power Research Institute, counterfeit parts have been found in valves, bearings, circuit breakers, pipe fittings, and structural steel, and can be difficult to spot.”

The antiseptic euphemism “serious consequences” resulting from the failure of critical but counterfeit “safety function” parts, means, in plain-spoken terms, nuclear reactors going out-of-control, suffering loss-of-coolant meltdowns, and causing massive radioactive releases with its acute and long-term damage to environmental and human health.

The finding that “most, if not all” of the country’s 94 operating reactors are more dangerous than we thought is potentially so devastating to the environmentally toxic and financially bailed-out nuclear power sector (Reuters said the OIG’s reports are “a blow to a US nuclear industry”), that public relations agents and industry allies in the media must have run headlong to the phones and demanded retractions. Somehow, they were rewarded almost immediately with a so-called “correction” which misstates and weakens the OIG findings — a “correction” that was placed at the beginning of most follow-up reports.

The retraction misleadingly states that it, “Corrects lead paragraph to say many counterfeit parts are in U.S. nuclear plants instead of most, if not all, plants contain counterfeit parts.”

In fact, the report from the OIG — based on confidential testimony from several industry and NRC whistle-blowers — says that “well placed NRC sources” allege that “most, if not all” nuclear reactors operating in the United States today have counterfeit or faulty, substandard parts essential for preventing disasters.

The lead paragraph in The Energy Daily improved on the Reuters report by including the word “operating” before “nuclear plant” — a salient point considering their increased potential for radiation disasters compared to the 23 shuttered units.

The “most, if not all” bombshell follows from the fact, as OIG found, that “the Nuclear Regulatory Commission may be underestimating the number of CFSI in plants and their impact because it does not require licensees [reactor operators] to report CFSI except in extraordinary circumstances” like “the failure of equipment that performs a significant safety function.”

One such fraudulently manufactured, purchased and installed part identified after it failed was a “service water pump shaft” that was found to be counterfeit after if snapped. The loss of cooling water circulation, either inside a reactor vessel, or in the deep pool of ferociously hot waste fuel rods, has caused some of the industry’s worse radiation release disasters.

Inspector General Savages ‘Misleading’ NRC Actions, Thanks Comley

The depth of deliberate malfeasance or deception by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is justifiably savaged in the OIG report. The investigation found that NRC staff had for more than 10 years dismissed, ignored and even misfiled so as to hide allegations regarding FCSI. “This investigation revealed that the alleger communicated CFSI concerns to the agency staff via letters, e-mails, phone calls, and discussions at public meetings over 10 years. Most of the alleger’s concerns involved Seabrook Station.”

“… we found that the NRC did not investigate or pursue any substantive actions regarding an alleger’s concerns about the presence of CFSI, nor did the NRC process any of the information provided by the alleger over the last 10 years through its Allegation Review Boards.”

Indeed, the NRC’s Office Allegation Coordinator was found to have classified the alleger’s charges as “non-allegations,” and then kept secret the details of how such a designation is applied. The OIG politely condemned the agency’s action, writing, “Such missing information regarding the NRC’s approach to reviewing allegations could be construed as misleading to the public.”

“The alleger” is a reference to Mr. Stephen J. Comley, Jr., of the national whistle-blower protection organization We the People, in Rowley, Mass. In a February 10 cover letter to Comley accompanying the reports, OIG head Feitel wrote appreciatively, “Thank you for taking considerable time to bring your concerns to the OIG,” and noted that “my staff has completed its investigations” into “your allegations that CFSI are present in most, if not all, U.S. nuclear power plants.…”

Feitel confirmed to Comley that “OIG investigators interviewed several individuals you identified.” They are some of the over two-dozen whistle-blowers who have spoken with We the People, and who are referred to in the OIG reports as “a well-placed NRC principle” or “an NRC source.”

As I reported last October in Steve Comley has for 35 years been haranguing the NRC and its inspectors, demanding that they take the whistle-blowers’ charges seriously. So the OIGs’ damning and alarming February findings (too many to report on in one or two articles) are the long-awaited validation and vindication of Comley’s steadfast work that goes back almost four decades.

Feitel’s letter to Comley speaks to his group’s repeated warnings to the NRC about the impossibility of safely evacuating the Seabrook, New Hampshire reactor site during an emergency, and, beyond this, to the whistle-blowers’ allegations that they as first responders — State Patrol and National Guard forces — have been gag-ordered by state authorities not to discuss the endangerment caused by the lack of a feasible evacuation plan. (Nuclear reactors are the only industrial operations required to earn the approval of an emergency evacuation plan prior to startup.)

“The OIG also investigated your allegation that Seabrook Station’s evacuation plan is inadequate,” Feitel wrote. This report is complete, but a response from the NRC is pending, and only after the response is filed with OIG can the public “request a copy of the report via the Freedom of Information Act,” Feitel advised.

For now, the NRC can continue to hide behind its PR hacks that manage major news services with bald-faced lies. An NRC Public Affairs Officer named Scott Burnell told Reuters, “Nothing in the report suggests an immediate safety concern.” And Burnell has a point. The report doesn’t “suggest” anything. While using more polite language then me, it directly condemns the deceitful, bogus, unscrupulous, immoral, deceptive, dodgy, and duplicitous chicanery of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when dealing with its own whistle-blowers, and warns against the reckless endangerment of operating counterfeit, substandard nuclear power reactors.

published at CounterPunch, Feb. 18, 2022: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/18/us-reactors-dangerously-operating-using-counterfeit-parts/

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