Saturday, October 6, 2012

NRC Whistleblower Claims Flood Threat to Nuclear Plants Censored by Regulators


Flood Threat To Nuclear Plants Covered Up By Regulators, NRC Whistleblower Claims 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/14/flood-threat-nuclear-plants-nrc_n_1885598.html

The Fort Calhoun nuclear facility in Nebraska was surrounded by rising floodwaters from the nearby Missouri River last year.

[Excerpted] In a letter submitted Friday afternoon to internal investigators at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a whistleblower engineer within the agency accused regulators of deliberately covering up information relating to the vulnerability of U.S. nuclear power facilities that sit downstream from large dams and reservoirs.

The letter also accuses the agency of failing to act to correct these vulnerabilities despite being aware of the risks for years.

These charges were echoed in separate conversations with another risk engineer inside the agency who suggested that the vulnerability at one plant in particular -- the three-reactor Oconee Nuclear Station near Seneca, S.C. -- put it at risk of a flood and subsequent systems failure, should an upstream dam completely fail, that would be similar to the tsunami that hobbled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan last year. That event caused multiple reactor meltdowns.

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, Richard H. Perkins, a reliability and risk engineer with the agency's division of risk analysis, alleged that NRC officials falsely invoked security concerns in redacting large portions of a report detailing the agency's preliminary investigation into the potential for dangerous and damaging flooding at U.S. nuclear power plants due to upstream dam failure.

Perkins, along with at least one other employee inside NRC, also an engineer, suggested that the real motive for redacting certain information was to prevent the public from learning the full extent of these vulnerabilities, and to obscure just how much the NRC has known about the problem, and for how long....

[read the full article at link above]

2 comments:

  1. Yep, NRC are just pimps to promote nuke

    Lets not forget how the only regulator willing to regulate --Jackzo---was sacked even though he was the top guy.

    What an evil cartel this nuke stuff is.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steveo did you see this headline

    Former Japan Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata: US gov’t is main reason why crisis at Fukushima Unit 4 has been “toned down” (VIDEO)

    http://enenews.com/watch-govt-main-reason-crisis-fukushima-unit-4-toned-down-video

    ReplyDelete

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