There’s a family resemblance between the disaster-ridden Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan and some nuclear plants close to us in here New England.
The Fukushima plant is a General Electric Mark I (a design term for the plant’s containment structure). So is the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant near Brattleboro, and so are two other plants that belong to Vermont Yankee’s owner, Entergy of Louisiana: the Nine Mile Point plant in upstate New York and the Pilgrim plant in Plymouth. In all, the U.S. has 23 reactors of this type.
The Mark I connection was cited last week by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, requesting a Congressional inquiry into “the safety of our nation’s nuclear power plants, in light of the ongoing situation in Japan. As you know, two nuclear reactors in Japan at the Fukushima plant are believed to be in partial meltdown according to the Japanese government; in addition, there have been two [three at press time] hydrogen explosions and direct venting of radioactive gases into the environment.”
The Mark I design stemmed from a model developed by General Electric in the 1950s, and from early on there were concerns about its safety. A revealing interchange on the subject took place in 1972 between Stephen H. Hanauer, an official with the Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Joseph Hendrie of Brookhaven National Laboratory, later NRC chairman. Hanauer wrote a memo suggesting that the Mark I design—which the industry favored because it was economical—be discontinued because in an accident, pressure from hydrogen buildup might rupture the containment. Hendrie agreed, but complained that the Mark I was so popular with the industry and regulators that “reversal of this hallowed policy& could well be the end of nuclear power.”
Fast forward to 2011, when the Fukushima disaster has become a dismaying example of the failure of nuclear plant engineering. As the Union of Concerned Scientists explains it, the NRC requires operators to show that in case of accident, their nuclear plants would release no more than 250 millisieverts of radiation during the worst moment of the event. On March 16, Fukushima, with reactors similar in design to many in the U.S., was emitting 1,000 millisieverts—a sign that nuclear plant design specs can be meaningless in the face of a significant natural disaster.
