Minutes - 20020502 - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

for material getting out. It may seem pretty obvious, but the berms are made out of earth, and earth is, as someone else has coined the term, dirt cheap. It would not be a very expensive thing. You would not have to move fuel from South Carolina and other places in North Carolina to your backyards. That could be stored in earthen berms at their own locations so their risks would not become your hazard. It would not make the risk go to zero, but it would reduce the risk to about as low as it possibly can be, and the cost would be relatively modest and a lot less than the cost of recovering from an accident or an attack if it were to occur. Thanks (applause). Mayor Foy: Dr. Lyman, can you give us more information, you were starting to talk about how plumes might flow and in what direction. Can you give us more information on that? Dr. Lyman: One issue is the industry has been alleging that even if the worst case accident did happen, the nuclear plant melted down —they have been putting out some ridiculous statements in the last few months that essentially you would get a very narrow region of contamination, that more than a mile or so from the site there would be no real cause for concern. Essentially a lot of misleading information that is based on not being up front about what would occur if the maximum credible release did happen. It is fairly easy to use computer codes, and I have done this. The NRC itself has approved and uses in certain applications to see what would happen if there were a severe Chernobyl type radioactive release and what kind of patterns of contamination would occur. Basically, as Dave indicated, with the maps of Chernobyl contamination, in some cases significant long-term contamination occurred hundreds of miles away from the site. The most severe consequences do occur within ten or fifteen miles of the release. But the interesting thing about the ten-mile emergency evacuation zone was that when it was introduced, the intent of the evacuation zone was not to prevent any injury as a result of the radiation release from the plant, but only the most severe types of injury, which were, as we heard before, those which cause acute radiation sickness as a result of the death of cells or inhibiting their ability to divide. These are very painful injuries; it is acute radiation sickness, and would be confined really to a few miles away from the plant. The evacuation of the ten-mile zone can only really deal with that particular type of injury. There would be a significant risk of cancer for anyone downwind of the plant, even 50 or 100 miles away. It depends a lot on meteorological conditions, the effectiveness of evacuation, people's particular position in relation to the plume when it passes over. But since there is no evacuation plan beyond ten miles from the site, it has to be assumed that people in those regions will have no way of knowing how to avoid the exposure that would occur from a release. And generally the computer models indicate that you would get tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands in densely populated areas of latent cancers as a result of an accident like this. The number of acute fatalities from radiation sickness would number in the hundreds if the evacuation were completely effective and in the thousands if it were ineffective. And that is assuming a kind of average population density for 100 persons per square kilometers or something like that. Mayor Foy: Dr. Alvarez, you did not have a chance to speak. Do you want to say anything? Dr. Robert Alvarez: Between 1993 and 1996 1 presided over an office in the Department of Energy Emergency Planning, which dealt with what-ifs— a broad spectrum of them including oil supply disruptions and also bad things that could happen in nuclear plants. We would look at these things very carefully and study these things and I thought at the time, "Well, this is one of the more boring jobs I could have," but I had to do it. And I recall we had a briefing and analysis about an act of malice against the commercial nuclear power plant in the United States. It was quite clear that the affects would be of historic proportions. I tried to tuck that away as an abstraction. And I recall then on September 11`h in the morning, watching