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Dr. Lyman: To answer the question directly, the numbers that I cited before <br /> were simply for people who were affected during the emergency phase, which is according to <br /> the code I used one week after the accident. So to try to calculate the long-term consequences, <br /> there are so many assumptions involved, it is essentially a very hard exercise. But just focusing <br /> on the people who are caught by the initial plume can be a very substantial consequence on the <br /> order of tens of thousands of cancers for a moderately populated area. <br /> Dr. Wing: I would just agree with the earlier speakers in saying that it is very <br /> hard to estimate a number. It is done all the time, but there are so many assumptions involved <br /> about things that are really wild guesses, there is no way to know what direction. Does the <br /> plume go towards Raleigh? It will be a very different number if it goes towards Raleigh then if it <br /> goes towards Pittsboro because of the different number of people. So I guess the answer to me <br /> is that there would be too many. <br /> Question: If it took a week to evacuate that many people, and how fast does a <br /> plume travel? I bring this up because our governor did not want to bring potassium iodide to our <br /> state for free because he assumed we would have a very fast evacuation. Of course that is not <br /> the only thing you need to take into consideration in terms of evacuations and consequences, <br /> that's what my question was about. <br /> Mayor Foy: OK, thank you. Next question. <br /> Question: I'm actually the Acting Coordinator of the Chapel Hill Citizens for <br /> Nuclear Safety and I have a question. Let me first note that our next meeting is next <br /> Wednesday, 7:00 p.m. at the Carol Woods Retirement Community. My question is, current <br /> scenarios seem to involve coolant failures. So has it been examined, what might be the <br /> outcome of a containment breach, let's say by explosives, followed by explosions in the waste <br /> pool itself? <br /> Dr. Alvarez: The studies that have been done that looked at this, the most <br /> recent one was done in October of 2000 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And it did look <br /> in very general terms at this. We do not know the sequencing of events. We do know that the <br /> study says that a large aircraft can cause the pool to breach, can cause the water to drain. We <br /> do know that explosions could lead to relatively prompt drainage of the water. But what <br /> happens after that, by the time the water gets down to, let's say there's about 15 feet of water <br /> above the cores, by the time it gets down to two or three feet above the cores, the radiation <br /> doses are so high that the area is uninhabitable, and the people who are supposed to go in <br /> there and fix it can't go in there without risking their lives through prompt radiation exposures. <br /> Once it gets down to exposing the core, depending on the age of the fuel, the study indicated <br /> that the time it would take for the fuel to catch fire would be somewhere between eight and ten <br /> hours. Once the fire starts, it starts to get worse because it strips off the hydrogen from the <br /> steam, which feeds the fire, and then the fire cannot be put out. And conceivably, given the <br /> Shearon Harris scenario, it could spread to other pools. But we are dealing with a situation, <br /> which is still based on, I guess you would call some sound science, chemical and physical <br /> principles, but a lot of things that happen we can only look to other analogs and the closest <br /> analog I can think of is the Chernobyl accident where you had something not at all similar but <br /> roughly analogous where an event occurred over a period of ten days that had profound <br /> radiological implications involving fire. <br />