Feel Safe, Very Safe
Oxford, England -- The first headline that greeted me here, three-quarters of the world away from Japan, was that radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has been measured here. The second was that the progressive half of Britain's push-me, pull-you coalition government, in the form of Liberal Democrat leader Nicholas Clegg, had uttered out loud what many are thinking: after the Japanese catastrophe, it will be almost impossible for democratic societies to replace their existing nuclear power plants, much less increase their nuclear reliance.
Clegg's point was simple: If we make nuclear plants safer, as Japan has shown we must, then nukes make even less economic sense and cannot go forward without huge subsidies. And Clegg's insistence that the British taxpayers will NOT bail-out nuclear power is a strong signal and warning to investors, even though the French nuclear company EDF promptly challenged Clegg's arithmetic.
Meanwhile, the radioactive U.S. spin machine churns its way glowingly along. In Sunday's papers, America's poster child for an almost nuclear catastrophe, T.V.A.'s Browns Ferry nuclear plant, invited journalists in to see how much safer our plants are than Japan's. The reporters were shown a lot of real but very small differences between Browns Ferry and its Japanese twins. We have strobe lights! And little carts carrying batteries to power measuring devices! "They're like a backup to the backup," said Keith J. Polson, T.V.A.'s vice president for the Browns Ferry site. "That's what we think the Japanese didn't have."
What Polson and the papers -- including the New York Times -- didn't tell us about are the backups Browns Ferry doesn't have. On Thanksgiving Day 2003, for example, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission decided that Browns Ferry didn't need a redundant backup electrical system. So if another fire occurs, like the one that almost melted it down in 1975, the plant will be shut down by some superhero employee running through the flames, rather than by a fail-safe backup technical system. Nor did the reporters touring the plant receive the information that, during a recent test of equipment at Browns Ferry, a critical water valve in the emergency core cooling system failed to work, although the plant's management had informed the NRC about the potential risk.
At least Browns Ferry has decent electrical cable -- something the NRC decided would be simply too expensive at New York's Indian Point plant, a piece of corner-cutting which could easily destroy New York City. Strobe lights are cheap. Decent electrical cable costs a little more. A backup electrical system is a significant investment.
New York City? Priceless.
Tell the NRC. Tell the New York Times. Tell your representatives and senators. Tell the president.
You can count. Even if they can't.
