Last week I got an interesting link from a longtime anti-nuke activist to SATAN's Code: The Early Years of Accident Models, a post at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's blog.
Back in the 1950s, nuclear engineers began to think about how mass-produced computers might help them to run nuclear reactor accident scenarios. It took a long time for such modeling to to emerge. Those older computer systems, of course, had limitations. For one thing generating data was very slow. All of this left engineers with a fair amount of uncertainty about how safe reactors actually were.
So, in order to speed up the modeling process, the engineers decided to use "gross simplifications" using far fewer accident codes than would have been ideal:
Engineers were confident that the codes would prove reactor designs were overly conservative. Their optimism proved unfounded.
When Westinghouse proudly unveiled its 70-volume SATAN code in 1970, AEC staffers discovered errors in the code indicating that the company’s Emergency Core Cooling System might fail in an accident. The problems of the SATAN code helped lead to a major rulemaking hearing in 1972 on the adequacy of both emergency cooling system designs and accident codes. Those hearings revealed just how embarrassingly uncertain and rudimentary the early codes were about what happened during an accident.
The AEC and later the NRC had to make a huge investment in creating more robust – and accurate – codes. Additional research that produced the RELAP-5 Code is still used today as an industry standard worldwide.
Nancy Allen* -- the activist who sent me the link -- explained why the NRC post had caught her attention:
"This is an amazing admission. I was an intervenor in the Pilgrim Plymouth MA licensing in 1970 and MIT grad student Dan Ford and I brought up the possiblity of failure of the emergency core cooling system. Many others testified around this time about this possiblity including John Gofman and Frieda Berryhill. In my case we were dismissed as nuts. The plant was licensed."
Back in March of this year, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth was back in the news.You may also recall that, around that same time, another nuclear story had shocked humanity into a global re-evaluation of nuclear power. An earthquake and tsunami not only had seriously impacted the lives of thousands of Japanese people, but had wrecked reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. In March only a few long-time nuke experts and activists were warning that this was far worse than we were being led to believe.
The Pilgrim plant was built a year after Fukushima Daiichi. Its NRC license will be up for renewal in 2012. Operators of the plant announced that they were seeking a 20-year renewal of that license, and with the nuclear catastrophe in Japan still unfolding, people in Massachusetts were understandibly concerned.
Governal Deval Patrick assured citizens that the state was very involved in the recommisioning process, but -- according to a story from NPR's WBUR in Boston -- activists wanted Gov Patrick to take a tougher stand:
“I absolutely think we should be shutting down every nuclear power plant in the United States,” said John Rosenthal, an anti-nuclear activist who fought construction of the Seabook Power Plant in New Hampshire in the 1970s.
“The reactors at Pilgrim are the same reactors as the Fukushima nuclear plant,” Rosenthal said. “And the nuclear spent fuel pools are the same situation; they are not in inadequate containment structures. All the nuclear waste that’s been generated since 1972 is sitting on site in containment buildings not designed for long-term storage.”
In her email last week, Nancy Allen finished with this comment on the NRC blog piece:
This says the faulty code was discovered in 1970 and rewritten in 1972. The NRC pats itself and the AEC on the back for this but it seems to me that their optimism was unwarranted and they came close to making a terrible mistake which could have proved catastrophic.
Now,in the present,they again refuse to listen to those, including Chairman Jazcko, who urge caution after Fukushima and want safety measures upgraded quickly.
Is history about to repeat itself, the NRC once again acting with too much confidence, and a US nuclear catastrophe even more possible?
Tomorrow, I'll be headed down to Knoxville to participate in a press conference and rally in opposition to TVA's plan to re-animate it's Bellefonte Nuclear Generating Station in Alabama.
The Babcock and Wilcox Mark C 205 reactor design at Bellefonte is an old one, dating back to the 1960's. This particular design has never been operated in the United States. And it has never even been lisenced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. After Bellefonte was abandoned, the reactors were targets of asset recovery in which reactor parts were "cannibalized" for use elsewhere.
Last year, TVA authorized $248 million to resuscitate Bellefonte. What are they thinking! Where are their brains?
The TVA Board of Directors is scheduled to make a final decision on Bellefonte at its meeting on August 18th.
The No Nukes, No Zombie Nukes, No Kidding! Rally will convene at Market Square in Knoxville at 4:30 EDT tomorrow. You can use the sidebar link to the right of this post to get more information on the event.
[*Many thanks to Nancy for the great link and permission to quote her!]
