Report: Nuclear industry's safety measures are 'inadequate'

[bananas]

8. Fukushima report urges U.S. plant operators to take heed

http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2014/07/fukushima-report-urges-u-s-plant-operators-take-heed

Fukushima report urges U.S. plant operators to take heed
By Dennis Normile
24 July 2014 4:00 pm

To avoid the kind of complacency over safety that led to the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, U.S. nuclear plant operators and regulators must be prepared to take timely action to upgrade plant safety features in line with advances in the understanding of natural hazards, states a report released today.

The report, Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving Safety of U.S. Nuclear Plants, was written by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences. The panel drew on Japanese and international investigations into the causes of the Fukushima disaster, precipitated by the magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011.

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"The overarching lesson learned from the Fukushima Daiichi accident is that nuclear plant licensees and their regulators must actively seek out and act on new information about hazards that have the potential to affect the safety of nuclear plants," the report concludes, adding that plant operators "must take timely actions to implement countermeasures when such new information results in substantial changes to risk profiles at nuclear plants." The report cites a need to strengthen capabilities "for identifying, evaluating, and managing the risks from beyond-design-basis events," including large earthquakes or floods that occur very infrequently.

During a dial-in press conference to discuss the report, committee member B. John Garrick, a consultant in Laguna Beach, California, explained that there is also a need to assess how a severe accident, simultaneously affecting multiple reactors at one site and within a region, can complicate crisis management at a time when electricity, support, and emergency services from off-site could be disrupted, as happened at the Fukushima plant. In such circumstances, plant personnel must be trained to respond in an ad hoc manner to circumstances that are nearly impossible to completely predict, the report states.

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