http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/04-8Published on Friday, June 4, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
A Nuclear Gamble on the Not-So-Distant Horizon
by Paul Gunter and Linda Gunter
Much like Captain Renault in Casablanca, the White House is suddenly shocked, shocked to find that oil rigs can explode, destroying ecosystems and livelihoods. The Obama administration has backed away from its offshore oil expansion policy in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe as the long-term environmental and economical consequences unfold in the Gulf States. Headlines are clamoring for the criminal investigations of BP, TransOcean, Halliburton and ultimately, the federal regulator, Mineral Management Services (MMS). Rather paradoxically, President Obama is using the oil spill to call for more nuclear power.
Yet, with the exception of a handful of insightful political cartoonists, the obvious parallel between the regulatory delinquency of MMS and that of its nuclear equivalent - the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) - and the potential for an equally catastrophic accident in the nuclear sector, has not been drawn. As with the MMS debacle, the NRC is gambling with inevitable disaster with the same spin of the wheel of misfortune and with potentially even higher stakes.
Investigations have already revealed that MMS had become too friendly and compliant toward the industry it was supposed to regulate. This hands-off approach proved to be a formula for inevitable disaster. Similarly, the NRC consistently puts the financial motives of the nuclear industry it is supposed to regulate ahead of public safety. In instance after instance, the NRC has chosen not to enforce its own regulations even in the face of repeated reactor safety violations, risking a serious reactor accident while leaving often high-risk safety problems to linger unresolved for decades.
The NRC acknowledges that the greatest hazard to a reactor comes from fire. Yet not one of the 104 currently operating reactors is in full compliance with critical federal fire safety regulations. The NRC has known this since 1992 when the majority of U.S. nuclear plants were found to have installed bogus fire barriers prone to fail in a significant fire. Rather than take prompt action, the NRC spent six years discussing the problem with industry, then issued corrective orders which it later discovered the industry had ignored, substituting them instead with less costly, unapproved and illegal measures. The NRC took no punitive action and simply changed its rules to accommodate an "alternative compliance strategy" that relies largely on quantifying or trivializing the risk from fire with computer models, many of which cannot be validated as reliable. Any one of the U.S. reactors operating today could be the next Deep Horizon fire, but spilling cancer-causing radiation instead of oil.
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