All Things Nuclear

Insights on Science and Security

[allthingsnuclear]

Iran Exaggerates Missile Accuracy

Iran announced today that it had successfully test launched a new version of its short-range Fateh 110 missile, claiming it has an upgraded guidance system that gives it high enough accuracy to “hit and destroy both land and sea targets, enemy concentration points, command centers, missile sites, ammunition dumps, radars and other targets with 100 percent precision.”

A ballistic missile is only guided during the first minute or so of flight when its engines are burning. During that time, the guidance system attempts to steer the missile to put in on the right trajectory to hit the intended target. Once the engine burns out, the missile flies without power and cannot be steered. This is like throwing a ball: you aim the ball by the speed and direction your arm gives it, but once the ball leaves your hand it flies on its own. (The fact that missiles fly unpowered for most of their flight is why ballistic missiles are called “ballistic.”)

Once they are launched, ballistic missiles have two main sources of inaccuracy.

The guidance system steers the missile while the missile’s engines are burning. One source of inaccuracy is the inability of the guidance system to put the missile on exactly the right trajectory to hit the target. These errors in accuracy are called “guidance and control errors.”

A missile of this range will reach a maximum altitude of about 75 km, which is above the bulk of the atmosphere. When the missile reenters through the atmosphere toward the ground at high speed, it is subjected to a number of forces that can knock it off its intended trajectory. It is buffeted by high altitude winds and density variations in the atmosphere. In addition, atmospheric forces due to asymmetries in the missile body or warhead or a spiraling of the missile as it reenters also affect its reentry. These are called “reentry errors.”

Even if Iran had developed a perfect guidance system so there were errors of type (1), there would still be very significant reentry errors, which are not reduced by a better guidance system. The reentry errors could be many hundreds of meters.

As a result, the idea that this missile has an accuracy high enough to allow it strike relatively small targets like ships, command centers, or radar bases, is simply not credible.

[allthingsnuclear]

AllThingsNuclear is Moving

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[allthingsnuclear]

Obama's Problems with China

If New York Times journalist David Sanger's new book on President Obama's foreign policy is accurate, Obama is increasingly frustrated in his efforts to develop a better relationship with China. His senior aides place all the blame on their Chinese counterparts. The President may also want to look a little closer to home.

The broader debate we have been having for three years in the administration internally is how can we make it compelling for the Chinese to move more aggressively to try to accommodate our concerns. They've been moving, and when they think it is completely in their interest they've been moving with alacrity. But where they may have some sympathy for our view but there are huge internal fights, they are only doing as much as needed to buy some peace.

This suggests a pretty one-sided view of the relationship. There is no apparent sense of a need for reciprocity among Obama's China hands. The administration's effort to get China to start talking about its military space programs provides an insightful example. The Obama administration wants to talk with China about its anti-satellite weapons programs. China's sole condition for agreeing to preliminary arrangements for the talks is for NASA to honor President Obama's personal commitment to Chinese President Hu Jintao to host a delegation from the Chinese Manned Space Engineering Office in the United States. But the Pentagon, the State Department and the China hands on the National Security Council refused, claiming the Chinese request was an unwarranted and unacceptable precondition for beginning bilateral discussions about space security issues. This despite an awareness that the same organization that runs the Chinese human spaceflight program, the General Armaments Department of the PLA, is also responsible for the testing of Chinese anti-satellite weapons.

The Chinese had already hosted the NASA Administrator in China during the fall of 2010 under an agreement for reciprocal visits reached during President Obama's visit to China a year earlier.  The Chinese were asking for the U.S. to hold up its end of the agreement. A critical factor in the Obama administration's unwillingness to order NASA to host the Chinese is Congressman Frank Wolf, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA. Wolf takes a hard-line on China on human rights grounds and was furious with NASA administrator Bolden for not consulting him before the China visit. The congressman exercised his anger by inserting language into several appropriations bills prohibiting NASA from spending funds on any form of contact with its Chinese counterparts. 

Obama's advisers told Sanger they were frustrated with the Chinese leadership's inability to overcome internal political opposition from hard-liners who could not be "compelled" to "accommodate" the concerns of the United States. At the same time these aides were unwilling to entertain a Chinese request for President Obama to stand up to his own hard-liners in order to honor an obligation he made to the president of China. It is not surprising that even "accommodating" Chinese officials are just as frustrated with the United States as the Obama administration appears to be with China.

You can now follow Gregory Kulacki on Twitter @gkucs. 

[allthingsnuclear]

Documents Show Japan Repeatedly Rejected Nuclear Weapons

Cross-posted with Ploughshares.

A widely circulated AP story recently suggested the current debate over the future of nuclear energy in Japan brought “muted pro-bomb voices” out of the closet. The AP also alarmed readers by stating that, “Historical documents released in the past two years show that the idea of a nuclear-armed Japan was long talked about behind-the-scenes, despite repeated denials by the government.”

In 1995, as Japan was considering its position on the permanent extension of the NPT, it commissioned a study from the Japan Defense Agency (JDA) on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The 1995 JDA report, which was never released to the public, carefully considered the question of whether Japan should develop its own nuclear arsenal, as well as the circumstances that might trigger such a decision. The “worst case” scenario envisioned a complete collapse of the NPT and the break-up of the U.S - Japan security alliance. The report concludes,

Even in such a case, it is questionable whether there is any value for a trading nation that depends on the stability of the international society to try to secure its survival and protect its interests with its own nuclear weapons. It would more likely undermine the basis of its own survival. Only in a case where destitution reaches a stage where the exchange of  damage with an opponent is not a concern anymore, would the geopolitical vulnerability of Japan make the nuclear option a possibility. This, however, is a case where a condition becomes its own goal, and is not worthy of consideration.

The unequivocal conclusions of the JDA report reflect a long-standing consensus among Japanese security officials and experts that there is no imaginable scenario in which developing nuclear weapons would be advantageous to the defense of Japan. The 1995 report reiterates and amplifies the conclusions of an earlier report on Japan’s nuclear options—also hidden from the public—commissioned by the Japanese government nearly three decades earlier, in 1968, as it was considering initial ratification of the NPT. 

(Both studies were made publicly available by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which obtained copies for its March 2010 study Japan and America’s Nuclear Posture.)

The two reports on Japan's nuclear options were kept secret not because of their conclusions, but because the Japanese governments that commissioned them were afraid that even the consideration of a nuclear option for Japan would incite massive public protests. Japanese public opinion polls consistently register high levels of support for nuclear disarmament and strong opposition to Japanese development of nuclear weapons.

The AP story fails to convey that the information now coming to light about Japan's nuclear past reflects a strengthening, not a weakening, of Japan's anti-nuclear credentials. The Democratic Party of Japan's (DPJ) electoral victory in 2009 was, in part, a consequence of its campaign pledge to curtail the influence of unelected bureaucrats who shaped Japanese public policy with little transparency or accountability. The DPJ's initial efforts to bring greater transparency to Japanese foreign and defense policy exposed a long history of Japanese government complicity with U.S. nuclear weapons policies that violated Japanese laws against bringing U.S. nuclear weapons into Japanese territory.

Recent Japanese comments on nuclear weapons, like those mentioned in the AP story, are a consequence of a concerted effort to make the discussion of Japanese governmental decisions about nuclear weapons more open to public scrutiny than it has been in the past. This is not a cause for alarm, but a welcome development that is highly likely to solidify Japanese opposition to the development of nuclear weapons. You can now follow Gregory Kulacki on Twitter @gkucs. 

[allthingsnuclear]

Fission Stories #103: Nuclear Time Out

My two nephews are generally good boys, but every now and then their behavior compels my sister-in-law and brother to give them a time-out. The time-outs seem to be effective – if nothing else, it curbs the behavior problems during the time-outs themselves.

Over the next few hours, these operators faced a series of unexpected problems performing their assigned duties – which was not surprising because restarting reactors after weeks of downtime with extensive maintenance activities always involves a number of issues to be resolved. One operator had those annoyances compounded by frustration with the actions of the second operator.

The operator’s fun-meter went downscale when he was updating the computer-based log book to reflect tasks he had completed. The second operator got onto the same computer and closed out the first operator’s log book. The first operator protested, saying he was using the computer. The second operator ignored him and continued using the computer. The first operator lost his temper and told his colleague that if he insisted on using the computer, he could do the first operator’s job as well. The first operator turned and headed for the door. The control room supervisor called out for the operator to wait. But the operator felt he was too angry to stick around and left the control room to recover his cool in a break room across the hall. He returned to the control room about 10 minutes later and resumed his duties.

The remainder of that shift passed without incident. That operator, his colleague, the control room supervisor, and the rest of the operating crew returned the following night for another shift. It passed without incident.

But word of the incident found its way to both the plant’s upper management and the NRC. When the operator arrived at Palisades for work two nights later, he was met at the gate by the Operations Manager and a union representative. After the operator’s oral statement was taken, the Operations Manager sent him home with instructions not to return to the plant until directed to do so. That direction came two weeks later, followed by another two weeks of the operator not being allowed inside the plant’s fences without an escort. He was disciplined with a week off without pay and subjected to a long-term remediation plan. He was not allowed inside the control room for nine months.

And the NRC weighed in, too. The operator held a license issued by the NRC. The NRC’s investigation determined he had violated the terms and conditions of that license, making it susceptible to revocation or suspension. By leaving the control room without permission and without having formally turned over his duties to another NRC-licensed operator, the operator had been inattentive to duty in the eyes of the NRC – a very serious charge. The operator’s very career was in jeopardy due to a rash decision made in a moment of anger.

The NRC gave the operator three choices: (1) he could contest the violation, (2) he could accept the violation and then whatever sanction the NRC levied, or (3) he could enter into Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR) with the NRC. The operator chose Door #3. The ADR process yielded a mutually acceptable outcome. The operator would retain his NRC-issued license, but would have to take several steps including “nuclear community service.” The operator had to write a lengthy paper about the event, what he did wrong, and what he learned from it and submit it for for publication in the newsletter of the Professional Reactor Operators Society (PROS). The operator returned to his control room duties about a year after the incident.

The NRC’s investigation also found fault with the company. The operator had been allowed to return to work and work the following day as if the incident never happened. Only after upper management and the NRC learned about it was the incident entered into the plant’s corrective action program and the operator’s actions questioned. The NRC also sanctioned the company for its initial lax response to the incident.

Our Takeaway

In an ideal world, individuals licensed by the NRC to staff control rooms of nuclear power plants would never make mistakes, never get emotional, and never lose their tempers. In an idealer world, nuclear power plants would be inherently safe such that NRC didn’t need to license control room operators.

In the real world, control room operators are humans. They get tired. They get frustrated. They make mistakes. In other words, they act like humans.

By his own admission and confirmed by many others, the operator at Palisades made a mistake. He paid a high price for that mistake. Again and again, he has had to confess his sins and pledge reforms. Such widespread mea culpas are uncomfortable. In addition, it was not clear that the company and the NRC were going to permit him to return to his control room work. His career was at risk.

It is apparent from the operator’s mandated narrative that he has accepted full and exclusive blame for the incident. It is also clearly evident that he is as unlikely as anyone to ever again misbehave while on duty. Thus, instead being banned from the control room, he should be welcomed there. The painful experience almost certainly makes him a better operator than he had been before this incident.

This is not to say that operator performance across the country can be improved by having each one stalk out or mess up. The NRC and the Palisades’ operator went to great lengths to share the lessons from this incident so that others can benefit from it without having to replicate it. UCS encourages all nuclear plant workers – not just control room operators – to read the operator’s account. He paints a picture of the situation that would enable most readers to find themselves in his shoes, either in theory or in past practice. But he also provides a clear explanation for how he, and we, can avoid painting more pictures like it.

“Fission Stories” is a weekly feature by Dave Lochbaum. For more information on nuclear power safety, see the nuclear safety section of UCS’s website and our interactive map, the Nuclear Power Information Tracker.

[allthingsnuclear]

Pools May be “Adequate,” But Dry Casks are Safer

  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) today released its staff paper evaluating Tier 3 recommendations based on lessons learned from the March 2011 nuclear accident at Fukushima.

The paper reiterates the NRC’s position that storing spent nuclear fuel in wet pools at commercial nuclear power plants provides “adequate protection” for public health and safety and the environment. The NRC also stated that it will continue to study spent fuel storage issues for up to five more years.

However, 80 percent of that stored spent fuel has been in the pools for more than five years and can be moved to dry casks, which do not require power for cooling and are passively safe. Given the potential consequences from a severe accident or terrorist attack on a spent fuel pool, it makes sense to transfer to casks as soon as it is safe to do so.

While NRC studies find that spent fuel pool storage provides “adequate protection,” the uncertainties in those studies are large enough that it is prudent to move the fuel to dry casks, which are safer. For example, just today at a public meeting the NRC and the Nuclear Energy Institute discussed the need for further work to evaluate the seismic vulnerability of spent fuel pools.

While the NRC encourages new reactor designs to have passive safety features, it appears unwilling to take steps to increase passive safety measures, like dry casks, for existing reactors.

[allthingsnuclear]

24th International Summer Symposium on Science and World Affairs

A second goal of the Symposiums is to create an international community of these technical experts who know each other personally as well as professionally. This allows people to share ideas and information, and to collaborate on what are inherently international problems. Since the beginning, these meetings have included some 500 people from 35 countries.

We have also used these meetings to help young researchers make a career in this field. More than two dozen scientists from Russia, China, India, Pakistan, South Korea, and Iran have spent time as research fellows at UCS and several other institutions, including MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Maryland.

And over the years, many of the Symposium participants have gone on to work on these issues as professors, government officials, researchers at think tanks, etc., in institutions around the world.

The meetings are currently funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

[allthingsnuclear]

Fission Stories #102: Under Pressure

The operators monitored the pressure rising inside the reactor vessel using a parameter displayed on the plant’s computer system. A handful of instruments each monitor the reactor vessel pressure. The computer then averages the values from the various instruments and displays a single averaged value.

The hydrostatic test procedures directed the operators to use a different indication for reactor vessel pressure rather than this averaged value, but the operators disregarded this instruction.

The reactor vessel pressure gradually increased during the hydrostatic test. In other words, the test takes a while. The operators reviewed and approved a request by a small group of workers to conduct another test while the hydrostatic test was continuing. Per procedures for that additional test, these workers removed one reactor vessel pressure sensor from service. As the pressure indication from the removed sensor dropped back to zero, it caused the average reactor vessel pressure calculated by the computer to begin decreasing. The two pumps still operated and the actual reactor vessel pressure still rose, but the computer display showed reactor vessel pressure to be dropping.

The control room operators watched the reactor vessel pressure “drop” until the reactor automatically scrammed when the actual pressure inside the reactor vessel exceeded 1,093 pounds per square inch. The control rods, which were already fully inserted within the shut down reactor core, were signaled to insert as a precautionary measure.

An annunciator – an annoying loud, flashing alarm – warns the operators when reactor vessel pressure rises above approximately 1,040 pounds per square inch. It should therefore have gone off and warned the operators that the reactor pressure was in fact rising. The report submitted by the plant’s owner to the NRC about this miscue does not mention whether this annunciator failed to alarm or if the operators failed to notice it.

Our Takeaway

The March 1979 accident at Three Mile Island was caused, in part, by operators relying exclusively on one faulty instrument and failing to check it against other instruments available in the control room.

As Yogi Berra said, it’s déjà vu all over again.

The operators performing the hydrostatic test watched the reactor vessel pressure slowly rise towards the pressure specified in the test. Then they watched it slowly drop away from the specified pressure. They had done nothing to physically cause the pressure to stop rising and begin falling. The pressure turnaround without cause should have prompted the operators to question what has happening.

But it did not. Perhaps they were distracted by the loud and obnoxious alarm warning of high pressure inside the reactor vessel. Or otherwise too busy to prevent pressure inside the reactor vessel from rising too high.

The result of this hydrostatic test was that the operators failed under pressure.

“Fission Stories” is a weekly feature by Dave Lochbaum. For more information on nuclear power safety, see the nuclear safety section of UCS’s website and our interactive map, the Nuclear Power Information Tracker.

[allthingsnuclear]

China in Focus #7: Remembering the Beijing Olympics

U.S. opponents of the Beijing Olympics, like the late Democratic congressman Tom Lantos, who compared China's bid to the "Nazi Olympics" of 1936, argued U.S. participation "permits an authoritarian regime to exploit the Games to prop up its faltering legitimacy." The same argument is now being used to justify efforts by Congressman Frank Wolf to forbid NASA from talking to the Chinese about cooperation in space. Wolf, a long-serving Republican representative from Virginia, picked up the anti-China mantle from Tom Lantos after his colleague across the aisle passed away in 2008. 

The opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games celebrated traditional Chinese history and culture—not communism, the party or the state. And when it came to the contentious contemporary problems of environmental sustainability and climate change, Zhang Yimou, the Chinese director of the event—whose films were once banned by Chinese government censors—chose solutions rooted in the traditional Chinese values of social comity, natural balance, education and the family. It was a soft, cosmopolitan, and progressive expression of China's emerging national identity. Xi Jinping, China's heir apparent, was the political figure who is reported to have green-lighted Zhang's vision for the Games.

Beijing 2008 Theme Song "You & Me" (official video with bi-lingual song lyrics here) Reviews of the Beijing Games noted Chinese authorities fell short on their promises to the International Olympic Committee regarding press freedom and other human rights. U.S. China hawks claimed the event was an "Us and Them" rather than a "You and Me" moment, accusing Zhang and the organizers of totalitarian posturing intended to demonstrate to the rest of the world that "China is big and will do what it wants." U.S. public favorability towards China shot up dramatically the following year, suggesting a majority of Americans saw it differently. Obama said little positive about China after getting elected but maintained a cordial tone with its leaders. The President trumpeted an aggressive approach to China on trade in his most recent State of the Union address and used a new set of trade complaints on autos to bolster his credentials with blue collar workers in a recent campaign swing through Pennsylvania and Ohio. His most significant contribution to U.S. defense and security policy was to "pivot" away from the Middle East toward East Asia, explicitly focusing current U.S. military assets, as well as future procurements, on the prospective military challenges of a modernizing China.  Hillary Clinton greeted the Chinese with cynicism. In 2009 Clinton told the Asia Society the United States should not focus on the "tensions and perils of our interdependence" in the region. One of the "perils" Clinton was referring to is China's trade surplus with the United States. The Chinese leadership converts the cash it earns into U.S. treasuries, which finance U.S. deficit spending. China now holds approximately 1.2 trillion dollars of U.S. debt. Clinton told the Asia Society she was focusing on the positive, because that is what they were expecting to hear, but confessed the following contradictory lament during a conversation with Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, just over a month after her remarks to the Asia Society:

"How do you deal toughly with your banker?" 

It is not without justification that a pair of policy analysts working for a Chinese Communist Party think tank once asked me, "Which Hillary Clinton do you expect us to believe?".

Four years after the Beijing Olympics, the Obama administration's "two-minded" approach to China finds the relationship stuck in a quagmire of simmering discontents and diplomatic doubletalk. 

The people of the United States seem to want their government to get along better with China. A recent survey conducted by a leading group of Chinese Americans showed that "an increasing proportion of the American public accepts China as a rising power and wants a collaborative relationship." Fifty-five percent of the American public holds a favorable opinion of China. That's a higher favorability rating than those enjoyed by either President Obama or candidate Romney.

[allthingsnuclear]

Lochbaum and Lyman Address NAS on US Response to Fukushima

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is working on a study called “Lessons Learned from the Fukushima Nuclear Accident for Improving Safety and Security at US Nuclear Plants.” It is currently in the phase of collecting information through public meetings.

The NAS website says the report will address the following issues:

1. Causes of the Fukushima nuclear accident, particularly with respect to the performance of safety systems and operator response following the earthquake and tsunami.

2. Re-evaluation of the conclusions from previous NAS studies on safety and security of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste storage, particularly with respect to the safety and security of current storage arrangements and alternative arrangements in which the amount of commercial spent fuel stored in pools is reduced.

3. Lessons that can be learned from the accident to improve commercial nuclear plant safety and security systems and operations.

4. Lessons that can be learned from the accident to improve commercial nuclear plant safety and security regulations, including processes for identifying and applying design basis events for accidents and terrorist attacks to existing nuclear plants.

The two-year study is due out in 2014.

[allthingsnuclear]

China in Focus #6: China is Not the Soviet Union

The incident and the conflicting interpretations of it given by Obama's advisers indicate an extraordinary low level of trust in the Chinese leadership and knowledge of its decision-making processes. High-level guessing games about imagined symbolism and secret messages are reminiscent of the old stereotypes of Soviet behavior during the Cold War. Obama's aides complain about the difficulties of dealing with mercurial (or should I say "inscrutable") rulers with an uncertain grip on power, a scheming "red" military with its own agenda, and xenophobic elites possessed by an aggrieved sense of national history. A former colleague of Gates told Sanger the former defense secretary "talked about China as a modern day Soviet Union." If Sanger's account of Obama administration perceptions of China is accurate, virtually the entire administration seems to see China that way.

Discussing China in the same terms as the old Soviet Union seems to have led to a similar policy towards China. Sanger describes it as "stealth containment" enforced by "an 'electric fence' around key parts of Asia."

 "Stealth containment" is an oxymoron. The target needs to know you're doing it in order for it to work. The term Sanger may be looking for is "polite containment." The Obama administration's policy is to speak softly to the Chinese leadership in the politically correct "stakeholder" discourse of "globalization" while trying to wield a big stick of regional alliances held together by American military power and the fear of China. Thinking about contemporary China as a "modern day Soviet Union" to be managed through a policy of containment is unlikely to produce effective results. China may have a political system composed of institutions, like the Politburo, that create an impression of similarity with the Soviet Union, but China has a dramatically different political history that is more significant. Informed discussions of that history are conspicuously absent from the ruminations on China imparted by the Obama administration China experts who shared their confidences with Mr. Sanger.

The view of modern Chinese political history reflected in the book is striking. It mistakenly describes the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) as if it were a centrally controlled event firmly under the direction of a single personality: the "Great Helmsman" Mao Zedong. Every serious historical account of the era, both in China and the West, depicts a country in chaos, torn apart by hysterical warring factions of radicalized twenty-somethings no longer under the control of their patrons in the Party hierarchy, roaming the country committing random acts of ideologically inspired violence. Sanger's book suggests, however, that Obama's advisors believe today's China is somehow less organized and controlled than it was during the Maoist era. The Chinese leadership's fear of another "Cultural Revolution" informs its reluctance to engage in much-needed political reform. When it started, the "Cultural Revolution" was supposedly an experiment in democracy aimed at smashing the intrenched power of the Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy. Memories of the chaos and terror it unleashed led Chinese "senior leader" Deng Xiaoping — who the book nostalgically depicts as a visionary — to force Chinese soldiers to use lethal force to suppress the student demonstrations that ended in the Tiananmen Massacre of June 1989. The President is a well-read individual who seems to appreciate the utility of studying political history. It is odd, therefore, that he is leaving key decisions about the U.S. relationship with China to senior aides who speak about the country in Cold War cliché and appear to lack a nuanced familiarity with China's past.

The generation of twenty-somethings that came of age during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution is about to take the reins of the government from the last appointed representative of the founding fathers of the People's Republic. The current President and Party General Secretary, Hu Jintao, was hand-picked for the posts by Deng Xiaoping before the "senior leader" died in 1997. Xi Jinping, Hu's heir apparent, was elected to his current posts by his peers in the Party Central Committee, as a dark horse if the rumors are true. Knowledge of the events that shaped the lives and beliefs of the incoming generation of Chinese leaders is more likely to produce an effective approach to U.S. China policy than imagining their country as "a modern day Soviet Union." It is difficult to predict or influence the behavior of people you don't understand. The Chinese Communist Party does not volunteer a lot of information about itself to outsiders — even to the people it governs — but that is no excuse for the administration's apparent lack of awareness of China's recent past.

[allthingsnuclear]

Nuclear Books

          I've read that 18th century author Samuel Johnson cautioned against trusting anyone who had written more than he had read.

Johnson’s words kept coming back to me in recent weeks as I was introduced at symposiums and conferences marking the anniversaries of the Fukushima and Three Mile Island accidents. The introductions of other presenters and I invariably included any books we’d authored. While I remain proud of the two books I have authored and was flattered by that recognition, Johnson’s warning suggested that the audiences might have been more interested in the books I had read than the few I had written. In that spirit, here are some of the many books that I have read that I found especially insightful:

Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation 1946-1962 by George T. Mazuzan and J. Samuel Walker (1984) and its companion, Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment 1963-1971 by J. Samuel Walker (1992) provide amazing insights into some of the Atomic Energy Commission’s decisions and indecisions. Although working for the NRC as its historian, Walker calls them as he sees them. Some of his calls don’t reflect favorably on the AEC. The value of these books is in their detailing of what happened and why; not what any party might have wanted to happen or for revisionist motives.

Nuclear Reactor Safety: On the History of the Regulatory Process by David Okrent (1981) is an invaluable resource. Bob Pollard, my predecessor at UCS, had a copy of the manuscript of this book before it was published. Bob handwrote this warning on its title page: “If you value your life, don’t even think about borrowing this.” I understand why Bob treasured this book so highly. There’s scarcely a month that goes by that I don’t refer to this book to find out why certain things did or didn’t happen. Okrent served on the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards when contentious issues like nuclear plant siting (there once was a proposal to build a reactor near the Brooklyn Bridge as well as one in Malibu, CA), emergency core cooling system performance, containment reliability, and reactor pressure vessel integrity. Okrent lays it all out. I encourage reading this book, but I won’t lend you my copy either. It’s available online for free here.

The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA by Diane Vaughn (1996) is not a book about nuclear power, but it describes similar situations faced by the nuclear industry and its regulator. Prior space shuttles experienced problems with the o-rings on their external fuel tanks. Rather than resolve the problems, their recurring nature led to their acceptance via what Vaughn termed “normalization of deviance.” O-ring damage was not supposed to happen, but because it happened frequently the abnormal became normal. As Challenger’s launch approached, NASA’s consultants expressed concern that the unprecedentedly low temperatures could make the o-rings even more prone to failure. NASA flipped the concerns around and asked the consultants for the minimally acceptable temperature. Lacking sufficient data with which to establish that limit, no line was drawn and the Challenger lifted off to its doom. The “normalization of deviance” also occurs in the nuclear industry (Davis-Besse in 2002 was an example) as does the issue of dealing with risk uncertainties.

Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic by George W. Hilton (1995) is although not a book about nuclear power, but it explains the quintessential unintended consequence that problem solvers everywhere seek so hard to avoid. Following the April 14, 1912, sinking of the Titanic and the deaths of 829 passengers and 694 crew members, laws were passed in America requiring vessels to carry enough lifeboats for all persons aboard. On July 24, 1915, while still tied to the dock in the Chicago River, the day steamer Eastland capsized, killing 841 passengers and 3 crew members. The Eastland disaster was caused by the Titanic disaster – the weight of the lifeboats and davits added to the Eastland made the ship more prone to tipping over. Thus, a law with the good intention of preventing deaths like those of the 829 passengers aboard the Titanic had the misfortune of causing the deaths of 841 passengers fewer than three years later.

The Whistleblowers by Myron Peretz Glazer & Penina Migdal Glazer (1989) uses case studies of whistleblower cases in several industries, including the nuclear industry, to reveal the systemic factors that often polarize issues. Any single case could easily be dismissed as being caused by a disgruntled worker or overbearing manager. But the collection of cases reveals how common workplace dynamics often compel the emotional actions and reactions that can make bad situations far worse.

Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow (1984) may not have been the first to explore the high risks associated with complex technologies, but it remains among the best. Covering a number of accidents across a number of industries, Perrow identifies the recurring factors that need to be better managed to avoid becoming candidates for the sequel.

Helen Caldicott: A Desperate Passion by Helen Caldicott (1996) is an autobiography of an amazing person. I first met Helen in 1997 following a keynote speech she delivered at a conference in North Carolina. It was the first, but not the last, time Helen scolded me for not doing more about nuclear safety. Her autobiography explains both her passion to address nuclear safety issues and its desperation. A true visionary who’d never be convicted of not seeing the forest for its trees, Helen sometimes make me feel like I can’t even see a tree for its bark. But it’s a fortunate feeling in that it inspires me to think bigger and aim higher.

Aunt Carrie’s War Against Black Fox Nuclear Power Plant by Carrie Barefoot Dickerson (1995) is a first-hand account of a citizen’s campaign against the operation of a nuclear power plant in her community. Reflective of many similar campaigns across the country, it explains the challenges faced raising funds to pay experts, translating obtuse jargon into plain English, and avoiding being overwhelmed by the closed-ranks cohesion between the power company and its regulator – all in one’s spare time carved from normal lives and jobs. It’s a good complement to Caldicott’s autobiography. Helen describes waging campaigns on the national and international levels while Carrie describes similar campaigning at the local and state levels.

Hostages of Each Other: The Transformation of Nuclear Safety Since Three Mile Island by Joseph V. Rees (1994) provides insights into the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), created by the nuclear industry in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident to be its peer watchdog. Rees describes how INPO works and some of the politics that give this watchdog less teeth than needed at times. Because INPO operates largely in the shadows, this book provides a rare peek behind the organization’s curtain.

Safety Second: The NRC and America’s Nuclear Power Plants by Michelle Adato, James MacKenzie, Robert Pollard, and Ellyn Weiss (1987) was authored by members of the UCS staff. But it was nearly a decade before I joined UCS, so it’s not self-promoting my work. And it’s out-of-print, so it’s not a fund-raising ploy (or at least, not one likely to be successful). This book covers four topics: (1) the NRC’s failure to resolve known safety problems, (2) the public’s limited capability to participate in the NRC’s processes in a meaningful way, (3) the NRC’s failure to enforce its safety regulations, and (4) the fraternal relationship between the NRC and the industry it regulates. To update this book, UCS need only provide some recent examples, change the date, and perhaps revise its title to Safety Third.

The Truth About Chernobyl by Grigori Medvedev (1989) describes the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine and its cleanup by someone who had worked at the plant during its construction and aided in its cleanup. The facts of what happened and why match many other books on the accident, but Medvedev provides insights into the culture as the plant was being built and in the wake of the disaster.

Licensed to Kill? The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Shoreham Power Plant by Joan Aron (1997) covers the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, which cost nearly $5 billion to construct but closed permanently before ever operating above 5% power. It was the most expensive electricity never generated. Aron, who worked for the NRC, describes the legal and political battles involving county, state, and federal government agencies and many others.

Idaho Falls: The Untold Story of America’s First Nuclear Accident by William McKeown (2003) explains how workers were preparing the SL-1 reactor in Idaho to restart on January 3, 1961, following a two-week maintenance outage. While moving individual control rods in and out of the reactor core to remedy longstanding sticking problems, a central control rod was pulled too far out of the core. Instead of about four inches, the control rod was pulled about sixteen inches. The reactor went from being shut down to over 100 percent power in a fraction of a second. That rapid power rise vaporized water inside the reactor vessel. The force of the resulting steam explosion lifted the reactor vessel nine feet out of the ground and expelled some of the control rods, one of which pinned a worker to the facility’s ceiling. All the workers at the plant that evening died. McKeown chronicles why it happened. He also describes the efforts of those who had to deal with the highly radioactive bodies of the workers and the cleanup of the facility.

Windscale 1957: Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident by Lorna Arnold (1992) covers the October 1957 accident involving a gas-cooled reactor at the Windscale nuclear plant in Britain. Arnold describes why that happened and how the radioactivity released from that accident caused cow’s milk to be dumped into the sea. Arnold also explains how filters – added to the plant’s vent system and called “Cockcroft’s follies” to ridicule their chief advocate – prevented that accident from having even greater consequences. This “back to the future” moment is timely as the NRC contemplates requiring vents at US reactors to be equipped with filters in the wake of the latest nuclear plant disaster, last year’s Fukushima.

The Accident by Hans Heinrich Ziemann (1978) is a novel following characters like the local elected officials, the plant manager and an anti-nuclear activist through the contentious days leading up to a nuclear plant in Germany operating for the first time. Before the dust of those battles settles, the plant experiences a major accident resulting in dust of an entirely different sort. Former antagonists unite in their struggles to survive the disaster. Ziemann develops his characters as humans all trying to do the right thing, albeit with different definitions of “right,” rather than as good guys and bad guys. Thus, the plant manager is not greedy and the anti-nuclear activist is not wacky.

We Almost Lost Detroit by John G. Fuller (1975) covers the October 1966 partial meltdown of the Unit 1 reactor at the Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant outside Detroit. It was viciously attacked by the nuclear industry at the time as being over-sensationalized speculation – criticisms that were blunted in the wake of the even larger meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. This book describes much of the internal debate over nuclear plant safety levels going on between the nuclear industry and its regulator at the time, the Atomic Energy Commission.

Fermi-I: New Age for Nuclear Power edited by E. Pauline Alexanderson (1979) explains how power companies formed a consortium to finance, build, and construct a liquid sodium reactor. It also describes how an 11th hour modification to the plant intended to make it safer in event of a reactor core meltdown actually triggered a partial meltdown.

Nuclear Power Goes On-Line: A History of Shippingport by William Beaver (1990) describes the two lives of this reactor – first as a pressurized water reactor and its later reincarnation as a light water breeder reactor. Shippingport was among the first nuclear power reactors to operate in the United States. It was also one of the first reactors to be dismantled. The former site of the plant is now an empty field and a parking lot adjacent to the Beaver Valley nuclear plant outside Pittsburgh.

Shouldering Risks: The Culture of Control in the Nuclear Power Industry by Constance Perin (2005) uses extensive on-site interviews with the workers involved complemented by exhaustive review of available documents to provide thorough case studies of safety problems that occurred at three US nuclear power plants. While not headline-grabbers like Three Mile Island and Fukushima, these problems nevertheless explained how schedule pressures, communication barriers, and other commonplace factors can conspire to lead well-meaning workers to undesired outcomes.

Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology by James R. Chiles (2001) examines several technological disasters, including Three Mile Island, to explain why they happened but also to draw recurring themes across them.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich (2005) is a collection of first-hand accounts of how the Chernobyl accident affected people’s lives. The book both puts the reader in the shoes of these people while at the same time making the reader glad to have worn different ones.

The Atom and the Fault by Richard L. Meehan (1984) provides the point of view of an insider during contentious proceedings regarding the seismic hazard and associated design features at nuclear power plants proposed in California.

Fallout by James W. Huston (2001) is a novel about terrorists attempting to use US assets to attack US facilities. Released shortly before 9/11, this book had the terrorists trying to attack a nuclear power plant on the California coast. And their target was not the thick, reinforced concrete containment building housing the reactor but the far less robust structure containing the spent fuel pool – and significantly more radioactivity than exists in the reactor core. Huston is a former US military pilot who applied this experience to determine the true weak spot at our nuclear plants.

Who Killed Karen Silkwood by Howard Kohn (1981) is about a worker at a nuclear fuel fabrication facility in Oklahoma who raised concerns about radiation protection for herself and fellow workers. On November 13, 1974, Silkwood died in a car accident while driving to meet a New York Times reporter. The documents she reportedly carried with her as evidence of her concerns were not in the car after the accident.

No Sacrifice Too Great: The Life of Lewis L. Strauss by Richard Pfau (1984) is a biography of a man who served on the Atomic Energy Commission at its beginning. Strauss is often remembered for uttering the infamous phrase that nuclear power would someday become “too cheap to meter” and for his role in removing the security clearance from Robert Oppenheimer. The latter incident came back to haunt Strauss – Washington politicians used it to deny him a position in President Eisenhower’s cabinet.

The Dorset Disaster by Alexander Sidar III (1980) is a novel that provides a fictionalized account of an accident at a nuclear reactor in Connecticut and the turmoil it causes company representative, elected officials, and the public. While the accident is fictional, the distress is causes so many people seems all too real.

[allthingsnuclear]

Fission Stories #101: “Watch This”

On April 19, 1995, operators encountered a problem while restarting the boiling water reactor at the Columbia Generating Station in Washington. The control room operator consulted with the shift supervisor about a problem controlling the water level inside the reactor vessel. The problem was not too little water; instead, the water level was getting too high.

After being shut down for a long time, the boiling water reactor’s vessel was filled with cool water far below the boiling point. As the reactor core’s power level increased, the heat it produced warmed up the water. The water expanded, causing the water level inside the reactor vessel to increase even when no additional water was being supplied.

The plant’s procedures sought to control the water level within 6 inches of its desired level. The operator consulted his supervisor as the rising water level approached the upper end of this control region.

“Watch this,” the supervisor reportedly told the operator.

To lower the water level the supervisor cracked open the valve circled in the figure above, which is within the “reactor water cleanup system," to allow water to flow from the reactor vessel to the liquid radwaste system. The reactor water cleanup system removes water from the reactor vessel and purifies it before returning it to the reactor vessel. When the reactor is shut down or operating at very low power, the reactor water cleanup system can also be used to discharge reactor water to the main condenser or the liquid radwaste system.

Because the liquid radwaste system’s piping and components were not designed to withstand the high pressure within the reactor vessel, the plant’s procedures did not permit this valve to be opened when the reactor’s power level so high. The supervisor jockeyed the valve until its OPEN light went out and its CLOSED light went on. But the switches for the lights on the valve had been set so that the valve could be up to 4% open and still not cause the OPEN light to turn on.

When the operator and then a second operator reminded the supervisor that procedures did not allow the valve to be opened at this power level, the supervisor maintained that the valve was not open since its OPEN light was off.

The shift supervisor later informed the shift manager about the valve having been opened.

After the next crew of operators arrived and took over control room duties, an oncoming control room operator closed the valve. Really closed. All the way.

The NRC was not pleased with the deliberate violation of operating procedures. Neither was the plant’s owner. The shift supervisor and the shift manager were fired. Really fired. All the way.

Our Takeaway

Nuclear plant workers are drilled time and again that verbatim compliance with procedures is mandatory. This does not mean that they would blindly follow faulty procedures off the cliff. They are also instructed to stop when a procedure glitch is found and formally revise the procedure before proceeding.

But trained and qualified workers following formally reviewed and approved procedures is part of the defense-in-depth approach to safety.

Workers taking shortcuts by deliberately violating procedures and “winging it” is unacceptable, as evidenced by the culprits in this case being fired for their actions and inactions.

“Fission Stories” is a weekly feature by Dave Lochbaum. For more information on nuclear power safety, see the nuclear safety section of UCS’s website and our interactive map, the Nuclear Power Information Tracker.

[allthingsnuclear]

ICD 630 and the "Avatar" Syndrome

On 14 May 2012 President Obama's Director of National Intelligence issued a directive stating the obvious:

1. Foreign language capabilities are essential to the performance of intelligence missions and operations.

2. The development and implementation of an integrated approach for ensuring the continuous availability of foreign language capabilities is necessary to achieve IC [Intelligence Community] mission objectives. 

Six years ago I wrote an article called "Lost in Translation" for The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on problems I noticed in the U.S. intelligence community's use of Chinese language materials. In the footnotes you will find references to an earlier set of GAO and Defense Department reports lamenting the sorry state of the foreign language capabilities within the agencies responsible for formulating and implementing U.S. foreign and defense policy. The reports argue serious language deficiencies have been evident for decades. They also describe a variety of failed reforms attempted by previous administrations. Ambassador Michael Lemmon, a dean of the School of Languages at the Department of State's Foreign Service Institute, describes one such effort in a 2007 address on the "Language Continuum Project". It reads a lot like the text of ICD 630.

If the Obama administration wants to succeed where its predecessors have failed, it will need a new approach.

One hopeful sign is that ICD 630 recognizes there is a connection between foreign language capabilities and "cultural awareness and understanding." The difficulty for the U.S. intelligence community is that acquiring cultural awareness requires time spent living and working in the culture you are trying to understand. Obtaining even a basic level of cultural awareness takes many years of day-to-day involvement in the target culture. Many potential U.S. intelligence analysts find it difficult if not impossible to spend the required time abroad.

Another more serious and difficult-to-resolve issue facing analysts is that the U.S. intelligence community's interest in foreign cultures is rooted in the perceived threats to U.S. national security from the cultures analysts are attempting to understand. Intelligence officers who seem too friendly, understanding or respectful of a suspect culture or country are often accused of bias, or worse.  You could call it the Avatar syndrome. The more common and derisive sobriquet used within U.S. intelligence circles is "gone native."

Analysts who put in the time it takes to develop a high level of cultural expertise inherently acquire equally high levels of empathy and respect for the country or culture they are working to understand. Rewarding that effort with ridicule or suspicion is counterproductive if the goal is to retain analysts with advanced foreign language and intercultural communication skills.

Research in the field of cross-cultural education has not been well incorporated into the efforts of the U.S. intelligence community to improve cultural awareness or foreign language capabilities. If it had been, the term "gone native" would seem as offensive as many of the other ethnic epithets we have grown respectful enough to discontinue using in common discourse. 

Removing the stigma embodied in the expression "gone native" is a prerequisite for reforming the intelligence community's approach to foreign language and cultural studies. If the bureaucratic labyrinth of authorities and incentives articulated in the Obama administration's new directive could effect this one simple change in the intelligence community's own culture, implementing the directive would be well worth the effort. Trying to improve those capabilities while this institutionalized partis pris remains unchallenged is futile.

[allthingsnuclear]

Fission Stories #100: Diablo Canyon: A Waity Matter

                       In the summer of 1981, the owners of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California wanted to start up their brand new $4.2 billion plant. But they had to wait a couple more years and spend another $1.6 billion before turning on the switch.

Why? Among other things, it seems that the containment building housing the reactor vessel had five large air conditioning units mounted near its top. Each of these units weighed 150,000 pounds, but the plant’s designers thought the units only weighed 45,000 pounds. Consequently, they had not designed supports for the air conditioning units to hold them in place during an earthquake (which have been known to occur in California). To add insult to injury, not only would this vital cooling equipment be disabled by an earthquake, but the 150,000 pound units could wreak havoc on (i.e., squash) whatever emergency equipment they fell upon.

The plant’s owner installed more supports for the 525,000 pounds of additional weight from the five air conditioners. The original calculations had been off by merely 262 tons or so.

Our Takeaway

Ironically, part of the wait was caused by part of the weight.

Here, defense-in-depth was defeated by garbage in, garbage out. Engineering calculations, such as those performed for the air conditioning unit supports, are prepared by one person and technically reviewed by a second person. This independent verification is supposed to check both the accuracy and applicability of the calculations. For example, it is mathematically accurate to say that the average person in a room of ten women and ten men has one ovary and one testicle. But that result, regardless of its statistical precision, does not apply to any one in the room.

Diablo Canyon’s calculation might also have been mathematically correct. But the inputs to the calculation were wrong since they assumed the wrong weight for the air conditioning units. Therefore, its results were rendered not applicable.

Mistakes happen. That’s why independent verifications are performed. In this case, the independent verification failed to catch a gross error. When finally detected, its correction carried a large price tag. Had it remained undetected until revealing itself during an earthquake, it may have carried an even higher price tag.

“Fission Stories” is a weekly feature by Dave Lochbaum. For more information on nuclear power safety, see the nuclear safety section of UCS’s website and our interactive map, the Nuclear Power Information Tracker.

[allthingsnuclear]

China Assesses the Value of Human Spaceflight

Some people might feel that that investment in the human spaceflight program stole resources and attention from the project of improving the people's livelihood, that the energy used to climb into space could be better used solving problems here on the ground.

Critics of the US human spaceflight program expressed the same doubts about the US program. A high profile defense of the Shenzhou program in the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper just days after a major success in space could be a sign that the Chinese public, and some members of the Party itself, are beginning to question the value of China's decades-long quest to build a space station. The editorial's defense starts with the contradiction of claiming space technology "demonstrates a country's national defense capability" while in the same sentence quoting an unidentified report from UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space that reportedly said "the use of space technology...is a shortcut to economic development because it can leap over the traditional technological development stages passed through by advanced nations." The editorial combines hypernationalist rhetoric about space giving China a leg up in "a strategic competition between nations expanding from the surface to space" with dramatic claims of economic benefits such as "the research and development of more than 1000 new materials, 80% of which were completed under the quest for space technology."  The strident political language of the editorial stands in contrast to some of the less scripted comments of the Chinese astronauts, who, like many astronauts before them, discuss the personal influence of seeing the earth from space, the recognition that we all inhabit a single planet and the need for greater international cooperation. In many ways the progress of China's space program seems to be creating echos of the social and political impacts the US space program generated in the 1960s and the 1970s. In both nations space-inspired images of national power and global connectedness continue to compete for attention in the public eye and investments from the public purse.

[allthingsnuclear]

Fission Stories #99: Seabrook’s Blews

                                    An emergency exercise was conducted April 17, 2012, at the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. Federal regulations require these exercises to be conducted every two years for each nuclear plant. For these exercises the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is onsite to evaluate how well the plant owner performs during the simulated emergency. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is onsite to evaluate how well local, state and federal officials perform.

The exercise simulated an accident involving the large, rapid loss of cooling water for the reactor core. With reactor core meltdown imminent, workers declared a General Emergency, the most serious emergency declaration. This declaration required workers to notify offsite authorities so they could take appropriate steps to protect the public.

In preparing the summary of plant conditions to be conveyed to offsite authorities, an emergency coordinator asked for the wind direction from the low-level indicator on the plant’s meteorological tower. This tall tower has wind speed and director indicators near its top and also towards its base. The plant’s emergency procedures directed that the upper elevation indicator be used if a release of radiation was in progress and the lower elevation indicator be used otherwise. Although a release of radiation was already in progress necessitating that the upper indicator be used, the coordinator mistakenly requested readings from the lower one.

Workers compounded that mistake by mistakenly responding with wind information from the upper elevation indicator. Because a release of radiation was occurring at the time, their mistake could have been fortuitous since procedures required the upper indicator to be used during releases. But a third mistake undermined that fortune. The wind information from the upper elevation was recorded on the offsite notification form along with a note that “A radiological release has not occurred” when in fact a radiological release was occurring.

The NRC also identified that the company failed to detect the inaccurate information provided to offsite authorities during its formal critique of the exercise. The combination of the inaccurate notification and the associated failure to identify it during the post-exercise critique led the NRC to propose a White finding (the NRC classifies violations as green, white, yellow and red in order of increasing severity) for the violation.

Our Takeaway

The good news is that emergency exercises are conducted periodically to gauge how well onsite and offsite entities perform to protect the public from harm in event of a nuclear plant accident.

The bad news is that a fairly serious failure occurred during this exercise. Workers informed offsite authorities that a radiological release was not occurring when just the opposite was true. They blew the call about what was blowing in the wind.

This serious failure happened during a simulated exercise when stress levels are likely far lower than during a real accident and workers are not distracted with worries for their families and friends. In other words, decision-making during real accidents is more conducive to mistakes than during simulations.

“Fission Stories” is a weekly feature by Dave Lochbaum. For more information on nuclear power safety, see the nuclear safety section of UCS’s website and our interactive map, the Nuclear Power Information Tracker.