Monday, May 21, 2012

NRC and NEI and Fukishima

The NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] has in fact registered that Fukishima may directly and indirectly threaten the nuclear power industry that is regulated by the NRC. Offsite safety issues, which should involve FEMA due to its assigned tasks going back to President James Early Carter as the expert judges of offsite safety considerations but does not has left NRC to deal with the issues arising out of Fukishima. All repeat all nuclear power reactors are NOW shut down in Japan and with a tense summer facing the Japanese over brownouts or worse as they shut off 30% of their energy supply by shutting the reactors it will be quite interesting to see what happens. In the meantime, the NEI [Nuclear Enterprise Institute] continues to launch a daily stream of "Be happy, don't worry" press releases over US impacts and even Japanese impacts of the Fukishima event. The potential for further problems from Reactor #4 at Dai Ichi seems to be the dominant issue with some experts expecting further dire outcomes from that reactor. NEI was of course the Edison Electric Institute but changed its names over a decade ago. It remains the "trade association" for the nuclear power industry. All in all since March 11th, 2011, when the earthquake and tsunami hit in Japan the fallout from the event grows daily in Japan and elsewhere. The trend line for further problems in nuclear power is up not down IMO. And waste storage and uranium supplies over the rest of the century continue to be problematic. Andy Mitchell continues to run the TECH HAZARDS programs in FEMA. I recently posted on HLSWatch.com on the history of E.O. 12657 published in November 1988 and requiring FEMA to prepare for the contingency that STATES and their local governments fail to adquately plan or prepare for a core melt accident, OR RESPOND! Meaning the STATES and/or their local governments fail to respond adequately. The NRC used its RASCAL modeling system to model the Fukishim event and recommend a 50 mile evacuation zone from the reactors. IF FEMA were forced to adopt a 50 mile EPZ by NRC it would in fact create absolute chaos in that program. The REPP [radiological emergency preparedness program] continues to be unable to face the advent of social media 2.0 on its various preparedness programs. With the JIC now at the White House in large scale events, few will be understanding of why that is a disaster in itself. Still, President Obama may just escape from office by defeat by not having any large scale catastrophic events [other than those led by Wall Street] during his time in office. His basic strategy in HAITI--ignore HAITI. His basic strategy in FUKISHIMA--ignore Fukishima. So far due to the incompetence of the MSM it has succeeded and neither appear to be election issues.