Fire hazard: Bush leaves nuclear plants at risk.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Cover Story

On June 16, the commission charged with investigating the events of September 11 announced that Al Qaeda's early attack plans had included "unidentified nuclear power plants." You might think the Bush Administration would respond by doing all it could to prevent a terrorist-triggered disaster at these plants.

Think again.

The Bush Administration is actually relaxing the fire safeguards there.

Instead of insisting that the plants have heat-protected mechanical systems in place that will shut down reactors automatically in case of fire, which is the current standard, the Bush Administration would actually let the power companies rely on workers to run through the plants and try to turn off the reactors by hand while parts of the facilities are engulfed in flames.

"The result could be catastrophic," says a March 3 letter from Representative Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, to Nils J. Diaz, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). "This would assign reactor personnel the duty of rushing directly to the shutdown equipment located throughout the reactor complex to shut down the reactors manually, and would potentially take place in station areas affected by smoke, fire, and radiation and possibly under attack by terrorists."

Inside the NRC, the idea of people dodging flames and possibly high radiation areas to try to avert a meltown has raised some eyebrows. In a September 2003 meeting, one member of a panel on reactor fire safety repeatedly pointed out that relying on humans to do work in dangerous conditions and under stress was asking for trouble. It's difficult to prepare operators, said Dana Powers, a member of the Fire Protection Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards. "How do you do that?" he asked. "How do you simulate smoke, light, fire, ringing bells, fire engines, crazy people running around?"

So why is the NRC proposing to relax the fire safety standard? Amazingly, because many nuclear power plants have not been abiding by current regulations to put up proven fire barriers. Rather than demanding better fire safeguards or insisting that nuclear power companies at least abide by the current ones, the NRC wants to let them off the hook. It's as if car drivers were regularly going 90 mph, so the government raised the speed limit to 90.

"It appears that after discovering that many reactor licensees were out of compliance with the automatic safe-shutdown fire regulations, the commission has decided to gut these regulations rather than force nuclear power plant operators to comply with them," says the Markey and Dingell letter. The NRC made its decision, according to Markey, "at the behest of the nuclear industry."

Current regulations require plants to maintain two sets of electrical circuitry that enable the reactor to shut down automatically in an emergency. These cables either must be encased in proven fire-retardant materials or must be separated by a distance of twenty feet with no combustible materials in between. That way, if one electrical system burns up, the plant can turn itself off, even if the fire is so destructive that no staff members are left to do that work.

The NRC introduced a proposed rule change on November 26, 2003, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It said that, instead of putting in fire barriers, nuclear plants could rely on personnel to turn the plant off by hand in the event of a fire that threatens the reactor. The rule change may go into effect as early as next spring.

The rulemaking started after the NRC met with the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), an industry group, which admitted that many of its members did not have the required safeguards in place. "NEI indicated that the use of unapproved operator manual actions in the event of a fire is pervasive throughout the industry," noted William D. Travers, then the NRC's executive director for operations, in describing the proposed rule to the commissioners. (Procedures for shutting down a reactor by hand are called "operator manual actions.")

Faced with resistance from industry, the NRC found itself in a predicament. "A concerted enforcement effort," wrote Travers, "creates a prospect of significant resource expenditure without clear safety benefits." He warned that the NRC could be flooded with requests for exemptions from the rules.

Fires are not uncommon at nuclear power plants. "Typical nuclear power plants will have three to four significant fires over their operating lifetime," says a 1990 NRC document. "Fires are a significant contributor to the overall core damage frequency."

Fire itself will not blow up a reactor, say critics and industry representatives alike. But if the electrical cabling burns and the pumps that cool the reactor core...