Officials of the Japanese government finally admitted to their citizens last week what many people had already feared:
That the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster resulting from earthquake and tsunami damage last month ranks at Level 7, the worst possible rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
Last Monday, Japanese authorities also declared radiation levels at the plant to be too high for anyone to work there.
In light of the Japanese disaster, many in western North Carolina quietly ask themselves:
Could this happen here?
The closest nuclear facility to the Hickory, Morganton, Statesville and Lenoir area is Duke Energy’s McGuire Nuclear Station on Lake Norman. It’s in Mecklenburg County some 17 miles northwest of Charlotte.
“The chances of radiation getting out of the McGuire plant property itself are really pretty small,” said Karen Yaussy, radiation control officer within the Catawba County Division of Emergency Management.
Not only is the McGuire facility located on an island in Lake Norman in a sparsely populated area, Yaussy said any radiation leaked into the atmosphere would “very likely” drift away from Catawba and surrounding counties.
“Most of our prevailing winds are actually west-to-east,” she said, “and that’s normally very much to our advantage.”
Some 1,600 Catawba County citizens live within a 10-mile radius of McGuire; more than 32,000 residents live in a 20-mile radius.
She acknowledges that western North Carolina is still a traditional “earthquake zone,” as is coastal North Carolina (Progress Energy’s Brunswick Nuclear Station is located at Southport).
Plus, while the likelihood of an earthquake hitting McGuire is very small, the possibility of a tsunami is “not in the picture at all.”
Lessons learned from Japan mishap
Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers told a CNN interviewer April 6 that the U.S. needs to start building more nuclear plants to replace its aging facilities, despite the crisis in Japan.
“We do need to pause. We do need to learn the lessons. We need to implement them. But I think at the end of the day, our industry is prepared to do that,” Rogers said.
Shortly after the incident in Japan, Duke announced that it has no plans to interrupt construction on its William S. Lee III plant in Cherokee County, SC.
That $11 billion nuclear plant has two more years in the licensing process, but it is scheduled to come on line in 2020 or 2021 with a pair of Westinghouse’s latest pressurized water reactors.
Yaussy is aware, too, that a tornado knocked off power at the Surry Nuclear Power Station on the James River in southeastern Virginia last Saturday afternoon. The twister was from the same line of tornadoes that left 23 dead and some 85,000 without of electricity in eastern North Carolina.
“The biggest challenge of a nuclear plant incident would be to keep our public informed of what we’re doing,” said Yaussy.
For instance, a major incident at McGuire would result in opening centers at both Maiden Middle School and at Bandys High School “to receive people to be monitored” for medical treatment.
“The schools,” said Yaussy, “could also be used as overnight shelters,” should that become necessary.
“The strength of our nuclear system,” she said, “is that we take emergency planning very seriously. We look at everything from an extended power failure, with backup systems down too, to other terrorist incidents.”
Since the Japanese disaster, Yaussy points out that she has “met several times” with her counterparts throughout the state and “have talked about a variety of possible nuclear incidents, including an airplane crashing into the McGuire plant, plus something happening to Lake Norman itself.”
“The beauty of a team is, the more minds thinking about it, the better the process, to make sure that we have thought of everything,” she said. “We’ve trained for all kinds of severe nuclear emergencies, but in the end, we’ve just been blessed not to have had a real nuclear event.”
Last week’s rating in Japan, up from Level 5, puts the Fukushima incident at the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in the former Soviet Union. That incident resulted directly in the deaths of some 4,000 people and the resettlement of more than 350,000 others.
April 26 is the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown, the world’s most serious manmade disaster to date.
Brought on line in December 1981, the McGuire plant’s two pressurized water reactors produce more than 17,600 gigawatt hours of electricity annually -- 44 percent of the nuclear power generated in North Carolina.
U.S. plant designs are different
Yaussy notes that the Westinghouse reactor designs used by Duke and other East Coast power companies “are a newer and more sophisticated design” than the one in so much trouble in Japan.
“The Duke technology is a closed-loop system,” she said, “where the cooling water and the fuel rods are not even near each other. It’s at least 10 years newer than the Japanese plant design and it’s thought to be much safer.”
“The thing about nuclear technology in the United States that helps us so much with safety is the very, very lengthy process of licensing—it takes decades—in which plans, designs, emergency drills all have been through a fine-tooth comb in advance.”
Progress Energy operates two North Carolina nuclear plants: the Shearon Harris Nuclear Station, about 20 miles southwest of Raleigh, and the Brunswick plant. Duke also operates the Catawba and Oconee plants in upstate South Carolina and is building the William Lee plant near Columbia.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) evaluators require a full-scale “exercise” every two years on the readiness of emergency management personnel at all levels of government, Yaussy said.
Mike Sprayberry, state director of emergency management -- still busy with the aftermath of last weekend’s deadly tornadoes -- says a nuclear incident would be “a Type 3 disaster” in the state’s scheme of things, the most serious class of emergency.
A Type 3 would be a widespread, catastrophic disaster devastating numerous counties, regions or even states, like last Saturday’s tornadoes or Hurricane Floyd in September 1999 in eastern North Carolina.
Federal funds from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) would account for 75-90 percent of the costs for recovery with state and local governments covering the remaining share. A complete set of response criteria, Sprayberry says, is set out in some detail in written emergency plans.
Type 2 and Type 1 emergencies are defined as incidents covering smaller geographic areas, each with their own written response criteria for government officials.
Other disasters of more concern
To date, the biggest disasters in the western Piedmont have all been the results of nature—storms in 1916 and 1940 that flooded the Catawba River and its tributaries and, Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which saw 90-mph winds 300 miles inland from Charleston, SC, where it came ashore.
Kenneth Teague, assistant emergency management coordinator in Caldwell County, says counties more remote from the nuclear plants “have been trained by the NRC for radiation incidents,” too.
But last weekend’s violent weather is what has tested the incident management readiness in counties with no nukes.
“We had six inches of rain, and the Johns River crested at 10½ feet,” Teague said. “We had homes damaged by landslides and falling trees, 50 campers floating in the flooded river, and we pulled 17 people out of the water.”
“But we’re prepared to do what we need to do if there’s a nuclear incident.”
Burke County Emergency Services Director Randy Price said, “Our primary function in a nuclear event is going to be in a supportive role for those counties directly in the 10-mile NRC planning area.”
“All North Carolina counties have a mutual aid covenant to assist each other in any kind of emergency. We would probably send people or equipment that might be requested by counties subject to the biggest nuclear threat.”
Price adds that Duke Energy “has always been very good to work with in any kind of emergency that might involve them, and North and South Carolina are two of the best prepared of all the states.”
Iredell County emergency management and communications director David Martin says he’s dealt with McGuire and Duke Energy since 1987, and he’s “very confident that we have safeguards and plans in place to protect our citizens.”
“All of our counties function well together in training, planning and testing for nuclear possibilities, along with Duke Energy,” he said “but he’s much more concerned with possible highway incidents.”
“Iredell County is criss-crossed by two major interstate highways that stay very busy with big trucks hauling some very bad stuff (hazardous materials) that we don’t want scattered by a big wreck.”
“To put things into perspective, that’s far more likely to happen than any kind of incident at McGuire,” said Martin.
FYI: A “Disaster Recovery Assistance Guide” booklet is available from the N.C. Emergency Management Disaster Recovery Operations Center in Raleigh. Wmail: disasterrecovery@ ncem.org or call 919-715-8000.
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