As reported by the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

'...The fishy tale has prompted federal regulators to ask a lot of new questions about morale at Perry and whether plant operators can control access to radioactive areas as required by regulation...

Because of a life-threatening incident during refueling two years ago at Perry in which three contractors were briefly exposed to hard radiation, the NRC has put the plant under a microscope on the issue of worker safety. The agency was already preparing to send squads of inspectors to the plant in June in an effort to determine whether Perry has corrected past shortcomings. Extra inspectors were at the plant earlier during this shutdown.

The company and the NRC said this latest incident is no laughing matter, as in the cartoon TV series "The Simpsons" in which Blinky, an orange fish, supposedly had three eyes from radiation exposure. Whoever was involved in the Perry incident will not get off as easily as nuclear worker Homer Simpson usually does...

"This is not something that happens every day. We want to know why it happened and how it happened," said Viktoria Mitlyng, NRC spokeswoman for the agency's Midwest region. "We are looking at the potential implications." '

Add that one to the "Fission Stories"!

NRC file photo of Entergy's Palisades atomic reactor

As reported by WSBT, "His sentence was imposed by Chief U.S. District Judge Paul L. Maloney in Kalamazoo, who said the maximum sentence of 5 years in prison was necessary based on Fortuna’s prior criminal history...and because the false reports required both the FBI and USMS to waste time and resources conducting extensive investigations of what, if true, would have been extremely serious plots." (emphasis added)

Palisades has experienced a number of real security breaches over the past decade, however. It has been cited by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for security violations. Esquire Magazine broke the story in May, 2007 that Palisades' security chief was a fraud, unqualified for his position, although able to convince local, state, and federal officials that his nuclear security approach should be implemented as a model nationwide. And on the first anniversary of 9/11 attacks, the New York Times reported that an armed Palisades security guard had suffered a nervous breakdown on the job, due to being forced to work 72 hours per week, for months on end; additionally, three suspicious cars had penetrated deep into Palisades' property, but got away because Palisades' security had phoned the wrong local law enforcement agency for response. 

Richard H. Perkins, top, and Lawrence Criscione, are risk analysts within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They are also whistleblowers who say the agency is not leveling with the public.

As London Guardian readers elect U.S. whistleblower Bradley Manning as Person of the Year, there is more good news on the whistleblower front in the U.S. as well. As reported by Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act has been signed into law, after more than a decade of campaigning.

This comes just in the nick of time for two U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) whistleblowers, Richard H. Perkins and Lawrence Criscione (photos, left). The two NRC Staffers have warned, independently, that NRC has not only neglected, but even covered up, the risk of meltdowns at U.S. atomic reactors due to flooding caused by dam failures, as at the Oconee nuclear power plant in South Carolina. The Huffington Post has published a series of articles about this story (see the most recent one here).

NRC whistleblowers are very far and few between. One that Beyond Nuclear has had the honor and privilege of working with is Dr. Ross Landsman, who served at NRC Region 3 in Chicago before retiring in 2005. Landsman testified before Congress about the Midland, Michigan nuclear power plant in the 1980s, which helped stop those two reactors from ever operating (safety-critical buildings at the plant were sinking into the ground, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa). Beginning 20 years ago, Landsman also warned NRC about earthquake safety regulation violations with high-level radioactive waste storage at Palisades in Michigan, located as close as 100 yards from the waters of Lake Michigan, drinking water supply for 40 million people downstream in North America. The violations have never been addressed.

Landsman also warned about a soft-spot (due to concrete and rebar degradation) on the already too small, too weak containment building at Cook nuclear power plant in s.w. MI, a problem that has never been corrected.

Nuclear power industry whistleblowers, however, are still very vulnerable to harassment, intimidation, blacklisting, and worse. Oscar Shirani, a nationally renowned quality assurance auditor who worked for Commonwealth Edison/Exelon, was run out of the company and blacklisted by the U.S. nuclear power industry, after revealing major QA violations on the Holtec dry storage/transport cask systems for high-level radioactive waste, used at 33 U.S. reactors. Dr. Landsman supported Shirani's allegations, but the NRC and U.S. Department of Labor did not, hanging Shirani out to dry.

"...said as much as one-third of the plant’s security force is subpar, with some officers openly professing that they would not engage an enemy if attacked.

He blamed Entergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for lax security standards and a 'security culture mindset' that calls for doing the bare minimum rather than what it would take to repel an attack. He said his complaints over the past 18 months have fallen on deaf ears.

'There is a security culture that ‘It will never happen here,' Travis said at a news conference across the street from the plant. 'That is absolutely unacceptable.'

Travis has sued Entergy for $20 million in compensation, and $1.5 billion in punitive damages. He has called on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to deploy National Guard or State Police to secure Indian Point.

The article also quoted local opponents of the nuclear power plant:

"...Gary Shaw, a market research analyst from Croton-on-Hudson, said President George W. Bush’s announcement in 2002 that nuclear plant diagrams had been found in Afghanistan left him no doubt Indian Point was vulnerable to attack.

'We all knew they were talking about Indian Point. Security has always been an issue, and they always bluster about how good their security is,' Shaw said.

Susan Shapiro, an attorney from Pomona who attended the news conference, said the plant and its security 'is the elephant in the room.'

'Everyone’s living with it in their backyard,' said Shapiro, who sits on the board of Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, an Indian Point opponent. 'You know it’s there. It’s in the back of everyone’s mind.' "

Although U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) spokesman Neil Sheehan said the NRC’s computerized records didn’t show any high-level infractions at Indian Point as far back as 1996, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) published a major expose of security lapses at Indian Point on the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Indian Point, surrounded by 21 million people within 50 miles, may be the single worst catastrophic security vulnerability in North America. Lead 9/11 attacker Mohammad Atta had considered attacking Indian Point instead of the World Trade Center, according to Khaleid Sheikh Mohammad, as well as the 9/11 Commission Report. Al Qaeda did not approve the attack on Indian Point, according to KSM, because "it did not want things to get out of hand," but had not ruled out such attacks in the future.

Kevin's research in preparation for the debate depended on: a Beyond Nuclear backgrounder compiled by Linda Gunter; "Thorium Fuel -- No Panacea for Nuclear Power," by Dr. Arjun Makhijani of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility (2009); a Science Friday program entitled "Is Thorium a Magic Bullet for our Energy Problems?" featuring Dr. Makhijani (May 4, 2012); "Thinking about Thorium" by Dr. Gordon Edwards of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (Sept. 16, 2012); "Thorium Reactors: Back to the Dream Factory," by Dr. Edwards (July 13, 2011); and "What is the Thorium Cycle?" by Dr. Edwards (1978).

The Thorium-232/Uranium-233 nuclear fuel chain shares many similarities with the Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 nuclear fuel chains, including the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation, the risk that reactors could unleash catastrophic amounts of radioactivity (particularly from intentional terrorist attacks or acts of warfare), the unsolved (unsolvable?!) radioactive waste problem, the astronomical expense of RDD (research, development, and demonstration) for "thorium reactors," and the environmental ruination downwind and downstream (as well as up the food chain and down the generations) from reprocessing facilities.

Cover of Beyond Nuclear's pamphlet "A Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High"The five Commissioners who direct the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have just ordered NRC Staff to carry out an expedited, two-year long Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process to revise the agency's Nuclear Waste Confidence Decision (NWCD) and Rule. Critics have charged the NWCD is a confidence game, which for decades has prevented environmental opponents of new reactor construction/operation licenses, as well as old reactor license extensions, from raising high-level radioactive waste generation/storage concerns during NRC licensing proceedings, or even in the federal courts. This EIS process and NWCD revision will thus delay any final NRC approval for new reactor construction/operation licenses, or old reactor license extensions, for at least two years.

The Court's ruling mandated that NRC give a "hard look" at the safety, security, and environmental risks and impacts of extended (not years or decades, but centuries or even permanent) storage of high-level radioactive waste at reactors sites, in pools and/or dry casks.

The "Mountain of Radioactive Waste 70 Years High" conference in Chicago Dec. 1-3 will serve as a launch pad for generating public comments to NRC on this EIS, as well as to push back against the nuclear establishment's backlash proposals to begin "Mobile Chernobyl" irradiated nuclear fuel shipments by road, rail, and waterway to "consolidated interim storage." See Beyond Nuclear's pamphlet on high-level radioactive waste (cover reproduced at left). More.

"None of the proposed preparations to cope with a natural disaster or a terrorist attack are adequate, said Paul Gunter, director of the reactor oversight project for Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear group.

'The fundamental issue is how can you make something that is inherently dangerous safe,' he challenged. 'This is all spin. The vulnerability of nuclear power plants to the loss of offsite power remains an issue coming out of Fukushima as well as 9-11.' "