Re: David Lochbaum (again) and Carolina Power and Light

["dkosloff1" <dkosloff1@email.msn.com>]

The key to the deception is how "worst case" is defined.  A spent fuel
assembly can have an inventory of fission products and daughters as high as
an operating fuel assembly with the significant exception of the iodines.
Since there are more spent fuel assemblies than operating fuel assemblies,
the total curie inventory in stored spent fuel on a site will usually be
higher than the total curie inventory in the operating reactor or reactors.
A deciever takes that information and postulates an incredible accident
("hypothetical disaster") that will get the curie inventory into the air.
Once that concept has been swallowed, the pathway to humans is similar to a
"worst case" reactor accident.  This is of course aided by the LNT and total
person-rem effect myths.

In fact,  the older fuel is no longer producing enough heat to cause damage
to itself even if all the water in the pool evaporated (don't fly over the
building at this time).  That is why it can be stored in dry casks.  I
suspect that if the spent fuel pool cooling pumps were shut off it would
take many days (if ever) for the water to reach boiling.  Heat transfer
would be to structures and air, then structures and finally to air and
earth.  This type of heat transfer, although real, is poorly modeled, which
leads to overly pessimistic results for water temperature calculations.  I
remember watching a test at a plant that had been shut down for many months.
The RHR pumps were shut down to confirm calculations of how fast the reactor
coolant would heat up.  When the pumps were restarted,  the instuments
showed that the reactor had actually cooled down while the pumps were off.
The reason the coolant stayed warm with RHR in service was because the heat
added by the pumps was kept in equilibrium by adjusting the amount of heat
rejected by the RHR heat exchangers.  The heat from the core could be
absorbed by the structures and air within the containment.  Remember that
PWRs heat up with pump heat from the reactor coolant pumps before they are
taken critical.

I believe Dr. Rasmussen presented this "worst case" airplane accident
concept:  "What is the worst case airplane accident?"  Knowledgable people
might respond that is was the Canary Island collision of two jumbo jets
where about 500 people were killed.  Then it is pointed out that that was
not a hypothetical worst case.  An example of a hypothetical worst case is a
collision of two jumbo jets over New York City.  They do not plumment
immediately to the ground.  One goes far enough to land on the Meadowlands
where 100,000 people are killed watching the Giants and the other goes far
enough to land wherever the Jets play, where another 100,000 people are
killed.  Plus 1,000 people on the jets.  Of course, from a system
perspective, this is not the worst case accident because several other
planes might crash at the same time.  You could also have a worst case
automotive transport system accident where for some reason thousands of
people swerve into oncoming traffic.  At any given momemt, thousands of
automobile passengers, pedestrians and children in day care centers are less
than a second away from disaster by truck or car.  This gives some
perspective on how "worst case" scenarios can be manipulated.

Don Kosloff dkosloff1@email.msn.com
2910 Main St
Perry, OH

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven Dapra" <sjd@swcp.com>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <radsafe@romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu>
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2000 9:00 PM
Subject: David Lochbaum (again) and Carolina Power and Light


> "The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, a panel of the U.S. Nuclear
> Regulatory Commission, ordered CP&L this month to evaluate the risk of a
> hypothetical disaster drawn up by critics.  . . .

> "Opponents of CP&L's radioactive waste plan say the panel's order confirms
> a fact rarely discussed outside obscure NRC documents.
>
> The URL is <http://www.egroups.com/message/doewatch/8818>.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Steven Dapra
> sjd@swcp.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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