Indian Point paper

["A Karam" <paksbi@rit.edu>]

You can find a copy of the "paper" on Indian Point at the Union of Concerned Scientists web site (http://www.ucsusa.org/index.cfm) - it has home page, top-of-the-page status right now.



A few problems with this report:



The authors do not seem to have spent any time in an actual nuclear power plant.  They assume that terrorists will be able to gain access to the control room, take the necessary actions to cause a core melt-down (leading to the core melting through the pressure vessel), and to coordinate this with an outside group of terrorists who will damage the containment structure sufficiently to allow a release.



The authors also assume that the terrorists would have the timing down so that the plume drifts towards NY City during the entire duration of the release.



Also of interest, the authors provide in a table the median and +95% figures on deaths (including latent cancer deaths), but they do not provide the -95% calculations.  In other words, they provide the worst-case (high) tail, but not the comforting (low) tail of a two-tailed distribution.  Their reporting method is biased in favor of the more dramatic numbers.  I also have to wonder about the validity of a scenario in which the median number of deaths is 696 (looking at what they term early fatalities within 50 miles of the plant), the 95th percentile is 3460, and 99.5 percentile is 16,600, and the peak number is 43,700.  This is an awfully broad distribution, which suggests to me that they have not constrained their variables very much.  Their "bottom line" numbers are 28,100 mean total deaths, 99,400 at the 95th percentile, 208,000 at the 99.5 percentile, and 518,000 peak.  Again, they report only the high-end tail and not the low-end tail of the distribution.  In effect, 

!

 I !

interpret this as meaning that the effect could range from zero deaths up to a half million.  Too bad the authors did not have the intellectual honesty to list the low end as well.



There are many other specific problems; these were the ones that jumped out as being most egregious.



Andy



P. Andrew Karam, Ph.D., CHP

Research Assistant Professor

Rochester Institute of Technology

Department of Biological Sciences

85 Lomb Memorial Drive

Rochester, NY  14623

+1 585-475-6432

karam@mail.rit.edu



"If A is success in life, then A equals X plus Y plus Z. Work is X; Y is play; and Z is keeping your mouth shut." - Albert Einstein



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