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Nuclear Regulatory Commission Engineers Charge Government Coverup: Reactor Meltdown “Absolute Certainty” If Dam Fails … 100s of Times More Likely than Tsunami that Hit Fukushima

Thursday, September 20, 2012 5:32

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(Before It's News)

Massive Cover-Up of Risks from Flooding to Numerous U.S. Nuclear Facilities

Numerous American nuclear reactors are built within flood zones:

NuclearFloodsFinal Highres Nuclear Regulatory Commission Engineers Charge Government Coverup: Reactor Meltdown “Absolute Certainty” If Dam Fails ... 100s of Times More Likely than Tsunami that Hit Fukushima As one example, on the following map (showing U.S. nuclear power plants built within earthquake zones), the red lines indicate the Mississippi and Missouri rivers:

Reactors in Nebraska and elsewhere were flooded by swollen rivers and almost melted down. See this, this, this and this.

No wonder, nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen said:

Sandbags and nuclear power shouldn’t be put in the same sentence.

And the Huntsville Times wrote in an editorial last year:

A tornado or a ravaging flood could just as easily be like the tsunami that unleashed the final blow [at Fukushima as an earthquake].

The Hill notes today:

An engineer with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says the agency has withheld documents showing reactor sites downstream of dams are vulnerable to flooding, and an elevated risk to the public’s safety.

Richard Perkins, an NRC reliability and risk engineer, was the lead author on a July 2011 NRC report detailing flood preparedness. He said the NRC blocked information from the public regarding the potential for upstream dam failures to damage nuclear sites.

Perkins, in a letter submitted Friday with the NRC Office of Inspector General, said that the NRC “intentionally mischaracterized relevant and noteworthy safety information as sensitive, security information in an effort to conceal the information from the public.” The Huffington Post first obtained the letter.

He added the NRC “may be motivated to prevent the disclosure of this safety information to the public because it will embarrass the agency.” He claimed redacted documents in a response to a Freedom of Information Act request showed the NRC possessed “relevant, notable, and derogatory safety information for an extended period but failed to properly act on it.”

The report in question was completed four months after … Fukushima.

The report concluded that, “Failure of one or more dams upstream from a nuclear power plant may result in flood levels at a site that render essential safety systems inoperable.”

Eliot Brenner, an NRC spokesman, told The Hill on Monday that the flooding report has been rolled into the agency’s “very robust” body of work on lessons learned post-Fukushima. He declined to comment directly on the letter.

“We cannot discuss the reasons for the redactions,” Brenner said. “The NRC coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security, the Army Corps of Engineers and FERC on the necessary redactions.”