NRC disavows MSNBC nuclear study

Friday, March 18, 2011

An MSNBC study showing the Callaway Nuclear Power Plant faces the least risk from an earthquake of all 104 U.S. nuclear plants has been disavowed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Lara Uselding, an NRC spokeswoman, said the NRC does not rank plants based on risk of damage from an earthquake.

Uselding said MSNBC reached its own conclusions in its rankings, and the NRC did not approve the rankings.

“It was an incomplete report on the overall research that had been done by the NRC. Somebody at MSNBC took numbers and threw them together to create the rankings. We have said that is not accurate because the NRC does not rank plants by seismic risk,” Uselding said.

She said the NRC did do a study on earthquakes in 2008 to update a previous 1982 study of recent seismic activity, but the NRC did not rank each plant for seismic risk.

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billdedman 2 years, 1 month ago

Don, don't be misled by NRC's non-denial denial.

NRC hasn't said our numbers are incorrect.

After all, they're NRC's numbers.

What NRC is saying is that it doesn't do rankings. That's right. We did, from NRC's data. If the NRC were publishing the American League East standings, it would list them alphabetically. But that doesn't make it wrong to rank them.

You and your readers can see for yourself in the NRC report, just as we reported, that:

-- NRC says the risk of quakes in the central and eastern states is higher than previously thought.

-- It still thinks plants are safe.

-- but their margin of safety is reduced.

-- and some plants are now near the point where they should be re-examined, and perhaps retrofitted.

-- and the technical staff says this should now move from being a research issue to a regulatory issue.

-- and it has made its best estimates of the frequency (chance, odds) of an earthquake that would cause core damage to a plant, and those are in Appendix D, last column on the right. The links are at the bottom of the article.

msnbc.msn.com/id/42103936/ns/world_news-asiapacific/

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