Safe Enough?: A History of Nuclear Power and Accident RiskSince the dawn of the Atomic Age, nuclear experts have labored to imagine the unimaginable and prevent it. They confronted a deceptively simple question: When is a reactor “safe enough” to adequately protect the public from catastrophe? Some experts sought a deceptively simple answer: an estimate that the odds of a major accident were, literally, a million to one. Far from simple, this search to quantify accident risk proved to be a tremendously complex and controversial endeavor, one that altered the very notion of safety in nuclear power and beyond. Safe Enough? is the first history to trace these contentious efforts, following the Atomic Energy Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as their experts experimented with tools to quantify accident risk for use in regulation and to persuade the public of nuclear power’s safety. The intense conflict over the value of risk assessment offers a window on the history of the nuclear safety debate and the beliefs of its advocates and opponents. Across seven decades and the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the quantification of risk has transformed both society’s understanding of the hazards posed by complex technologies and what it takes to make them safe enough. |
Contents
Hanford Exclusion Areas | 6 |
Hanford N K and B Reactors | 9 |
The Design Basis in Crisis | 11 |
Big Rock Point Consumers Power Plant 1962 | 15 |
Bell Hot Water Heater Fault Tree | 22 |
Farmer Curve | 24 |
Browns Ferry Unit 1 Under Construction | 28 |
BoilingWater Reactor BWR | 30 |
Executive SummaryNatural Events | 69 |
Putting a Number on Safe Enough | 82 |
Toward RiskInformed Regulation | 102 |
Three Mile Island Control Room | 117 |
Risk Assessment Beyond the NRC | 146 |
NRCRussian Ceremony | 160 |
Linear NoThreshold Model | 172 |
RiskInformed Regulation and the Fukushima Accident | 188 |
Common terms and phrases
ACRS AEC’s Analysis approach April Atomic Energy ATWS backfit Chernobyl Commissioners Committee containment building criteria critics Davis-Besse December decision defense in depth design basis accident Development DOE PRRC ECCS engineering Environmental estimates Evaluation experts failure Fault Tree Federal Fukushima Hanauer Hanford hazards IAEA improve Indian Point Inside NRC International issues July June Kozloduy licensees LOCA Loss-of-Coolant Accident MacLachlan maintenance rule March ment NASA NRC ADAMS NRC Legacy NRC staff NRC’s Nuclear Energy nuclear industry nuclear plants Nuclear Power Plants Nuclear Regulatory Commission Nuclear Safety Nucleonics Week Okrent operating organizational oversight Policy Statement PRAs Probabilistic Risk Assessment qualitative quantify radiation Rasmussen Report Reactor Safeguards regulatory staff Reliability Review Risk Management risk-informed regulation safety culture safety goals safety systems SALP scientists scram shuttle Soviet standards Stellfox task force technical Three Mile Island tion U.S. Nuclear utility VVER Washington Water Reactor