Short 1 of 5 panel members, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC] voted 3 to 1 in August NOT to allow public comment or to go forward with proposed rulemaking and independent expert analysis of proposed safety retrofits to all GE Mark I & II boiling water reactors in the United States. These represent a third of the US reactor fleet and are identical to the 3 plants that melted and exploded so dramatically at the Fukushima Daiichi facility in northeastern Japan in March of 2011.
The retrofits were recommended following the Fukushima disaster, when the long-known weaknesses of the Mark I & II containment designs were played out in real time for all to see as reactor plant after reactor plant was utterly destroyed by massive explosions. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens were exposed to radiation and hurredly evacuated from their homes and land, much of which remains uninhabitable to this day and will remain so essentially forever. The GE containment design was determined to be inadequate for containing a serious accident in 1972 by the US AEC. It took AEC's successor NRC only 20 years to finally get around to "requesting" that utilities voluntarily install hardened vents on their pressure suppression pools [aka "torus"] components. These hardened vents were installed in the plants at Daiichi as well as in US plants. They too were proved entirely inadequate to contain a meltdown.
Following the NRC's review of the disaster at Fukushima the commission issued a revised 2-phase order requiring all US Mark I & II plants to install more "reliable" hardened vents on their toruses by June of 2018, and to install a severe accident-capable hardened vent as well on their primary containment structure "drywell" by June of 2019. This latest vote served to reject the additional task force recommendation for high-efficiency external [vent in-line] filters to trap the radioactive contaminates that come along with the high pressures and explosive gases generated by a meltdown.
According to Paul Gunter, Director of the Reactor Oversight Project at Beyond Nuclear...
The Commission's August 19th majority vote is effectively a gag order on the American public's opportunity for formal input to fortify the continued operation of GE Mark I and Mark II reactors against the next nuclear catastrophy. Ironically, the international nuclear industry is simultaneously cashing in on the effort to restart Japan's nuclear power plants where their Nuclear Regulation Authority has ordered state-of-the-art engineered external filters on severe accident capable hardened containment vents as a prerequisite to resume operation. [...]
S'okay. We're changing the definition instead!
Proposed Rulemaking, public comments
Change the basis for "Standards for Protection Against Radiation" regulations from the old standard LNT/ALARA model to the [New! Improved!] Radiation Hormesis model. Radiation will be Good For You,
by definition!!!
Oy. It's almost like these so-brilliant nuke-thinkers have no clue what the 'selection' portion of evolutionary theory is, or how it works. Or, if they do, are entirely willing to sacrifice those who are not perfectly healthy 20-something ~180-200 pound males (their human corollary exemplar for specifically bred and specially selected lab mice) to improve the species (or some such rot). Who needs women, children, unborn babies or the less-than perfectly healthy? They won't be missed...