The Lessons that should have been learned

The Two Lies are Lies

This should have been the big take away. Three Mile Island brazenly and unmistakably exposed the nuclear establishment's two big lies.

1. The Negligible Probability Lie. The probability of a significant release is not negligible. The probability of the next release is 1.00. It is inevitable. It is only a matter of when.

The usual way that the nuclear establishment tells the Negligible Probability Lie is they throw out a bogusly small frequency number, say 1 in 17000 reactor years, expecting the public to interpret this as a ``no need to worry about it" number. But in a fully decarbonized, all nuclear world we will need at least 25,000 large reactors. So even if the 1 in 17000 number were correct, we could expect a TMI-or-larger release about once a year. The actual performance to date is about 1 TMI+ release every 4000 reactor years, in which case we are talking about roughly 6 TMI+ releases a year.

2. The Intolerable Harm Lie. The radiation harm associated with a release is not intolerable. In this case, if there was any harm, it was far too small to be detected. If the TMI release had been more than 1000 times larger as it was at Windscale, there would have been no detectable harm. If the TMI release had been 300,000 times larger as it was at Fukushima, there would still have been no detectable public harm due to radiation.

At one point, the Rogovin Report appears to realize this:

Just as the regulators must change their attitudes to appreciate that this [the public's] perception of risk cannot be dealt with by trying to convince the public that it ``can't happen", so renewed efforts must be made to educate that the risks and benefits of nuclear power must be weighed against the very real health and environmental risks associated with other forms of power generation.\cite{rogovin-1980}[p 91]

But there is no follow up. Nor does this insight show up in any of their recommendations. The problem is, if the two lies are false, then there is no need for an NRC. And neither the Rogovin nor the Kemeny report is going to go there. //

The utility filed a four billion dollar suit against the NRC alleging the NRC's failure to tell MetEd about what happened at Davis Besse caused the loss. The way this works is MetEd first had to file a complaint with the NRC. The NRC Commission rejected the complaint on the grounds that it is not responsible for what happens at a nuclear power plant.

The commission does not, thereby, certify to the industry that the industry's designs and procedures are adequate to protect its equipment or operations,\cite{upi-1981}

This rejection allowed MetEd to go to the Courts. The court came up with a different out. It turns out the Davis Besse loss of feedwater was listed in a routine monthly Licensee Event Report that the NRC sends out to all the plants. According to the court, that's all it had to do.

When an agency determines the amount of information necessary to fulfill its regulatory mission, it is exercising the essence of its discretionary function.\cite{yorkdailyrecord-1984}

Let me get this straight. The NRC admits it is not responsible for nuclear plant safety. And the courts say the NRC has the discretionary power not to tell the plants that the training that the NRC has approved and required is both wrong and dangerously misleading. What does it have to do?

To survive, the NRC must spread fear and then sell a bogus solution to that bogus fear. To survive, the NRC must promulgate the Two Lies, even if events like Three Mile Island prove both are false. That's what it has to do and continued to do.
People who screw up must pay

Accountability shows up almost no where in the Kemeny and Rogovin reports. There is one exception. The TMI Reactor Operators lost their licenses and had their careers ruined, for doing what they had been trained to do. [3] And when that failed, they did a pretty good job of coping with the resulting mess. They were not culprits; they were scapegoats. //

[3] This was based on an NRC Office of Inspection and Enforcement Report which pinned the blame squarely on the operators.\cite{nrc-oie} The problem was their mindset.

There is considerable evidence of a ``mindset", that overfilling the reactor cooling system (making the system solid) was to be avoided at almost any cost. Undue attention by the TMI operators to avoiding a solid system led them to ignore other procedural instructions and indications that the core was not being properly cooled.\cite{nrc-oie}[p 2]

Nowhere in this 800 page exercise in unapologetic deflection is there any admission that this strange mindset was a product of NRC approved and required training, nor that the NRC had ample, multiple warnings that the training was dangerously wrong.