Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

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One other feature which is extremely important in these evaluations
is operator action. For the most part these methods assumes
the operator does not take effective action in responding to the
emergency condition.
We know that is in effect in doing these risk assessments and
have launched a program which now is being done cooperatively
with the major national utility in France, to measure the response
time of operators under full-scale simulation of accident condition.
We are not finished with that, but what we have so far is an indication
that if we apply the data, we will find that the probabilities
of getting into a truly severe core melt condition are 10 times lower
than our present methods would indicate.
I would like now to discuss— my paper points out the many other
areas of work we have undertaken and reliability, particularly to
address the lessons from TMI-2, and I will not repeat those.
Many of these actions that we took were done at the request of
the Utility Nuclear Power Oversight Committee of the utility. A
steering group of chief executive officers of the nuclear utility.
Shortly after Chernobyl, this group supported an industry technical
review group, functioning with AIF staff support, to evaluate
the causes, postaccident response, and recovery experience of the
Chernobyl accident, identify whatever lessons there may be for
U.S. commercial nuclear powerplants and responding to the legitimate
questions raised by the accident.
That group met on May 29, and finalized the industry efforts on
Chernobyl, and EPRI has been asked by UNPOC to provide technical
support for that evaluation. So our staff has been working to
understand the events of Chernobyl and to develop an understanding
of what lessons from that event can be applied to our U.S. commercigd
nuclear power industry.
A thorough understanding of the sequence of events and a thorough
understanding of the performance of all the safety systems
and operator actions during the event is crucial to developing
sound conclusions and recommendations.
We are concerned that pressures on the NRC and on our industry
to produce quick answers and quick fixes in response to Chernobyl
may preclude doing the thorough job of analysis that is so
importgmt to rational decision-making. We must avoid the temptation
to shoot from the hip.
I would like to make a comment on some discussions earlier
today which I believe are of the nature of shooting from the hip.
EPA was challenged on why it did not consider seriously a report
of a measurement in Europe of 1.5 millirem per hour, or 1,500
roentgens; 1,500 roentgens will kill a person in 1 to 2 hours, so on
the very face of it that information is inappropriate.
There is also great discussion of the possibility of several hundred
thousand people getting cancer as a result of the Chernobyl
accident. Now, I agree with the statement made by EPA that they
do not want to make guesses without the information on what the
exposure of those people would be.
But we do have information from the tragedy of the bombings in
Japan. There were 285,000 survivors of that bombing, which as you
well know killed tens of thousands of people, who had excess radiation
dose.