Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

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As a nuclear physicist who has prepared many theoretical studies on
reactor accidents, I appreciate this opportunity to comment for the
National Audubon Society on the relevance of the Chernobyl accident to the
U.S.
nuclear program.
The Chernobyl accident has many lessons to teach us:
Lesson 1: Reactor accidents, as predicted by theoretical computer models, are
serious business.
At Chernobyl, millions of curies of radioiodine and radiocesium were
released into the environment. Thousands of cancers will likely
3 4
result from the accident over the next 30 years. ' The nightmarish
vision, long feared by environmentalists, of a landscape contaminated by
radioactivity has become a reality in the Ukraine. Russians in the
Ukraine find themselves having to fear the very environment itself, the
soil, fields, crops, gardens, even the beaches.
Lesson 2: Strong containments are valuable safety features.
We are fortunate in the United States that many of our reactors have
large-volume containments that can hold enormous quantities of steam
during an accident. Unfortunately, a significant fraction of U.S.
reactors do not have strong containments. Reactors with ice-condenser
safety systems will fail at very low pressures, and all 25 of the older,
small-volume containments made by General
Electric will quickly burst
when assaulted by the copious amounts of steam and other gases that are
likely to be produced in a core-melt situation.