Emergency Safety Violation at Diablo Being Explored

by Jack McCurdy

A possible safety violation of emergency procedures at the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant has been discovered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has called a meeting with the owner/operator of the plant, Pacific Gas & Electric—but not here in San Luis Obispo in whose vicinity the facility is located but in Texas.

Mothers for Peace, a leading champion of  the long-standing challenge to the public safety of the plant, strongly objected to the meeting being scheduled in Texas, branded it “incomprehensible” and immediately called on the Commission to reschedule the meeting from Arlington, Texas, to somewhere with a one-hour driving distance of Diablo Canyon. Numerous meetings of the Commission or its staff in California have commonly been held in San Luis Obispo.

The meeting in Arlington between the Commission and PG&E has been set by the Commission for Wednesday, Jan. 14, between 1 and 4  p.m.

Meanwhile, Friends of the Earth, an environmental organization, disclosed that it has—through filings under the Freedom of Information Act—obtained emails it said shows the Commission and  PG&E “may have worked together to counteract widespread news coverage of warnings” by Dr.Michael Peck, former chief inspector at the plant, suggesting that “new seismic data” demonstrate “the aging nuclear plant…is operating with an invalid license and may not be safe from previously-unknown earthquake faults.” Peck  filed his conclusions with the NRC about three years ago, and they under review by the Commission until recently when his warnings were denied. (Details of Friends of the Earth information are at Emails Suggest NRC and PG&E Colluded to Downplay Diablo Canyon Earthquake Danger). Peck’a arguments were made public by him some four months ago.

The Commission-PG&E meeting will be held “to discuss the safety significance of an apparent violation related to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant emergency preparedness plan,” a Commission media release dated Jan. 2 said. The release explained further: "The NRC uses color-coded inspection findings and performance indicators to assess nuclear plant performance. The colors start with green and then increase to white, yellow, or red in order of increasing safety significance. The NRC has preliminarily determined that the severity level III (3) violation has low to moderate safety significance, or is ‘white.'”

The NRC statement continued, "During an NRC inspection, inspectors identified that the licensee’s emergency plan did not include a measure to recommend evacuation of the public for areas over the ocean within the 10-mile emergency planning zone. Upon further review, the inspectors determined that the licensee had changed its procedure without prior NRC approval as is required if a change decreases the effectiveness of those plans. In this case, PG&E did not identify the change as a decrease in effectiveness and therefore did not request NRC approval.”

PG&E claims it has “resolved this issue and put measures in place to prevent a recurrence,” the release said.

The procedure for dealing with such emergency plans, it added, is this: “Licensees (such as PG&E) recommend protective actions to local and state officials, who then make the actual call about what protective actions the public should take. In this case, the county had procedures in place that included evaluating the ocean for evacuation.”

The release claimed that “at no time was the public going to be allowed to stay in an area that had the potential for radioactivity if an event had occurred.”

The NRC release said the meeting can be listened to by telephoning 1- 888-469-0950 and entering passcode 34924.

Mothers for Peace said that “holding this meeting in Arlington, Texas. may be convenient for NRC officials. But it is not convenient for PG&E, their customers, nor residents impacted by any accident scenarios.” It also urged that the NRC “utilize state-of-the-art webcast technology so that people can participate with visual as well as audio broadcast”  to monitor the meeting.

Friends of the Earth said it obtained more than 100 pages of NRC emails through the Freedom of Information Act request. “Many emails were heavily redacted, but nonetheless show that the NRC knew the exact date and time PG&E would release a long-awaited report on Diablo Canyon’s seismic safety,” Friends said, “and the NRC responded by simultaneously releasing its verdict rejecting the former inspector’s (Peck) dissent. The documents also show that while the NRC denied collaborating on release of the reports, they had worked for weeks on a media strategy based on prior knowledge of the PG&E report.”