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gressman Chet Atkins from the State of Massachusetts, who is a member of the Interior Committee, which has jurisdiction over nuclear power oversight; and also with us today is Congressman Bob Smith from the State of New Hampshire, who clearly, as well, has a tremendous interest in the resolution of the issues.

We welcome them both to our subcommittee's deliberations and welcome their full participation at any point in the proceedings. We now turn to our first panel that will testify today, and that panel is, indeed, a distinguished one and one that is a privilege for this Subcommittee to greet.

We have His Excellency the Governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis. The Governor agonized for months over how to deal with the emergency planning question. In September, he reached a courageous decision not to submit such plans. I hope that he will illuminate our committee on his thinking, and I note as well that he is joined by Sharon Pollard, who is the Secretary of Energy for the State of Massachusetts, and Charles Barry, who is the Secretary for Public Safety.

We welcome you, Governor, and we look forward to your testimony.

TESTIMONY OF HON. MICHAEL S. DUKAKIS, GOVERNOR, COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS, ACCOMPANIED BY SHARON POLLARD, SECRETARY OF ENERGY

Governor DUKAKIS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you all for giving me and giving us the opportunity to appear before you, especially in one of my favorite Massachusetts communities. Those of you who are historians know that this was the place that John Greenleaf Whittier lived in for much of his adult life, a member of the Massachusetts Legislature who ran for but never made it to Congress.

It is also the community where my mother came to teach in 1927 at the Junior High School, so there are some very close personal ties with Amesbury, and it is great to be with you.

Let me commend you for bringing this hearing to Amesbury, and also for your continuing effort to hold the nuclear program in this country to the highest levels of safety.

The issue of safety is what brings us here today, and specifically our obligation to protect the public from the consequences of an accident at Seabrook.

As Governor of Massachusetts, I have a very serious responsibility under Federal law and Federal regulations, and that is to determine the adequacy of emergency plans for the Massachusetts communities near Seabrook.

Let me state at the outset something that should be obvious: Emergency plans do not make a nuclear plant safe. A safe nuclear plant is a plant where accidents do not happen because of superior design, construction, management and maintenance.

As Chernobyl reminded us vividly, nuclear accidents have an extraordinary destructive potential no matter how unlikely we may think they are. Thus, we must concentrate our efforts on actions which will prevent accidents from happening.

In this, Mr. Chairman, you have shown great leadership over the years, and for this, we are all grateful.

Nevertheless, emergency planning is important. We saw this at Three Mile Island where so many public officials found themselves improvising a response to that emergency. And after Three Mile Island, the NRC wisely promulgated new rules which called upon the States to devise emergency evacuation plans and determine their adequacy before nuclear power plants could be licensed for operation.

In short, the NRC was acknowledging, and rightly so that accidents can happen. In fact, the Commission's emergency planning guidelines instruct Governors to assume that they will happen. Those guidelines instruct us to assume that they will happen. The Governors are not asked to make a judgment call on whether or not an accident will occur, and how bad it will be. The Governors are asked to prepare for a wide range of accidents, including the worst, and to certify that emergency plans have been devised which are adequate to protect the public health and safety.

Let me repeat that: that emergency plans must be adequate to protect the public health and safety in the event of a radiological emergency.

The guidelines do not say minimally adequate; they say adequate to protect the public health and safety.

Mr. Chairman, we have taken very seriously our obligation to apply this standard to emergency plans to Seabrook. I and Secretary Pollard, Secretary Barry, and all of us in the administration in Boston have spent months analyzing draft plans for Seabrook, and sifting through evidence from Chernobyl.

As nearly everyone knows, I announced my finding on September 20. I released a lengthy statement on my decision, and I have included that as part of my testimony with the committee, and I would urge the committee members and staff to review it in detail. Mr. MARKEY. The testimony without objection will be included in the record in its entirety.

Governor DUKAKIS. But let me repeat just briefly some of the key points in that statement.

First, in instructing the Governors to prepare for a wide range of possible accidents, the Federal guidelines further instruct us that a major release of radiation can occur within 30 minutes after the onset of an accident at a nuclear plant, and that radiation can reach a radius of 5 miles within 2 hours.

Massachusetts Civil Defense employed a Federal computer model, the same model used by the State of New Hampshire, to make evacuation estimates in the Seabrook area.

Our evacuation time estimates for the six Massachusetts emergency planning communities range from 3 hours and 40 minutes, under the best conditions to 8 hours under the worst conditions.

If we assume, as we must, that the New Hampshire communities are evacuating at the same time, then those estimates would be even higher.

The evacuation time estimates are high for many reasons, but chief among them is the fact that in this area, we have many, many people, particularly during the summer and a very constricted road and transportation network.

Plum Island, for example, is just a few miles from here. It is a very popular place to visit in the summer, and is served by a fairly narrow two-lane road. In short, Seabrook, quite simply, was a very poor place to build a nuclear plant. Years ago, before the NRC allowed the plant to begin construction, two Massachusetts Attorneys General, Bob Quinn and Frank Bellotti, warned the NRC that the site posed grave problems for emergency planning. Unfortunately, the NRC refused to listen to them until after Three Mile Island, and at that point Seabrook was already under construction.

There are other problems with Seabrook that the Chernobyl disaster brought home to us this year. After I suspended our Seabrook planning, I asked Professor Al Carnesale at the Kennedy School of Harvard to assist us in assessing that accident. In the weeks that followed, we concluded that the Soviets had suffered damage that was well beyond the level that we would find tolerable, but that in many respects they were very, very lucky.

In fact Chernobyl was in many ways a best-case accident, if there is such a thing. Its radioactive plume shot up to a very high altitude. Hot, dry weather helped lift the cloud up to a level where it was dispersed over a wide area. Prevailing winds blew the cloud to the west, away from populated areas, during the first crucial hours of the accident. If the winds had blown to the southeast, if weather conditions had been such at Chernobyl that winds had blown to the southeast toward the city of Kiev, a city of some three million people, we would have witnessed a disaster of immense proportions.

People living near the Chernobyl reactor benefited from heavy masonry construction which proved to be relatively good shelter.

Despite the fact that the Soviets had little advanced planning in place, they were able during those crucial early hours to prepare for mass evacuation and part of those people could stay in their apartments, and those apartments did, because of their construction, provide fairly adequate shelter.

When radiation reached a level at which Soviets' practice requires that evacuation takes place, the town of Pripyat was evacuated in a little over two hours.

If a serious accident and release of radiation occurred at Seabrook, it is not very likely, Mr. Chairman, that we would enjoy the same luck as the Soviets. The weather at Seabrook is extremely changeable, windy, and as we all know, hardly ever hot and dry. The predominant construction in the area is not masonry, but wood construction which offers minimal protection as shelter.

We have a huge summer population. It would be nearly impossible to shelter it all, much less adequately; and it would take hours to evacuate people.

When all the evidence was considered, I concluded that no emergency plan could adequately protect the public health and safety of the people who live in or visit or would be in those six communities.

And therefore I did not and will not submit evacuation plans.
Now, I know that witnesses may follow me today--

Mr. MARKEY. Again, please, I ask the audience, in consideration of all the other people who are here and a number of witnesses

which we are going to have to hear in order to have a complete hearing today, please refrain from any outbursts of any nature.

Governor DUKAKIS. I know that witnesses may follow me today to assert that the NRC's idea of an adequate plan is less stringent than mine, and that the NRC's judgment ought to prevail. Yet, I have to assume that the NRC knew what it was doing back in 1980 when it created the emergency planning rules and delegated to the governors the responsibility to determine the adequacy of those plans.

Mr. Chairman, the NRC acted wisely when it gave the emergency planning responsibility to the States. Only the States can quickly mobilize the resources necessary to protect the public during disasters of the magnitude of a nuclear accident. I believe we have exercised our responsibility toward emergency planning for Seabrook in good faith, and I believe that my decision is the only responsible one that could have been made.

I trust and expect that that decision will be upheld, and I welcome your continued support for it.

Both I and Secretary Pollard and Secretary Barry will be heppy to respond to any questions that you might have, Mr. Chairman. Mr. MARKEY. Thank you, Governor, very much.

They do not have individual statements to make?

Governor DUKAKIS. No, sir.

Mr. MARKEY. Thank you.

[Testimony resumes on p. 104.]

[The prepared testimony of Governor Dukakis and attachment

follow:]

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Testimony of Governor chael S. Dukakis
Delivered Before The

House Subcommittee or Fnergy Conservation and Power

Amesbury, Massachusetts
November 18, 1986

Thank you, "r. Chairman, and a'low me to commend you, not only for bringing this hearing to Amesbury today, but for your continuing effort to hold the nuclear power program in this country to the highest levels of safety.

The issue of safety is what brings us here today, the safety of the people of Massachusetts and New Hampshire who live and work near the Seabrook nuclear power plant, and the safety of the public at large.

Mr. Chairman, as you know only too well, nuclear plant safety is the product of many different and complex factors. Yet one thing about nuclear plants is very simple and clear: the safest plant is not the plant with the best emergency plans, or the strongest containment vessel, or the greatest number of back-up safety systems. The safest plants are those where accidents never happen and never will.

Maybe this sounds simplistic, like saying that the best evacuation plan is the one we never have to use. But it is true. For any accident that leads to the use of back-up safety systems, or brings the containment into use, or leads to evacuation- any accident that brings these things about will also bring about some damage to the nuclear reactor, and the chance of damage to the environment and to people, regardless of how good the safety systems and the evacuation planning is for that nuclear plant. This confronts us with an enormous challenge. As we were reminded so vividly by Chernobyl, nuclear energy and its by-products have extraordinary destructive potential. Even a little damage from a little nuclear accident may be too much for us to bear.

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