5 affected local governments must conduct a joint exercise of emergency plans in cooperation with the NRC licensee; and, any deficiencies in the planning identified by FEMA must be corrected before FEMA will grant approval. If a State and/or local government (s) refuse to submit plans to FEMA for review and/or refuse to participate in the joint exercise, it is an open question whether FEMA, and ultimately the NRC, can make the requisite findings. This is precisely the situation at the Shoreham plant on Long Island, where the State of New York and the County of Suffolk have refused to participate in emergency planning in light of their convictions that there is no way they can adequately protect their citizens in the event of a serious reactor accident. In July 1986, the NRC issued an interlocutory decision which presumed state and local government cooperation in the event of an emergency. Emergency planning issues are currently before the NRC Licensing Boards in the Shoreham case. No full power license has been issued by the NRC. The situation is muddied somewhat by the fact that in P.L. 96-295, Congress directed that the NRC could issue an operating license only if there were adequate State and local emergency response plans approved by FEMA, or in the absence of such plans "there exists a State, local, or utility plan (emphasis added) which provides reasonable assurance that public health and safety is not endangered" by operation of the plant. However, given the complexity of emergency planning, the requirement for coordinated actions, and the delicate questions of usurpation of government authority, to permit a utility plan to replace the required State and local plans in jurisdictions where State and local governments have refused to participate would raise many serious legal and practical questions. These issues doubtless will be litigated in the courts. PSNH EFFORTS TO CIRCUMVENT THE TEN MILE EMERGENCY PLANNING The Subcommittee investigation has established that PSNH initiated its "update" of the Seabrook Probabilistic Safety Assessment in order to determine if there was a defensible technical argument for seeking to reduce the emergency planning zone around the Seabrook nuclear power plant. If the NRC should concur and take formal action permitting PSNH to reduce the size of the zone in which emergency planning is required from 10 miles to 2 miles or less, the effect will be to exclude Massachusetts from the emergency planning process. Stress the uniqueness of Seabrook's containment, the NRC staff coached the utility. Lo and behold, the utility presents the NRC staff with an expert study proposing to demonstrate that Seabrook's containment is so safe that an accident with off-site consequences greater than two miles is virtually inconceivable. Something is very wrong here. The NRC staff has allowed itself to be co-opted by Public Service of New Hampshire. Rather than providing technical comment, it has crossed the line to advocacy of the utility's objective. Rather than regulating, the NRC staff has connived with the utility to circumvent the NRC's own regulations. It is as though a taxpayer who wanted to fudge on his taxes went to the IRS staff and worked out with them exactly how to do it just short of committing tax fraud, and then went ahead and filed his return. Of course, it would be worse if when the taxpayer first approached the IRS to enlist their participation, the IRS staff had put his request on an expedited review schedule to accommodate him, assigned staff to the job, and hired consultants for almost a quarter of a million dollars to help them. Startlingly, that is just what the NRC staff has done for Public Service of New Hampshire. If the utility's calculations, 10 miles minus Massachusetts equals 2 miles, which also equals a full-power operating license, are correct, then the utility has gotten the NRC staff to help punch the buttons on its calculators. People whose very lives and homes may be endangered have a right to trust that the Government agencies that are supposed to protect their interest and their health are rendering impartial judgments arrived at through a process that is open and fair and objective. That is the only way that the public's faith in the credibility of the regulatory process can be maintained. If the people perceive that the regulatory process has become a sham, or that some party is trying to circumvent the rules by a technical sleight of hand, or that federal regulators have failed to keep an appropriate distance between themselves and those who they are supposed to regulate, then the integrity of the system itself is called into question. And that injures all of us, because when people lose faith in the process by which they are governed at any level, it begins to erode the very foundation upon which our system of Government is based. [Testimony resumes on p. 74.] [A staff memorandum and chronology of events follow:] This memorandum responds to your request for a summary of the Subcommittee's investigation of emergency planning issues related to the Seabrook nuclear power plant. We stress that both the chronology of events and full explication of them should be regarded as incomplete, since the Subcommittee has not received all materials requested and still is continuing its investigation. As you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has granted a fuel-load license to Public Service of New Hampshire for the Seabrook plant. The licensing board currently is considering the question of issuance of a low-power operating license for the facility. Decisions regarding a full-power license will not be made for some time; however, they are complicated by the fact that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and thirteen local communities have refused to participate in the emergency planning process in light of their conviction that no practicable emergency planning is possible which could adequately protect the health and safety of their citizens. Under the NRC's regulations, certain findings regarding the adequacy of emergency planning must be made before a full-power operating license can be issued (see below). The utility, in close cooperation with the NRC staff, has been conducting technical studies with the objective of demonstrating that the Seabrook containment is so unusually strong that a reduction in the size of the "emergency planning zone" (EPZ) around the plant is warranted. It has become apparent from public and internal agency documents as well as from comments offered by the utility and NRC staff that: o a key objective of Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH) technical studies is to reduce the size of the emergency planning zone for Seabrook from 10 miles to 2 miles, thereby excluding the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from emergency planning decisions required for a full-power operating license; 2 * technical work undertaken to rationalize this decision was 2.sreč specifically to circumvent the possibility that Massachusetts might refuse to participate in emergency planning on the acounds that it was impracticable for the Seabrook site; WRC staff appears to have become an adjunct to PSNH enate and is providing valuable technical assistance to assist the company in seeking its objective. "estigation by Subcommittee Staff suggests that this effort dect the size of the emergency planning zone is questionable So, the following reasons. The NRC staff has held a long series of meetings with the and its consultants, most of them private or without maar rotol public notice, that have served to guide the applicant 3* attempt to bolster its technical arguments important for we, to an exemption from the emergency planning regulations in , & to reduce the size of the EPZ. It appears that the NRC wow we have crossed the line from technical comment to advocacy >ss.sting this applicant in moving toward its objective. On January, 1986 NRC Staff rejected a request from re Gas & Electric Co. for an exemption from the regulations ce the size of the EPZ at the Calvert Cliffs plant, only favoring a generic rulemaking over a "piecemeal, -gecific approach." NRC has provided no evidence to justify Dat same policy is not being followed ten months later for Recent NRC statements about unresolved safety issues and ale: ament analysis techniques, some in response to inquiries by odcommittee, contradict the utility's claims that the w containment is so strong that it is virtually impossible ^ a ærere accident with significant off-site consequences more *her ? miles from the plant could occur. A close reading of NRC * suggests that the uncertainties surrounding containment * estimates, accident phenomena and sequences, and source **** so great that any efforts to use such claims to support section in the EPZ appear to strain credulity. A cursory review of the technical issues suggests that licant's technical arguments represent only one subset of *** Possible scenarios. Many technical uncertainties suggest he whet, equally tenable assumptions are equally reasonable. 3 In summary, this effort to reduce the size of the emergency planning zone appears to be a bold attempt by the utility to circumvent the Commission's emergency planning regulations by creating the subterfuge of a purported invincible technological barrier to disaster, thereby justifying an exemption from emergency planning regulations. The objective appears to be to attempt to expedite the securing of a full-power license for the facility, at the expense of the citizens of Massachusetts and their rightful participation in the licensing process. To proceed in this fashion would ignore existing emergency planning regulations which are not being met, and would cast aside the belief by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and thirteen local communities that no conceivable emergency planning could adequately protect the health and safety of their citizens. NRC staff appears to have had few misgivings about whether or not their participation in these discussions dignify this effort, and seem immune to considerations of whether their efforts are defensible in light of the serious public and legal controversies surrounding the emergency planning issues in particular and the licensing of the plant generally. We provide below: The o a brief history of the development and application of existing emergency planning regulations as they pertain to the reactor licensing process; o a history of PSNH's and the NRC staff's efforts to create a technical rationalization for reducing the size of the EPZ, O NRC staff's comments rejecting an earlier application to reduce the size of the EPZ at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant; O a brief enumeration of the substantial technical uncertainties, many admitted by the NRC, that plague the issues of severe accident analysis, containment performance, and related matters, and several illustrative comments regarding the need to plan for severe accidents; and o a summary of technical issues that PSNH and the NRC staff may have ignored in their analysis of the updated Seabrook probabilistic risk assessment. |