When the Federal Emergency Management Agency wanted to defer an exercise of the New Hampshire emergency plans alone because those plans weren't very good and because when two states are involved FEMA prefers to hold a joint exercise. FEMA received a phone call from the White House urging them to proceed with an exercise for New Hampshire alone.

The FEMA official who received that phone call informed the subcommittee that the White House representative told him that he was contacting FEMA because Governor Sununu had been calling the White House to complain.

Moreover, when FEMA gave New Hampshire's emergency plans what amounts to failing grades, Governor Sununu phoned and threatened to "go to the White House to clean out [FEMA's] staff operation."

Political interference and political intimidation have no place in the licensing process for Seabrook or any other nuclear plant. When it happens, the people have a right to know about it. Bringing it out into the bright light of public scrutiny is the best way to put a stop to it.

Unfortunately, the problems do not stop there. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency charged with protecting the public from the hazards of nuclear power, is also responsible for the licensing of nuclear power plants. Before a full power license can be issued, the NRC has to make a finding that an emergency plan exists which provides "reasonable assurance that public health and safety is not endangered by operation of the facility concerned." Under NRC regulations now in force, such plans must cover a tenmile radius around the plant.

As you all know, six Massachusetts communities lie within that ten-mile radius. All six of those towns have refused to participate in the development of emergency plans for Seabrook. Similarly, Governor Dukakis has refused to submit plans for Massachusetts. All share the view that no emergency plan could adequately protect the health and safety of their citizens in the event of an accident. That view is also held by seven New Hampshire communities that also have declined to participate in the process.

So, the utility and the Governor of New Hampshire, both of whom want the plant to start up as quickly as possible, have a real problem on their hands. How can they get around recalcitrant Massachusetts whose border lies 2 miles, 690 feet from Seabrook? One attractive option was for the utility to go to the NRC for an exemption from the emergency planning regulations to reduce the radius from the required 10 miles to only two miles. But the utility was not willing to submit a formal exemption request to the Commissioners without a clear indication that it would be granted.

Enter the NRC staff whose job is not just to provide technical comments to licensees, but also to make a recommendation to the Commissioners themselves on any exemption request of this nature and to participate itself as a party in the licensing proceeding.

For more than 15 months, the NRC staff has been assisting the utility in how best to support a petition for a reduced emergency planning zone. The NRC staff admonished the utility that it was going down the wrong path when it attempted to justify its scheme on the basis of recent general source term research.

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:

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;

o technical work undertaken to rationalize this decision was initiated specifically to circumvent the possibility that Massachusetts might refuse to participate in emergency planning on the grounds that it was impracticable for the Seabrook site;

O NRC staff appears to have become an adjunct to PSNH efforts and is providing valuable technical assistance to assist the company in seeking its objective.

Investigation by Subcommittee Staff suggests that this effort to reduce the size of the emergency planning zone is questionable for the following reasons.

(1) The NRC staff has held a long series of meetings with the utility and its consultants, most of them private or without meaningful public notice, that have served to guide the applicant in its attempt to bolster its technical arguments important for seeking an exemption from the emergency planning regulations in order to to reduce the size of the EPZ. It appears that the NRC staff may have crossed the line from technical comment to advocacy in assisting this applicant in moving toward its objective.

(2) On January, 1986 NRC Staff rejected a request from Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. for an exemption from the regulations to reduce the size of the EPZ at the Calvert Cliffs plant, specifically favoring a generic rulemaking over a "piecemeal, site-specific approach." NRC has provided no evidence to justify why that same policy is not being followed ten months later for Seabrook.

(3) Recent NRC statements about unresolved safety issues and containment analysis techniques, some in response to inquiries by this Subcommittee, contradict the utility's claims that the Seabrook containment is so strong that it is virtually impossible that a severe accident with significant off-site consequences more than 2 miles from the plant could occur. A close reading of NRC documents suggests that the uncertainties surrounding containment failure estimates, accident phenomena and sequences, and source terms are so great that any efforts to use such claims to support a reduction in the EPZ appear to strain credulity.

(4) A cursory review of the technical issues suggests that the applicant's technical arguments represent only one subset of numerous possible scenarios. Many technical uncertainties suggest that other, 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;

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.