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HomeMy WebLinkAboutMinutes - 20020502 APPROVED 6/18/02 MINUTES ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS CHATHAM COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS PUBLIC FORUM MAY 2, 2002 The Orange County and Chatham County Board of Commissioners held a public forum on May 2, 2002 at 7:30 p.m. at the William Friday Center entitled, "Risks and Response: Nuclear Terrorism in the Triangle." ORANGE COUNTY COMMISSIONERS PRESENT: Chair Barry Jacobs and Commissioners Stephen H. Halkiotis, Margaret W. Brown, Moses Carey, Jr., and Alice M. Gordon CHATHAM COUNTY COMMISSIONERS PRESENT: Chair Gary Phillips and Commissioners Margaret Pollard, Bob Atwater, Rick Givens, and Carl Outz NOTE: ALL DOCUMENTS REFERRED TO IN THESE MINUTES ARE IN THE PERMANENT AGENDA FILE IN THE CLERK'S OFFICE. 1. WELCOME Commissioner Brown welcomed everyone to the public forum. This public forum is to discuss the risks of nuclear terrorism in our region. A panel of experts was assembled in the field of nuclear safety, who join our own emergency management officials to engage in a frank, open discussion about the risks we face and possible methods to help reduce the potential danger of nuclear terrorism in the triangle area. The Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant, along with its spent nuclear storage facilities, makes it a tempting target for those with the means and the will to exploit it. After 9/11, we know that we have vulnerabilities. It is my hope that when we leave this public forum tonight, we have a better understanding of the risks we face and the level of preparation that will be required to help reduce and/or eliminate those risks. She recognized all of the elected officials in the audience. She read a note from Legislative Senator Wib Gulley expressing his regret that he could not attend. He supports this forum and the NC WARN risk reduction plan. She introduced Commissioner Halkiotis, who gave some opening remarks. 2. OPENING REMARKS Commissioner Halkiotis read a prepared statement and said that the thoughts were his and his only. Here in Orange County we believe in and practice free and open debate and we welcome citizen participation in the democratic process. This forum is an example of that process and I am delighted that everyone is in attendance. In the preface to Gordon Prang's classic, At Dawn We Slept—The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, it is clearly stated that the surprise attack on December 7, 1941 not only was a daring and brilliant naval operation, but it also heralded a turning point in history. I quote, "Pearl Harbor did not unfold with all of the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. The operation was not an act of God. The options on both sides of the Pacific were in human hands, not in the laps of the gods." I was not born when Pearl Harbor was attacked with the resulting loss of over 2,400 American military personnel and civilians, but I was in Hillsborough, North Carolina on September 11, 2001, enjoying a morning cup of coffee with our Chair Barry Jacobs when news reached us of the attacks in New York City and Washington, DC. The subsequent loss of over 3,000 lives in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and in the barren field in Pennsylvania delivered a cruel and unprecedented blow to the very soul of the American people. Once again it can be said that the options to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens here in Orange County and across the state of North Carolina are in human hands, your hands, the people who are here tonight — not in the laps of gods. The events of that fateful day in September has brought the possibility of horrific death and destruction from the world of Hollywood to the real world that you and I wake up to each and every morning. The highly improbable is no longer that, and all that is possible with the rules of civilized warfare, whatever that means, no longer apply. The disclosures made to citizens in the post-September 11 days that foreign terrorists back in the mid-1990's were planning to fly high- jacked planes into the Eiffel Tower and nuclear power plants raised our concerns to even greater heights. Our destiny and our lives lie in human hands, your hands — not in the laps of gods. To simply sit back and assume that someone else is going to do it for us is sheer folly. Citizens must get concerned and insist that government officials—federal, state, and local — get involved and plan for any eventuality. Death and destruction can come from the sky, or from the ground, or from the sea. They know no boundaries, they do not discriminate. The threat to the Shearon Harris nuclear facility in Wake County and the threat to trains carrying nuclear waste material are very real. It was recently discovered that two work-release prisoners got aboard a train right here in North Carolina two weeks ago; a train that was hauling nuclear waste to the Shearon Harris facility. They saw the armed guards and then some event took place where they jumped off the train and took off. This information was not obtained via normal channels; it had to be obtained through other channels. But it is now being reported on local news. U. S. citizens have a right to know. The threat to rail cars and trucks carrying other deadly products and waste products are very real and tempting targets to those whose mission is death and destruction on innocent people —all of us innocent people who represent a part of the earth's civilization that these terrorists are determined to destroy. Shearon Harris is close to the Raleigh/Durham airport and Shearon Harris is close to significant public water supplies. Shearon Harris is close to a population cluster of over one million people, and this spent nuclear fuel storage facility poses an inviting target to evildoers. Rail transportation and truck transport pose serious safety issues in their own right even without terrorists, and the need for regional planning is obvious. Our panel of experts this evening is here to help us understand the consequences of chemical, biological, or nuclear terrorist attack on our North Carolina home. Don't let my accent fool you, I came here in 1967 to graduate school, and I have stayed, and this is my home. Please be sure and read the handout entitled, "News from Ed Markey", a Massachusetts congressman who was concerned about security gaps at nuclear facilities across the United States. Please study the maps provided showing school locations out to the 50-mile radius line, railroad lines, water supplies, and towns and cities in close proximity to the Shearon Harris facility. Please be sure and place a push pin to show where you live and what circle you are in —the 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50-mile zone. Do you really believe that a 10-mile planning area is truly realistic and the winds will never blow in your direction? This program is designed to help all of us achieve a greater understanding of the issues involved, and how we need to plan on a regional basis to respond in a meaningful manner, and mitigation efforts we can take and ask for to lessen the risks of all involved. All of our citizens, even those who aren't here this evening deserve that consideration. An invitation to participate in this forum was extended to CP&L officials, and they declined, and I'm sorry that they did. An invitation was extended to the state office of Emergency Management, by our Emergency Management Director Nick Waters, and they also declined (booing). The Orange County Commissioners have sent two resolutions to the Governor asking him to follow the lead of other Governors in the United States and station National Guard troops around all nuclear power facilities. We did not ask for anti-aircraft missile batteries to be placed around such facilities as they have done in France. Several months have elapsed and we have yet to receive a reply from our Governor, and I'm sorry to have to report that, but that's the way it is. Everyone else in the program, these distinguished people up here, have accepted the invitation and thus, they are here. I thank all of you for attending and for recognizing that this event is not designed as an opportunity to gang up on CP&L and the Shearon Harris plant. It is designed as an opportunity for all of us to have an open and honest discussion of the serious threats posed here and everywhere else in this country where our enemies have cleverly thought of using our own infrastructure as a ready- made weapon to destroy us. Very much unheard of, only in Hollywood do they think of stuff like that. I want to live in Orange County for a long time with my wife, and my family, and the dog, and the three cats, and everything else that comes onto our property. What is discussed here this evening is relevant to the rest of the United States, for we have entered a new period in our history. Our destiny truly lies in our hands, your hands — not in the laps of gods or in government bureaucracies in Washington or Raleigh, or in corporate headquarters elsewhere. Thank you for being here tonight. He introduced the moderator for the evening, Sharron Hinton, from the Orange County Manager's office. 3. EMERGENCY AND RESPONSE a. Introductions —Sharron Hinton, Orange County Manager's Office Due to the tight schedule of our program, there are no formal breaks scheduled for tonight. The restrooms and telephones are located to the right and left of the lobby area. Please feel free to avail yourself as necessary. Following the presentation and panel discussion, we will have a question and answer period. We ask that you please hold your questions and comments until that time. If you have questions, you may write them on the orange cards located in your programs, and our staff will bring those forward for discussion, or you may come to one of the microphones located in the aisles. As a follow up to tonight's forum, a summary of the discussion points and questions and answers will be mailed to all participants. In the event that time precludes us from addressing all questions, we will respond to the remaining questions written on the orange cards, and include those in our forum summary document. Now to our program. The order of the presenters has been slightly amended from that on your written program. Mr. David Lochbaum is our first speaker. He is a Nuclear Safety Engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists. He leads the organization's efforts to ensure the safety of nuclear power by monitoring the U. S. commercial nuclear plants to identify and publicize safety risks. Mr. Lochbaum has more than 17 years of experience in commercial nuclear power, plant startup testing, operations, licensing, software development, training, and design engineering. Our second presenter, Dr. Edwin Lyman, is Scientific Director of the Nuclear Control Institute, a position he has held since 1995. The NCI is a nuclear, non-proliferation research and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. Dr. Lyman earned a Doctorate in Physics from Cornell University in 1992 and was post-Doctoral Research Associate at Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies. His research focuses on security and environmental issues associated with the management of nuclear materials and the operation of nuclear power plants. On June 1'`, Dr. Lyman will succeed Paul Leventhal as President of NCI. Our third presenter is Dr. Steven Wing. Dr. Wing is an epidemiologist and faculty member at the UNC School of Public Health. He is a leading researcher in the field of radiation health effects. Dr. Wing has conducted studies of radiation and cancer risks of nuclear industry workers at Oak Ridge, Hanford, Los Alamos, and Savannah River, and of cancer incidents in relation to the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. Following Dr. Wing is Alan Rimer. Mr. Rimer has served on the Board of Directors for the Orange Water and Sewer Authority since July 1995. He chairs OWASA's Natural Resources and Technical Systems Committee. He is National Practice Leader with the international consulting firm of Black and Beech. Mr. Rimer is a Registered Engineer in five states, including the state of North Carolina. He holds a master's degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from Duke University, and has completed additional graduate work in environmental engineering, modeling, and economics at Duke University. He has served on a number of national advisory boards involved with pollution prevention, environmental technologies, and energy related technologies, and is an adjunct faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Next we will hear from Nick Waters and his staff. Nick is the Director of Emergency Management Services for Orange County. His office administers operations for the County Fire Marshall, hazardous materials response, emergency medical services, the 911 communication center, and coordinates all disaster training, planning, and response for the County. Nick has over 30 years of experience in this field. I am also pleased to announce that we have been able to add another member to our panel this evening — Mr. Robert Alvarez. He had encountered a scheduling conflict earlier, but fortunately, that was resolved and he is now able to join our panel discussion tonight. Mr. Alvarez is Program Director of the STAR Foundation in Easthampton, New York, and a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He is a former senior advisor to the Secretary of Energy and the U. S. Senate specializing in commercial and military nuclear facilities and high-level waste management. In March, Mr. Alvarez was featured on the CBS "60 Minutes" TV show regarding the challenges associated with military high-level waste. Please join me in welcoming our presenters, beginning with Mr. David Lochbaum (applause). b. The Emergency— David Lochbaum He thanked everyone forcoming to the forum. As the first speaker, part of my job tonight is to lay a foundation for a lot of the information that later panelists will provide and basically get everybody on the same starting point on some of the information. There will be a lot of talk tonight about hazards, and I want to start with what the hazard is. Nuclear power plants produce a lot of energy, and the way that energy is produced is by the splitting or fissioning of uranium and plutonium atoms. When these atoms split apart, they form byproducts, not always the same byproducts, there are over 100 byproducts that are formed. The majority of these byproducts are unstable. These unstable byproducts seek to become stable by emitting radiation in the forms of particles or energy waves. That radioactivity that is released from the unstable byproducts can harm human cells if it comes into contact with it. Too much of that exposure can kill the cells or damage the cells. If too many cells are killed, a person can die in fairly short order. If cells are damaged but not killed, the damage can be passed on to future generations. The hazard we are talking about is exposure to radiation from the byproducts of the nuclear reaction. Where is the hazard? The fuel for nuclear reactors is housed in fuel pellets that are then stacked in long metal tubes called fuel rods, that are then placed into metal arrays called fuel assemblies. The smallest part that you see in the plant is the fuel assembly. As long as those metal tubes remain intact, the radiation stays at the plant and the only people that would be harmed are the plant workers, not members of the public. So the important part becomes where are those fuel assemblies? They start out initially in the reactor core. They operate in the reactor core for four to six years to produce the electricity that CP&L sells or other plant owners sell to their customers. After six years, or after they have done their job in the reactor core, they are moved to the spent fuel pool. The fuel assemblies must be initially put into a wet pool because when they come right out of the reactor core they are too hot, both temperature wise and radiation wise, to do anything else with them. So, for the first five years at least, they are placed in what are essentially large swimming pools to cool them thermally and also for protection of the radiation. That's the second place the fuel assemblies are stored. After five years, plant owners then have the option of moving the fuel assemblies from the wet swimming pool, the spent fuel pool, into large dry casks, such as the one illustrated. These casks are made out of concrete and lead and store up to about 50 fuel assemblies. So, initially they start out in the reactor, they move to the spent fuel pool, after five years, you have the option — not a requirement, but the option to move them into dry casks. So, that's where the fuel assemblies are. Where are they vulnerable? Well, they are vulnerable when they are in the reactor core, they're vulnerable when they are in the spent fuel pool, and they're vulnerable when they are in dry casks. I'm going to talk a little bit about what those vulnerabilities are. They are vulnerable from the outside or from the inside. They are vulnerable to external forces that can break apart the metal tubes and cause the radiation to be released. They are also vulnerable from internal forces that can cause the metal tubes to heat up, overheat, and be damaged from that way. The difference is kind of like what happened on 9/11. Two jets hit the World Trade Center, but it was not the impact from the jets that toppled the towers, it was the burning of the jet fuel that weakened the steel girders that caused the collapse. So, the external forces would have been if the towers were knocked over by the jet impact, the internal forces are the follow up effects that can happen later on. I'm going to talk a little bit about how those follow up effects can affect the fuel assemblies. The external forces are pretty simple, they are the blasts from an explosive device that can cause the fuel rods to break open, also if they are hit by bullets. Any outside force can break them apart. There is some protection; I don't want to make them sound too vulnerable. The internal forces are basically the heat that is produced by the unstable byproducts when they decay. They release radiation and they also release a large amount of heat. That heat continues to be hot enough to cause either meltdown or fire for many years after the fuel is taken out of the reactor core. The problem does not stop when it is taken out of the reactor core. So, those are the internal forces, whether they are in the reactor, spent fuel pool, or in dry casks. How can these internal forces affect the fuel when they are in the reactor core? This is a schematic of a plant like Shearon Harris. You'll see that there are a number of safety systems to provide cooling for this reactor core. If something were to disable the control room, where all the instruments are controlled, then the system stops working. It is kind of like the brain, if you knock out the brain, it does not really matter if the heart and the liver and everything else are functional. If you knock out the brain then the body does not have a long period of time. A nuclear power plant is the same way, if you are able to knock out the control room, the plant timeline is not long. Once you move the fuel assemblies to the spent fuel pool, they are also vulnerable to internal forces. The water in the spent fuel pool must be continuously cooled; otherwise it heats up, overheats, and causes damage to the pool. If that water disappears for any reason, if you crack the side of the pool, allow the water to drain out, that in itself does not cause the fuel to be damaged, but the internal forces will lead to that fuel being overheated and damaged due to either meltdown or fire. Likewise, the dry casks, normally it is a passive system and there are no moving parts, if everything is working right. If the outside surface of the container is ruptured, it allows air to get inside or damage, then the cooling mechanism for the cask can be disrupted and the fuel inside can overheat and be damaged. A couple of things I would like to point out here is that when the fuel is in the reactor, it is protected against sabotage and terrorist attack as long as the terrorists come by ground. If they fly in, it is not protected. But if they do not have an airplane, it is somewhat protected; although Dr. Lyman will talk about some of the deficiencies in that protection. Once the fuel moves to the spent fuel pool or to dry casks, the security protection drops off. It is really not protected in the spent fuel pool, because it is never tested to ensure that security is adequate. When it moves to the dry casks, it is never even considered, let alone tested. The good news is that the number of fuel assemblies, the amount of materials that is able to be released is least when it is in the dry casks; it is most when it is in the spent fuel pool. At Shearon Harris, the reactor core contains 157 fuel assemblies. The spent fuel pools contain 4,000 fuel assemblies, or five times as much. The dry casks hold less than 50. So if there is a successful attack or sabotage, you have 157 things releasing radiation, 4,000 things releasing radiation, or less than 50, unless you damage more than one cask. As Jim Warren is fond of pointing out, the chances of somebody just going down the road and attacking the casks is slimmer since security would come and ask them to stop doing it. Are these vulnerabilities real or am I just up here Chicken Little, scare mongering? I think the indications that suggest that they might be real is that nuclear power plants cannot go out and get private liability insurance, because no insurance company would provide insurance for the level of damage that could come from the radiation released from a nuclear power plant. The federal government had to provide federal liability protection for Shearon Harris and all the other plants because the damage is so great. Whether that damage is accidental or by intent, it does not really matter. The vulnerability is there, and terrorists could exploit that vulnerability if we are not careful. In addition, if you look at nuclear power plants, they are ringed by an emergency planning zone. The reason for that is because the radiation could be released and it was thought prudent to provide some protection for people living nearby, a ten-mile zone was thought to be the prudent range, and there have been some discussions about whether that is enough or not. And lastly, the spent fuel that exists at Shearon Harris and the other plants is there because the federal government has not yet opened up a permanent repository for the spent fuel. The challenge facing the Department of Energy is to find a place where these can be safely isolated from the environment for 10,000 years into the future. It is a threat in the reactor, it is a threat for 10,000 years once you dispose of it; obviously, between those two places it is also a hazard. The further answer of whether these vulnerabilities are real is in October of 2000 the NRC released a report about the risk of spent fuel damage. Basically, among other conclusions, they said that if radiation were to be released from this spent fuel, roughly there would be over 2,300 cancer deaths to the people living within 100 miles, and there would be 26,800 cancer deaths out to 500 miles from the radiation released. So assume 100 per square mile population density. Ninety-seven percent of these fatalities would be caused by Cesium 137, which has a 30-year half-life. This stuff is not going away anytime soon. Where would the radiation go if it were to be released from Shearon Harris? Basically it would circle the globe. After the Chernobyl accident in 1986, our detectors at our plant saw the radioactive cloud as it went by. It was not enough to cause damage to people in this country, but it did cause damage to people living closer to the plant. How close? The picture closest to me is from the Chernobyl plant in 1996, ten years after the accident. This is the plant itself. This area up here is 120 miles away approximately, and it is still so heavily contaminated that people cannot go into it ten years later. That zone is still out there today. Most of the contamination is from Cesium 137. Approximately three million curies of Cesium 137 were released in this accident. There is about 20 times that much in the Shearon Harris spent fuel pools. One of the things we hear a lot but disagree with every time we hear it is that nuclear power plants are well protected, they are hardened targets, and smart terrorists would go down the street and attack softer targets. I am not a terrorist, I have never been a member of a terrorist group, and I do not know what terrorists think. But to look at what they have done in the past, they do not have a history of attacking soft targets. A few years ago they attacked U. S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. They could have attacked U. S. corporate facilities and offices in those two countries that were not protected by U. S. Marines, but instead they chose the harder target and were successful. Less than two years ago they bombed the USS Cole at Port Newman. They went by unarmed merchant ships in the harbor to attack an armed U. S. ship. And in the last year they attacked the Pentagon in Washington, DC. There were several other buildings in DC that were unarmed. The fact that it was one of the most secure facilities in DC apparently did not dissuade the terrorists. So I do not think that we need to trust our future on the fact that the terrorists may not choose to attack Shearon Harris, I think we need to make sure that Shearon Harris is protected to the extent possible so that terrorists will not be successful and not rely on them not attacking it to ensure our futures. Thank you. C. The Threat— Dr. Edwin Lyman I'm Ed Lyman from the Nuclear Control Institute, and I'd like to thank the Orange County Commissioners for their hospitality. It is always refreshing to get out of Washington, especially these days. I would not turn down an invitation like this. I was asked to talk about the issues of terrorist threats in nuclear power plants and their vulnerabilities with regard to terrorism. What I would like to do is really document what we believe the state of nuclear power plant security was before September 11`h. The Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Richard Meserve, only a few weeks ago, told Congress that, and I quote, "Before September 11, 2001, nuclear power plants were among the best defended and most hardened facilities of the nation's critical infrastructure." This is the line that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry have been peddling since the September 11`h attacks as justification for the inaction that has taken place. I think the point of this talk is simply to make it perfectly clear exactly what the vulnerabilities were before September 11`h and what they appear to be even after September 11`h. So, what do we have? The state of nuclear power plant security in general; since the 1970's it was recognized that nuclear power plants might be a potential target of the terrorists and that the consequences as Dave pointed out could be catastrophic. So, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did decide to impose some regulation that meant the plant had to protect against the potential for an attack of a commando team whose intent was to cause enough damage to the plant to cause a meltdown and the kind of consequences that we just saw in the previous slides. To do this, the commission postulated what is called a design basis threat, which is essentially, according to the regulation, several persons with the assistance of an active or a passive insider. An active insider is someone who would actually be working inside the plant and participate actively in the attack. When the attack was taking place, let's say he or she were in the control room, he would be able to manipulate the controls, he could kill the other operators, he could do all sorts of mischief actively. Passive simply means that he was in a role where information was provided to the external attacker so that they would have information about the plant layout and the physical protection system when they attacked. In the early 1990's, the NRC added another regulation that the plant also had to provide some protection against truck bombs. This was in response to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and also an incident at the Three Mile Island plant where an intruder was able to drive a vehicle into the site and disappear for four hours. So they imposed a regulation where there had to be some sort of way of preventing truck bombs from getting close enough to the plant so that if they were detonated they could cause damage and again potentially a release of radiation. Aircraft attack was never contemplated in the design basis threat and it is not today. Now, how did the plants comply with this? They had to come up with a physical security plan, which is a description of how their guards would respond if the plant were attacked. Complementary to this were controls for access authorization meaning individuals who had unescorted access to the vital areas of nuclear power plants had to be vetted, they had to have background checks to make sure they were trustworthy and had no ulterior motives that could come across in the background. Finally, access control is simply a system making sure that the people who get onto the plant site are the ones who are appropriately authorized to do so. It also includes the placement of vehicle barriers to prevent large truck bombs from getting close enough to the plant to do harm — in a position where they cannot get close enough to the plant to do harm without having been searched first. The NRC introduced a program in 1991 to test security at these plants, which was called the Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation. And this was introduced because it was recognized that even if the utility was perfectly in compliance with every element of the regulation, it is possible that they still may fail to prevent the plant from being sabotaged. So it was actually a way of testing the particular response strategy that would be executed by the guards. And the way OSREs were run, they would have four separate force on force drills, which are essentially exercises in real time where a mock attacking force would challenge the security force and the security force would have to prevent the attacking force from causing enough damage to cause a meltdown. The way these were carried out were first tabletop exercises and were carried out where the NRC and contractors could observe the plant security strategy sort of like a chess game. That was meant to simulate the passive insider that I talked about before — someone supplying information about the plant security strategy. Then the NRC would choose the particular scenarios that would be run, and they would run the exercises in a matter of a couple of days. The type of adversary that was chosen ranged from the so called Farmer Brown, which is the lone, paranoid, right-wing nut who decides that he wants to threaten the U. S. government by attacking the nuclear power plant with a pitchfork; ranging all the way to a team that had most of the characteristics of the design basis threat. But the full design basis threat was never tested. In fact, one loophole in the OSREs was active insiders they never considered. So the attacking force was never helped by someone in the control room who turned on the other operators and shot them and forced them to manipulate the controls. That is an unrealistic assumption, but that is the state of things. Now, the goal of the OSRE force was destruction of the target set. And target set was defined in a way, which means that of every element of the targets that was taken out, the plant would proceed toward a meltdown and eventually radioactive release. The only way that that could be stopped if the targets that were taken out was if the operators were able to respond heroically in a situation of great uncertainty and try to make repairs in an environment where there are still terrorists around, where there are high radiation levels, doing things that they have not been trained to do. Just a heroic intervention is really the only way that they could respond. So it is assumed that if a target set is taken out, the plant would meltdown realistically. What is interesting to note is that in some plants a target set can be all of the equipment in a single room, so if you set off an explosive in the right place, that in itself is enough to cause a meltdown. That is a scary thought. Now, the goal of the defending force in an OSRE exercise is to prevent all of the targets in a target set from being taken out. That means basically making sure that at least one of them is protected by enough guards who reach the target in time who are protected and who have the appropriate weapons. All those are non- trivial acts, especially taking into account the realism of things like actually getting the weapons you would need in an attack because they are usually locked in storage and they have to be retrieved before the guards can actually use them. So all of these things have to be realistically timed to demonstrate whether or not the guards would succeed. Now, there are a lot of artificial aspects of the OSREs, for instance, they were announced six to ten months in advance, they were rehearsed and trained like a stage play pretty intensively, and a lot of money was spent preparing for them. Even so, the miraculous fact that is pretty well known and has been well documented, is that 46% of the exercises that were run in a ten-year period, and some plants had more than one OSRE since there were only on the order of 65 on average sites during this time period, so some have had more than one. Still, 46% failed, and in at least one of these exercises, the attackers were able to reach and destroy a target set. And in a number of those, the containments were also breached, meaning that the attackers were able to blow open an airlock, and therefore, the last barrier between the radiation resulting from the fuel melting and the environment was also breached, so there was no uncertainty. If there was a meltdown, there would have been radiation released into the environment. Performance did not improve over the life of this program. In fact, in the last two years, prior to September 11`h, the percentage of failures was exactly the same as it was over the whole life of the program, 46%. In fact, the very last exercise that was held in August 2001 was one of the worst that was publicly documented and received the worst score by the NRC since they started scoring and using the current color coding. Lest there be any confusion whether OSREs pass/fail or not, I could quote Chairman Meserve that these are not pass/fail exercises, which is particularly irksome, because I think that we have passed an education law in this country where I think we are testing children every year, standardized tests, and they are not being told that failure is ok, it is just a means of improvement. That is what the NRC is telling the nuclear power plant operators. And so I kind of see the NRC as a very indulgent parent that has been warned never to tell their children that they have actually failed at something and always finding a way to characterize a failure as just a means of improvement. That is sort of the message that the reactor operators like to hear. The fact is that these are failures. I mean, if terrorists can actually infiltrate a plant, kill all the guards, and cause a meltdown, I do not see any other way to call it but a failure. And if you read the text of some of the reports documenting, well here NRC used the word, "The licensee failed to protect the mock adversaries from gaining access to two target sets. Numerous responders were unable to deploy that being vulnerable to the adversary." So, they used the word "failure" themselves there, and these were very recent events. So this is not some ancient history, it was something that was right before September 11`h. So, the response of this industry to this bad news was to kill the messenger. So the NRC staff decided to terminate the program very quietly in 1998 before all the plants had been tested. But news of the termination was leaked to the L. A. Times and the White House, which President Clinton two days before had given a prominent policy speech talking about the importance of response to terrorism. This news is not consistent with that message. So the White House called NRC and said, "You better put this program back on track." And they did. But since then the industry has tried every other means to try to weaken it. What had happened with regard to reactor security right before September 11`h? By September 5`h, which was the time of a major public meeting on security, NRC had suspended all penalties associated with OSRE failures. They had allowed many plants to go down to the minimum number of security guards that are allowed in the regulations, which is five per shift. They had approved starting a self-assessment program where the utilities would run OSRE type exercises by themselves and also grade them themselves, which, if any teacher has asked their students to grade their own exams, I think there are clearly methodological problems with that. And they were planning to zero out the OSRE budget in future years. So, they had laid the groundwork really for gutting the whole security assessment program, and that is where we were. And the industry was completely consistent, and this quote really says it all. This was an article appearing September 10`h. The Nuclear Energy Institute representative said that, "We believe nuclear plants are overly defended at a level that is not at all commensurate with the risks." And the scary thing is that if you ask Lynette Hendricks what she thought today, she would probably agree with that statement. I think that is probably the scariest thing. So, that's where we were before September 11`h, and have things really improved? Well, what happened on September 11`h, NRC suggested that nuclear power plants go to their highest level of security, which they promptly did. But a number of people asked them, "Why didn't you order anyone to do anything?" "Well, we didn't have to order them, because they did it anyway." "Well, what if they didn't do it?" Well, they just danced around that question. The consequences of not actually issuing a mandatory order were that the plants, instead of hiring new guards were forcing existing guards to work overtime. We heard about guards working 72- hour shifts. We were getting calls from security guards who were exhausted who said that they were scared to go to work because they did not know what they were doing anymore and they could not defend their plants. This was of great concern to us. The level of the demoralization and loss of morale among these guards was something to see. Finally, five months later, NRC did actually impose a mandatory order, but they gave all of the plants six months to actually comply with the order, which would put them almost a year after September 11`h without actually doing anything that was a mandatory requirement that they could be fined if they did not comply with. We heard about the National Guard situation in North Carolina. One consequence is that there was no recommendation from NRC about whether or not individual states should order National Guard to supplement the security at nuclear facilities. So you had situations where one state sent the National Guard to supplement security and the neighboring states did not. There was inconsistency across the country, which is very confusing, because it simply did not make sense why some plants needed them and others did not. I think I'm out of time. I must be. I would be happy to answer questions and discuss how the Nuclear Control Institute, my organization, believes that security should have been improved and should be improved in the future. Thanks. d. Health Impacts — Dr. Steven Wing Good evening, my name is Steve Wing. I'm at the UNC School of Public Health. I want to start out by thanking the Chatham County Commissioners, my hometown is Chatham County, the Orange County Commissioners, and NCWARN for inviting me to participate in this event. I'm really pleased to be here with everybody that's on the panel tonight. I want to begin by saying that I find it very uncomfortable to discuss the topic of terrorism at a nuclear power plant. It's just something that we do not want to think about. And even more than that, I guess I feel that what we should mainly be talking about if we're really responsible is preventing terrorist acts, that that's the best thing to do. Not just nuclear terrorism, but biological terrorism, use of conventional weapons, and so on, because no kind of preparedness that we could have after the fact can possibly protect us. We do not want to get sick in the first place, we do not want to have casualties in the first place. And so it is particularly uncomfortable for me because I believe that there are things we can do to prevent terrorist acts. So I do not believe that people engage in terrorism because of their race or because of their religion. That does not explain terrorism. Terrorism occurs because of really deep frustrations and problems that people have, and basically they are related to injustices that are occurring around the world and that, as the richest country in the world, we have a responsibility to try and prevent terrorist acts by promoting justice and peace (applause). I'm glad you agree. The trouble is that it would be irresponsible of us not to recognize that terrorism does occur, that there are threats of terrorism, and that we need to do something to prepare for it. So we do have to pay attention to this. I'm more comfortable with making preparations to respond, if at the same time, we as a country are doing our best to try and reduce the causes of terrorism. My job tonight is to talk about radiation health effects. Dave Lochbaum gave a brief introduction talking about the idea that the primary problem in nuclear plants is with release of radioactivity and that radiation can damage cells, and at high doses can kill people. There is a spectrum of responses that occurs, and in discussion of radiation health effects, they are generally divided into two categories of effects. There are effects that occur immediately, acute effects. They begin with damage to the blood cells and the immune system, and build up to skin damage, eye damage, damage to the digestive system, the cardiovascular system, the nervous system, and so on. High dose radiation can kill very quickly. That is seldom encountered in normal situations. So most of the studies of health effects have to do with the more chronic effects that occur after a long time, meaning that you do not see the effects right away. The mainstream view now is that no level of radiation is safe. This means that even background radiation that we are all exposed to every day has some negative biological effect. And this is because even one ray of radiation, one hit, can potentially damage a part of DNA, and if repair does not occur properly, that damaged cell can reproduce. And so the kinds of effects that we are talking about have to do with, as Dave mentioned, genetic effects. If they occur in the germ line cells it can be passed on to subsequent generations. And there are also malignant effects, cancers. These are the primary effects that have been studied. There are also birth defects that occur. Another concept that I think is important is there are some populations that are more vulnerable to radiation than others. This generally includes the fetus, children, and elderly people. It parallels many other situations — infections, other kinds of physical and chemical hazards —these are the vulnerable populations. In the 1950's, the famous epidemiologist Alice Stewart from England demonstrated that the diagnostic x-rays being used in the care of pregnant women during their pregnancies when women were x-rayed, the children of those pregnancies had a higher cancer rate. And this is at a very low level of radiation. And her work and subsequent work led to the rather strict practices that are in place now to try and eliminate as much as possible the use of even low level ionizing radiation, the kind used routinely in medical diagnosis for pregnant women. So that is an indication that radiation can lead to damage even at low levels as well as high levels. By now, quite a few studies in the nuclear industry have shown relationships between the radiation doses received by workers in the nuclear industry and their subsequent cancer rates. I thought that I would present to you just a little information about one case here in the United States that I think may have some interest in relation to our situation here in the Triangle area. What I want to talk about is the accident at Three Mile Island. I want to talk about a study that a group of us here at UNC published in a journal called, "Environmental Health Perspectives" a few years ago. This is the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. I want to talk about the Three Mile Island area in part because I think that there are some interesting similarities to the Triangle area. This is a picture of Three Mile Island, which is in the Susquehanna River in southeast Pennsylvania. It is a fairly rural area. You can see the river and the cooling towers of the plant in the background. This is a picture taken just a few miles from the site. You can see that this is an area where there are small towns, there are farms, it is a rural area, and the population includes a lot of elderly people, kind of traditional lifestyles. People take their boats like they do to Jordan Lake. There are small neighborhoods around Three Mile Island. I guess I think of this area reminding me a little bit about what it would be like around Apex or in Chatham County and so on. After the accident the data were collected by a group from Columbia University. They actually obtained information about cases of cancer from 15 local hospitals. The group from Columbia University identified an area of ten miles in radius around the plant. The design of the study was that they were going to compare groups of people within the ten-mile area with each other, according to their radiation exposures. And this was important because after an accident like this, there is naturally increased concern about cancer, people might go to the doctor sooner, and doctors may look more frequently for cancer because they know about the accident. So rather than trying to compare the Three Mile Island area to some other area that did not experience a nuclear accident, they decided that they would look just within the ten-mile area and try and identify the more and less exposed people. So the ten-mile area there had about 160,000 people. They surveyed 15 local hospitals and identified cancer cases that occurred both before and after the accident. And this was important because there is geographic variation in cancer all over the place, whether or not there are nuclear facilities, and they wanted to be able to control for this variation what the cancer rates were before the accident when they looked at potential effects of the accident. They estimated doses from the accident using some monitoring data. The monitors on-site went off scale, but there were some monitors that were available. And there was an airport right near Three Mile Island, so that airport was able to provide meteorological data, and they were able to model the emissions of the plumes from the accident. What I want to show you here next is the results of our study. This is a schematic diagram. The Columbia group divided the ten-mile area into 69 small tracts. To each tract they assigned a radiation dose, and that is shown in the different colors —from the green, the lowest doses, to the dark red, the highest doses. And so you can see that the investigators estimated that the strongest plumes of radiation from the accident in 1979 went in a west-northwesterly direction from Three Mile Island. I would note also that the second highest dose group runs right to the edge of the ten-mile area. That's the direction of Harrisburg, which is the capital of Pennsylvania. That is another similarity with this area, is that just outside of the ten-mile area is our state capital. The bottom of the graph shows the estimates that we made of the incidents of lung cancer in the seven years following the accident. Actually, this is the 1981-85 period - the accident was in 1979. These rates have been adjusted for differences in age and sex in the population. And we have also adjusted these rates for the pre-accident cancer rates. So the rates that are shown in the bar graph at the bottom of this map are adjusted for the pre-accident cancer rates. So these are the lung cancer rates that are occurring after the accident adjusted for the pre-accident rates. And what I want you to notice is that there is an upward increase in the rates for each dose group, in terms of the increased intensity of the plumes that were estimated from the accident, the accident plumes. And there is about a four to five-fold excess of lung cancer in the highest dose group compared to the lowest dose group. The lowest exposed area being in the northeasterly direction. This is not the type of accident that would occur with a fuel pool fire, such as the kinds of scenarios that are of most concern here tonight, because there are different types of radiation which are released in a reactor accident than in a fuel pool accident. You heard earlier that Cesium 137 with a half-life of 30 years would be most important in a fuel pool accident. In this accident, the most important releases were radioactive gases, not particles — like xenon and krypton. We felt that these lung cancer incidents rates were particularly of interest because the lungs are exposed to the air we breathe. I also wanted to note that this is an accident that is considered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to have been an insignificant one. And if you consult the Nuclear Regulatory Commission you will find that no one was hurt at this accident. We analyzed these data, they were published in a peer review journal, and we have not in the five years now since the publication of these findings, we have not heard anything from anyone who has found any mistakes with our analysis or anything like that. I wanted to present this to you just as an example of one accident that did occur in the United States. And this accident was not a result - at least it is not thought to have been the result - of any kind of a terrorist act. One of the arguments that I have heard many times is that, "The probability of an accident is very, very low, so that is why we should not be concerned about the environmental contamination or the potential health effects from a fuel pool fire or from a nuclear meltdown because the probability of the accident is very low." But I would just note that the technologies that we are dealing with are extremely complex. We, in recent years, certainly have experienced accidents that had very low probability. The probability of the space shuttle blowing up on launch was very low. The probability of an accident such as what occurred at Bhopal in India was very low. The probability of a nuclear meltdown like at Three Mile Island is very low. But in central North Carolina, we heard a few minutes ago that the amount of Cesium 137 in the fuel pools that are located at the Shearon Harris plant is greater than what was released in the Chernobyl accident. And there are large areas around Chernobyl that are no longer habitable. These are the kinds of issues that I think that we should at least discuss. And I really want to thank the Commissioners and NCWARN for having this meeting, in part because I think it is so important that the issues be debated. My real concern is that the discussion thus far has primarily been taking place among the experts and has not involved the public. I think that there are a lot of basic issues. And I thank all of you for coming out tonight because I think this kind of involvement is really key to protecting ourselves and our communities. Thank you (applause). e. Water Safety Issues —Alan Rimer I'm Alan Rimer with the Orange Water and Sewer Authority representing the Board of Directors and I am drinking Orange Water and Sewer Authority water. We are here tonight and I'm here tonight representing the Orange Water and Sewer Authority; not from the perspective of the experts that you have heard with respect to what is actually going on at Shearon Harris or what might go on at Shearon Harris, but what the environmental fallout from what might go on there under a number of different scenarios could do to impact the region as a whole - all of the water supplies in the region, not just the Orange Water and Sewer Authority. For those of you who are not familiar with our authority, we serve about 70,000 people in southern Orange County. We have a service area that includes a number of communities outside of just the Orange Water and Sewer Authority. We have many connections with the water systems that you see outlined here in this figure through a series of interconnections for emergency purposes. So, in effect, as a region, we are almost completely connected together so that we can serve one another if water were to be unavailable. We are operators of water and sewer systems, not of power plants, not of anything else. We have a great deal of experience dealing with emergency response that relates to our business. We deal in public health daily, because if this was not healthy, we could not drink it. We care for the environment. We, certainly as a board, and as an authority are very proud of our record of taking a lot of these issues seriously and trying to deal with them very effectively. Unfortunately, at this point, we do not believe that we are in a position to respond effectively to what might happen if there was radiation release from the Shearon Harris facility. And it is really to that point that we would like to talk tonight. From our perspective, and as frontline emergency people with experience in this area, we believe we have an obligation, not only to our customers, but to all of those other utilities that we are connected with in order to be certain that we can provide a safe water supply to the community. We have a number of concerns. As water supply experts, we are not experts in radiation. We do not believe that the radiation experts are necessarily experts in public water supply. So the bottom line for us, and I think for the community as a whole, is to foster communication, to fill in the information gaps that we have in this situation. And that has become much more acute, of course, since September 11`h. We have made some efforts to become informed. We have had a number of meetings with officials from the North Carolina Division of Radiation Protection, the Division of Environmental Health, the Division of Emergency Management, and Progress Energy. These meetings have been very useful, and they have provided us, as a board, some very practical information on which to build our own strategies for dealing with these kind of events. On November 28`h I was there when Bernadette Pelissier, who is our board chair, petitioned the Triangle J Council of Governments to take a leadership role in organizing and gathering, and then ultimately the dissemination of information on behalf of all of us in the region who have local water utilities that provide this water that we drink; and to coordinate and essentially formulate a plan for a regional response by local water utilities in the event of some kind of a radiation release. Unfortunately, TJCOG declined to act on that petition. This means that there is really no mechanism at the present time for formulating some kind of a regional response, or for determining whether or not it can be possible for local water supply utilities to supply safe water after a substantial radiation release. We wrote to Mr. William Cavanaugh of Progress Energy on December 6`h of last year, asking that the organization address a list of questions that we had about radiation issues. To date, we have not received satisfactory answers to those questions. The absence of some very basic information truly makes it impossible for us, the Orange Water and Sewer Authority, and for others in similar straits, all of those communities who are in the area around Jordan Lake, to know whether any response that we could make, any response, would really enable us to provide safe water to our customers. And that is our obligation. If we cannot drink this water for a day, we have enough water collectively in the systems to manage. A few days, and we are out of water. It is not like the cable system, if you do not pay your bill, you do not get cable. But if we do not have any water, we do not have life. So, where are we now? There are three areas of concern from our perspective — water supply interruption, emergency response in the short term, and emergency response in the long term. Where does this leave us? Well, we think it is useful to consider these facts because, in fact, if we do not, we will not have a coordinated plan for our authority on how to deal with these matters. Let's look for example at water supply interruption. How would OWASA meet the needs of our utility customers to supply water if it were shut down for more than a day? But beyond that, think about a week, think about a month. What do you do? Not many of us have lakes in our backyard in our service area that we could go and turn to. We simply do not know the answer. What about our role in supporting our neighbors? Remember that chart that we had that showed all of the interconnections between all of the utilities. If we have a supply, which is satisfactory and has not been contaminated, but we then go and supply it to somebody that has, is there a potential for cross-contamination? Do we, as a single utility, or as a regional community, have the capacity to supply water to those communities that are close by to Shearon Harris and may in fact be in an impacted area? It is a very difficult question to answer and one that we do not know the answer to. Could we as a community, for example, supply Cary and Apex or Chatham County with drinking water if their Jordan Lake supply were shut down? Yes, possibly, for some short period of time, but we do not know if we could prolong that period of time. And in this period of drought right now, that makes those opportunities even less for that kind of supply. What other issues might there be? What equipment? What personnel? What kind of resources are we going to have to share during such an emergency? We'll hear from emergency management shortly, but we are not sure we know the answer to that. We do not know that the answers exist in any one particular place, but we really do believe that we should be working together to define what those answers are - together, as a series of utilities. In the emergency phase, you have a reaction plan that has been developed by the North Carolina Division of Radiation Protection and the Public Water Supply Section of the Division of Environmental Health. And they have a responsibility for environmental monitoring and guidance to local water supplies. That plan appears to be in good shape, and according to those emergency plans, those agencies would inform us if our lakes were safe to use as a water supply. But from a local perspective, we believe we also need to take the same kind of precautions and understand how we might act in the event of such an emergency and how we ought to be advising our customers. We need to be able to react relatively quickly and we believe the plan has some of the elements of that in it, but there needs to be further discussion about that. In the post-emergency phase, it is a little bit more complicated. In here, the issues that need to be dealt with have a greater number of questions —questions that we do not yet have answers to, but which we have posited to the authorities. We have not been able to identify any consistent standard or procedure for determining and certifying the long-term safety of surface water supplies that may contain low levels of radiological contamination that persist beyond that initial emergency period. We simply do not have the answers. When would it be safe to use the water again? Could long-term exposure resulting from the ingestion of low levels of radiation cause our water plant and distribution system to become contaminated? The thought of having to replace all of our hundreds of miles of water and sewer lines just in Chapel Hill is daunting. If not, would the residents of southern Orange County be stuck with the bill for paying for the repair or the replacement of all of those systems? And then how could it be done in a timely fashion in order to be able to accommodate the community as it needs to have water? We have not been able to find the answers to those questions, or even to identify people who can answer those questions. Finally, the issue with respect to whether or not you have an environmental record of protection, which we do, becomes critically important. As I had said earlier, Jordan Lake is the supply source for a variety of our communities and is the single largest resource available to the communities in the Triangle as we begin to grow. So these water supply sources are irreplaceable. But the fact of the matter is that OWASA's record on environmental protection has some very significant tales to tell. As people who work with water, which is what our business is, we have a very long-standing concern with environmental protection and with environmental issues. We have expended a great deal of effort and money protecting the watersheds upstream of our lakes. The state has given us money to do that, and we are pleased for that. We are now preparing for the likelihood of fairly major expenditures on our wastewater plant in order to protect the downstream users who happen to be in Jordan Lake or may take water from Jordan Lake in the future. We will do what we need to do because we must adhere to the regulations, but we do that in a sense of community. We ask that others do exactly the same thing when it comes to understanding the potential impacts of a major release from the Shearon Harris facility from whatever cause. The cause is not the relevant part here. The reality then is that, as people who work with water, we are concerned that we get the folks in the community, and I say the community as a whole, meaning this Research Triangle area, together to understand the implications of this on our water supply. So we have essentially two specific requests. One is to have Progress Energy to have a thorough response to the questions that we posited in our letter to them on December 6`h. The second is that we seek leadership from the North Carolina Division of Radiation Protection and Environmental Health in developing a coordinated response plan among all of the water suppliers; and that safety criteria for both the intermediate and the long-term use of affected water systems be given consideration. And until those questions have been answered, we as a region are vulnerable, not just for the potential health effects that occur as a result of things like you heard Steven talking about, but as a result of the water, which may be contaminated, or the fact that we may not even have any water to drink. So, with that I close and ask that you give some consideration to these points. I'd also like to note that I have another hat that I wear for Orange County. I'm on the Orange County Board of Health. And they are also concerned with the public health issues associated with the public water supplies obviously. So they asked me to express their support for the issues which have been raised and the recommendations that OWASA has offered here in terms of trying to get information out. We thank you for the time and attention that you pay to this and we hope that in the long term that we never have to worry about whether or not we have a good water supply to drink. Thanks. f. Emergency Management Planning — Nick Waters Before I start, I would like to recognize and have all of the emergency responders, fire, and law enforcement personnel stand up (applause). We are going to broaden the scope of this conversation a little bit, and we are going to talk about some things regionally. You will hear some things that we have identified as shortfalls in our own plan. We will point these things out and ask if they are considerations in your plan, and then we will talk some about what kind of regional strategies we need to be concerned about. I am confident, as we go through this, that you will be able to apply these strategies to your own individual concerns and local plans. Our presenter tonight is going to be Major Kent McKenzie. Kent is the Deputy Director and he is in charge of the Emergency Medical Services and Special Operations Divisions of our office. Kent has been in the EMS field for about 15 years and is a graduate of Duke, but we do not hold that against him. Here is Kent, thank you. Kent McKenzie: Thank you for your interest and attention tonight. The intent of my segment is not to frighten, but to provide you with information and make you aware of risks in our region other than natural disasters. My discussion tonight will not consider hurricanes, tornadoes, or other severe weather. However, the same planning strategies may apply to all risks. This presentation will identify some technological risks in the region, including terrorism; point out a few problems associated with evacuation; and provide insight into emergency planning situations. The information in my presentation results from shortcomings found in a review of our multi-hazard plan. The identification of these shortcomings may benefit you and have application in regional planning. When most people think of risks, there are some significant ones, which are often overlooked. We have railroad shipments of extremely hazardous substances including chemicals such as ammonia, chlorine, and hydrogen cyanide through our region. Chemicals are also transported over our roadways. Although smaller amounts of these chemicals are carried by trucks than by rail, the risk of a truck related incident is more widespread throughout our cities and neighborhoods. Fixed facilities include those that use, manufacture, store, or distribute hazardous materials. Large quantities of materials may be stored at these facilities such as propane distributors, farm supply companies, and manufacturing or research facilities. And, of course, radioactive materials are found in medical and research facilities, manufacturing sites, nuclear power plants, and spent fuel storage facilities. When we consider risks, evacuation has historically been a primary concern. Regionally, we may not be prepared for widespread catastrophic events of the magnitude of the recent terrorist events. 1-40 and US 64 are primary thoroughfares for east/west travel. Heavy use leads to regular roadway maintenance and frequent traffic jams. In an evacuation, this will result in compromised traffic flow and extended travel time. Information dissemination is faster now than any other time. Citizens today are more concerned about their personal safety and have more timely general information. Therefore, we must recognize that citizens may be overly reactionary and leave, even when not directed to do so. If persons do evacuate, it is probable that they will travel outside the county and possibly in other regions of the state, or to other states. You may be surprised to find that the 911 system can fail. Each telephone exchange has a fixed number of lines for 911 use. This number is determined by the telephone company based on the number of land line subscribers in that exchange. Wireless subscribers are not included in the count. There is also a finite number of staff on duty in every 911 center. For example, an exchange might have six lines for 911 use and the 911 center might have five telecommunicators on duty. That means that if seven or more people in that exchange call 911 at the same time, five will be answered, one will ring unanswered, and the rest will get a busy signal because of system overload. The frequency of overload incidents is rising, driven primarily by the increasing use of wireless technology. 1-40 and US 64 cross through some of the most populated counties in North Carolina. Shown are population figures from the 2000 census. It should be noted that the Raleigh News & Observer recently reported that Raleigh Planning officials estimate their population surpassed the 300,000 mark. There are more than 120 municipalities in our region, including the 1-40, US 64, and 1-85 corridors. Notice how both railroads, shown in red, and highways, shown in blue, run through the middle of towns and cities. Any major incident could lead to the closure of transportation corridors creating extraordinary traffic jams for hours. This map reflects population density by county. Population density is an important consideration because it is a fair predictor of normal traffic volume. Secondary roads in densely populated counties are more apt to be crowded on a regular condition than comparable roads in less densely populated counties. This usual crowding would worsen already difficult evacuation considerations. Evacuation is an important component in any emergency plan for large-scale incidents. Many specific factors affect evacuation planning, so let's look at a few. Roadway infrastructure is not capable of handling a large-scale rapid evacuation. 1-40 and US 64 are frequently at or near capacity under normal conditions. Note these photographs. They show a traffic jam in Orange County on Interstate 40 near the 266 mile marker on April 25`h, last Thursday. West bound traffic was at a standstill, backed up ten miles for over an hour due to a single motor vehicle crash. Evacuation effectiveness depends on multiple factors such as the time of day, weather, school schedules and notification. For example, an evacuation begun at midnight on a clear Sunday morning in June would progress much differently than one attempted at 8:00 in the morning on a rainy Thursday in December. School buses full of children, car loads of commuters, and worried parents would all complicate the evacuation. Any regional evacuation will not only affect surrounding areas, but likely other states as well. We cannot end the evacuation plan when a car crosses a political boundary. Where evacuees go, how they are cared for, and when they return must be considerations as well. Our multi-hazard plan provides guidance and outlines responsibilities for the different county departments and affiliated non-profit agencies. Our plan bases evacuation estimates on ten-year old untested assumptions with best-case scenarios. For example, our evacuation assumptions are based on formulas used by the North Carolina Department of Transportation for their planning. This information may not accurately determine evacuation times. A coordinated traffic count and accurate time study must be done to provide objective data. Our plan does not consider all the anxiety associated with evacuation, such as separation of family members, doomsday thoughts, and the loss of normalcy. Our assumptions do not consider traffic jams, roadwork, vehicle crashes, or weather conditions. The plan does not consider any attempts of families to reunite before evacuating. Actions such as parents rushing to schools, employees leaving work to meet their families, or people going home to collect pets must be considered. Does your plan consider calculating evacuation times based on realistic scenarios? Do you consider roadwork, normal traffic congestion, and school or business schedules? Do you have a current traffic flow time study? Have you considered adverse citizen reactions? Do you allow for family reunification prior to evacuating? All regional planning initiatives must be coordinated to avoid duplication of efforts and prevent overlooking important factors. The development of regional planning initiatives should include efforts to determine the best routes for travel, direct evacuees around traffic bottlenecks, and promote cooperation among agencies for multiple jurisdictions. The regional effort must develop coordinated sheltering plans that provide assistance for evacuees, including pets. Plans must include the segment of the population who has special needs. Planning strategies must use realistic and tested or theoretically sound assumptions. Every county has citizens who are unable to easily move about, be totally independent, or communicate easily. Emergency management typically considers these individuals as having special needs. We have few resources available to evacuate citizens with special needs. There are a limited number of ambulances, buses, and wheelchair capable transports. Further, we have limited capability to inform, assist, and warn non-English speaking residents and visitors. It is difficult to quickly and efficiently evacuate institutions in the counties and region. The types of institutions are varied and diverse including universities and schools, hospitals, jails and prisons, animal shelters, daycare, assisted living, and nursing homes, just to name a few. Patient care levels may be difficult or impossible to maintain due to the number of patients. For example, many patients are dependent upon infusion pumps, ventilators, and other electrically operated medical devices. In addition, an average of 135 patients receive outpatient dialysis treatment daily at just three dialysis units in Orange and Durham Counties. Our plan allows for citizens to remain inside their respective facilities in a practice known as 'sheltering in place'. This may, depending on the incident, preclude the need for an evacuation. Successful sheltering in place requires extensive procedural education to the general public and is useful in limited circumstances. Our plan assumes transportation will be available for all the patients with special needs. However, many facilities have contracted with the same transportation providers. While this is effective in normal circumstances, it presents problems in incidents requiring evacuation. For example, three rest homes contract with a transport provider, which is included in their transportation evacuation plans. The transport provider may not be able to provide enough units and staff to effectively evacuate all three facilities simultaneously. We assume all personnel will be available and remain at their jobs. While many workers will be able to come to work, some will not. We assume that all patients will be healthy enough to move. However, many will not feasibly be moved because of dependency on medical devices, frailty, and/or specialized medical treatments. Does your plan consider how sufficient transportation resources for citizens with special needs will be provided? Does your plan assume all personnel will come to work, or allow for the fact that personnel can be victims too and may not be able to come to work? Does your plan consider that some citizens may not be healthy enough to survive the evacuation process? Does your plan address the ability to transport, maintain, and use medical equipment necessary for special needs evacuees? Regional planning efforts should identify the locations of special needs facilities. Regional planning should determine existing resources and identify gaps. Only after the capabilities of the region have been identified are we able to address shortcomings. Regional efforts should create mutual aid agreements between healthcare providers to facilitate cooperation. This will allow for both the evacuation and hosting of the special needs population. Planning efforts should identify secondary means of transportation including taxis, school buses, charter buses, and so on. Planning strategies must use realistic and tested or theoretically sound assumptions. Unfortunately, most plans do not address psychological considerations. Recent events have demonstrated that psychological impacts to large numbers of people are just as profound as the physical trauma they suffer. People may overreact due to a lack of knowledge or fear of hazardous materials or radiation and the effects of exposure to them. Some people who are not actually exposed will believe that they are. The idea that perception is reality holds true, so people's perceptions should not be casually dismissed. Road rage due to traffic congestion and unreasonable behavior is very likely, as it happens on a daily basis in normal times. It is conceivable that it could become widespread and violent during evacuations. It is also possible that assaults, suicides, and homicides would increase and that fanatical religious and extremists groups would take advantage of the situation of unrest. Our multi-hazard plan does not fully incorporate all psychological considerations and is therefore based on unsound assumptions. Our plan assumes that evacuation will be orderly, when in fact it will not. Our plan assumes that civil disturbances will be very limited, when in fact they may become widespread. Our plan assumes that individuals will follow directions, when history shows that they are more apt to act on their own initiative. Our plan assumes that only those told to leave will evacuate. In reality, many people evacuate because of their own perceptions and fears, not because they are at direct risk or told to do so. Our plan assumes that all available personnel will come to work, when some, perhaps many, will not be able to for a variety of reasons. Does your plan consider psychological factors such as heightened anxiety, overreaction, anger, a sense of loss of control among your citizens, and other feelings that may lead to unreasonable actions? Does your plan consider the limited public safety resources on duty at any time and how to augment them to achieve your objectives? Does it also provide for volunteer management for those who show up to help? Does your plan address the need to maintain order in a panicked society and the actions, which may be necessary to restore order if it is lost? Does your plan include provisions for providing initial and ongoing mental health care for the citizens and emergency workers? Regional planning efforts should identify procedures for calming citizens and maintaining order, including public information, special notification, establishment of hotlines, and so forth. Regional efforts should establish agreements and procedures to facilitate mutual aid and common disaster operation protocols. These protocols may establish a standard incident command structure, standard radio codes, and specify inter-agency communication channels. Planning efforts must consider mental health needs both during and after a large- scale incident. Some psychological effects may not be apparent for days or weeks after the event. Regional planning should identify all area mental health resources and their capabilities and create a network for disaster operation. Planning strategies must use realistic and tested or theoretically sound assumptions. Now let's look at a few additional planning considerations. Radio systems across the region are not currently compatible with each other. A uniform regional incident command system is needed. Now, different agencies use different systems or their own different variations of systems. A uniform common terminology or code system is needed. Currently, the same codes have different meaning for different agencies. For example, 1081 means a disabled vehicle for one agency, a warrant service for another, and careless and reckless driving for yet another. Regional resource typing must be developed to ensure that everyone throughout the region calls the same resource by the same name. For example, is a rescue unit an ambulance, a fire department crew, an extrication squad, the Red Cross, the Animal Protection Society? Across the region, all of those are called rescue units. Accurate and rapid information sharing between public information officers throughout the region is important. An active network between public information officers and communication centers would allow for the rapid dissemination of important information to citizens. For example, officials involved in exercises at Shearon Harris have provided limited information to agencies outside the ten-mile zone. During these exercises, citizens acting on information from the media have called and questioned their local officials who had little information about the exercises. Regional planning is ineffective if there is no agreement among citizens, government, businesses, industry, and non-profits, and ongoing education and training is not provided for all, including the public. This is a transient area with many people moving into and out of the region regularly. Logistically, it is difficult for all agencies across the region to come together for planning and training. In addition to communications issues, there are jurisdictional limits to authorities, which present obstacles during large incidents. For example, a paramedic certified to practice in one county cannot legally practice in another county. Planning should not assume that all off-duty personnel are available to report to work, which should make allowances for some being unavailable. Planning must also address numbers of unsolicited volunteers spontaneously responding to the scene for help. Mass casualty plans need to be regional. A major incident will likely require assistance from other agencies who may not be trained in the same triage methods. This could lead to problems such as inappropriate treatment or transportation of victims. Mass fatality planning should also be regional to ensure consistency in the management and processing of the deceased while maintaining their dignity. Pet sheltering and evacuation must be planned for, as evidenced by Hurricane Floyd. Many people are unwilling to leave home unless they are certain their pets are being cared for. Progress is being made in the development of the state animal response team and local animal response teams. Expanded vulnerability assessments are necessary in the region, with an emphasis on terrorist activity rather than only weather or natural disaster related. A broad new range of targets not previously considered are now becoming painfully apparent. Prudence dictates that all planning assumptions must be tested whenever possible. Decontamination is a major consideration for people on property exposed to hazardous substances. Logistically, it is difficult to decontaminate a large number of people when all other environmental considerations are taken into account. For example, freezing temperatures or extreme heat, geographic location of victims and scope of their exposure, the type of the substance involved, modesty issues, and clean clothes for the victims all complicate efforts. Cross contamination of people and the environment may be a problem, particularly if the incident is near sensitive facilities such as water plants, hospitals, or residential neighborhoods. Little or no medical care can be provided to victims until they are decontaminated. Otherwise, valuable resources like people and equipment will be cross- contaminated and must be removed from service. Ambulances, personnel, and even hospital emergency departments could be rendered unusable. There are very few specific resources for decontamination in the region. Many plans rely on fire departments to conduct large-scale decontamination. However, these departments may be engaged in hazardous materials containment or fire fighting efforts, and so might not be available immediately. Most hospitals have limited decontamination capabilities. UNC, for example, only has one decontamination shower in their emergency department. In mass casualty situations, when the number of victims overwhelm immediate responders, it is not possible to give the same level of care to each patient as in routine situations. In these cases, assorting or prioritization of victims would occur. This is called triage, French for, "to sort." In other words, victims in most need of care receive treatment first. The slide illustrates one sample triage system, which categorizes treatment and transport urgency using color codes. Red tag patients are those who have a good chance of surviving if they are transported to a hospital immediately and provided with definitive care like surgery. Yellow tag surgeries have serious injuries that do not pose an immediate threat to life. These patients require transportation and definitive care, but can wait longer than red tag patients. Green tag patients have only minor injuries and may not even need to go to the hospital, but should be followed up in clinics or doctor's offices, or can wait until the hospital returns to normal operations. Black tag patients are either dead or have sustained injuries that are not conducive to the continuation of life, even with immediate definitive hospital care. These patients will be the last to be transported. An effective triage system is the only way to prevent the unnecessary depletion of limited medical resources, including ambulances, emergency department space, paramedics, nurses, and physicians. Now we'll talk briefly about how mitigating the consequences of a disaster can benefit us all. Mitigation is defined as acting before a disaster strikes to permanently prevent the occurrence of a disaster or to reduce the effects of the disaster when it occurs. Floodplain ordinances, fire codes, land use permitting, and hazard mitigation buyouts are all examples of mitigation practices. Floodplain ordinances and mapping identify areas prone to flooding and restrict the building of structures within those areas. Fire codes have a wide range of applications from requiring sprinklers to regulating hazardous materials. Land use permitting can prevent the co-location of potentially hazardous industries with residential areas. Hazard mitigation buyout projects, which reduce recurrent flood risks, have been used extensively since Hurricane Floyd. Thousands of flooded homes are being purchased, moved, or destroyed, and the land reverted back to its natural state. Changing storage methods can be applied to both interior and exterior storage. This includes practices such as storing oxidizers away from combustibles, blasting caps away from explosives, and limiting ammonium nitrates to a pile ten feet by four feet by eight feet with a separation of eight feet between piles to prevent spontaneous detonation. Hardening of structures include such actions as adding checkpoints in security, upgrading to shatter proof or bullet proof glass, retrofitting with fireproof roofs and materials, installing generators, and extending the perimeter by moving parking away from facilities. Reducing the attractiveness of potential targets may be accomplished by changing hazardous materials storage practices, the hardening of structures, good planning, increased visibility of security, and the use of media to educate the public on restrictions at events (i.e., no book bags allowed). Orange County received a planning grant from the State Emergency Management Office to study some issues in the region. The first issue is do we have the ability and resources to evacuate an entire county or large portion thereof as a result of an extraordinary event? This question was raised by the Orange County Board of Commissioners upon realizing that existing Shearon Harris disaster plans only address evacuation of a ten-mile radius around the site, and that no countywide evacuation plans exist to address any type of disaster. The second issue was raised because of the anthrax mailings last fall and planning meetings with public health officials. The issue is, dealing with infectious agents, do we have the ability, authority, and resources to quickly quarantine an entire county or portion thereof? Orange County will coordinate a regional hazard vulnerability assessment and facilitate the entire study for the participating counties—Alamance, Chatham, Durham, Guilford, Johnston, Orange, and Wake. This initial study is being conducted through the emergency management agencies and will result in a published report for local and state governments. Thank you for your attention tonight. Nick has a few closing remarks. Nick Waters: I hope you found some of that useful in your own planning and review of your plans. The testing of the assumptions is a very crucial part—that is something we must do. We must look closely at our daily obligations. Too many times we commit to doing things and agree to take on fundamental tasks and emergency planning and not consider the fact that our daily workload may prevent us from doing a good job of that. The example of the fire department—they are trained, they are willing, they are equipped, and they will do decontamination unless they are committed to a major fire or some other major incident. The other point I want to review with you is the psychological effect. Too long, psychology of disasters has been a post-disaster consideration. It must be moved to the front, it must be included in our planning. Our planning must take into account the action or overreaction of people. And we must develop strategies with the mental health community as to how to plan and cope with those behaviors. Just take your afternoon ride down the road as an example and see the people that you meet. They are on your bumper, they cut you off of lane changes, they race to beat the yellow lights, and if for any reason traffic stalls, you can look around and they are beating on the steering wheel or the dash with their fists, they are cursing to themselves, or they go over to the shoulder and speed past everyone. These are the same people that are going to evacuate patiently and orderly (laughter). In closing, I want to thank my counterparts, I see several out in the audience, and I thank them for coming. It is my job to objectively plan and train and respond to disasters in Orange County in the best way that meets the public good, and that is what this forum is about. And I want to express my disappointment to our professionals at the state level at Division of Emergency Management and whoever in the Department of Crime Control and Public Safety directed their staff to avoid this forum (applause). It seems to me that if their positions were so defensible and their plan so solid, they would have taken advantage of this opportunity to tell us that (applause). I want to thank my staff. Eric Griffin is an Emergency Management Specialist with us and is new on board. He did most of the PowerPoint presentation for us and did a lot of work in putting this presentation together. And Kent for delivering it in such an eloquent manner as he normally does. And for you for giving us your attention during this presentation. Now I'd like to introduce to you the Mayor of Chapel Hill, Kevin Foy (applause). 4. HOW TO REDUCE RISK a. Panel Discussion — Kevin Foy, Mayor, Town of Chapel Hill Well, it is a pleasure to host this forum in Chapel Hill this evening. Thank all of you very much for coming. One thing I think we have all learned this evening is that we have to take responsibility for our own futures, for our own health and safety. But it certainly helps to have enlightened leadership. And, to that end, I think we all owe a sincere debt of gratitude to the Orange County Commissioners and the Chatham County Commissioners (applause). These are true leaders who have persisted in the face of serious adverse pressures to bring us information. That's what they are attempting to do —to bring us the kind of information that we need to be able to understand what the threat is to our own health, safety, and welfare. So this is the portion of this program when we are going to engage the panel and ask them to speak in a little bit more detail and also ask each of you to ask questions. If you would like to ask questions, there are microphones on both sides of the auditorium, and you also have orange cards in your packet. Fill out those with your questions and pass them to staff members who will roam up and down the side. So, to begin, I'd like to ask members of the panel to elaborate on, to the extent that you want to, ideas for mitigating risks in this region. And also to ask Dr. Lochbaum and Dr. Lyman in particular to finish if you have further information to impart. I know that both of you were cut short. Mr. Lochbaum: NCWARN, even prior to September 11`h had come up with what was called a risk reduction plan for the most secure and safest way to store spent fuel at Shearon Harris. I have looked at that plan and talked with a number of my colleagues about that and I cannot think of any improvement to make to the plan that NCWARN has other than to implement it (applause). Basically, what the plan calls for is to move the spent fuel from the pools into dry casks, but not as it is done in the picture, which is a plant in Virginia where they are kind of easy to see and kind of easy to hit. But what NCWARN has proposed is to put berms around them so that each cask is isolated from others so that it would be difficult to get to if they were successfully attacked. There is a kind of a container used for an additional barrier for material getting out. It may seem pretty obvious, but the berms are made out of earth, and earth is, as someone else has coined the term, dirt cheap. It would not be a very expensive thing. You would not have to move fuel from South Carolina and other places in North Carolina to your backyards. That could be stored in earthen berms at their own locations so their risks would not become your hazard. It would not make the risk go to zero, but it would reduce the risk to about as low as it possibly can be, and the cost would be relatively modest and a lot less than the cost of recovering from an accident or an attack if it were to occur. Thanks (applause). Mayor Foy: Dr. Lyman, can you give us more information, you were starting to talk about how plumes might flow and in what direction. Can you give us more information on that? Dr. Lyman: One issue is the industry has been alleging that even if the worst case accident did happen, the nuclear plant melted down —they have been putting out some ridiculous statements in the last few months that essentially you would get a very narrow region of contamination, that more than a mile or so from the site there would be no real cause for concern. Essentially a lot of misleading information that is based on not being up front about what would occur if the maximum credible release did happen. It is fairly easy to use computer codes, and I have done this. The NRC itself has approved and uses in certain applications to see what would happen if there were a severe Chernobyl type radioactive release and what kind of patterns of contamination would occur. Basically, as Dave indicated, with the maps of Chernobyl contamination, in some cases significant long-term contamination occurred hundreds of miles away from the site. The most severe consequences do occur within ten or fifteen miles of the release. But the interesting thing about the ten-mile emergency evacuation zone was that when it was introduced, the intent of the evacuation zone was not to prevent any injury as a result of the radiation release from the plant, but only the most severe types of injury, which were, as we heard before, those which cause acute radiation sickness as a result of the death of cells or inhibiting their ability to divide. These are very painful injuries; it is acute radiation sickness, and would be confined really to a few miles away from the plant. The evacuation of the ten-mile zone can only really deal with that particular type of injury. There would be a significant risk of cancer for anyone downwind of the plant, even 50 or 100 miles away. It depends a lot on meteorological conditions, the effectiveness of evacuation, people's particular position in relation to the plume when it passes over. But since there is no evacuation plan beyond ten miles from the site, it has to be assumed that people in those regions will have no way of knowing how to avoid the exposure that would occur from a release. And generally the computer models indicate that you would get tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands in densely populated areas of latent cancers as a result of an accident like this. The number of acute fatalities from radiation sickness would number in the hundreds if the evacuation were completely effective and in the thousands if it were ineffective. And that is assuming a kind of average population density for 100 persons per square kilometers or something like that. Mayor Foy: Dr. Alvarez, you did not have a chance to speak. Do you want to say anything? Dr. Robert Alvarez: Between 1993 and 1996 1 presided over an office in the Department of Energy Emergency Planning, which dealt with what-ifs— a broad spectrum of them including oil supply disruptions and also bad things that could happen in nuclear plants. We would look at these things very carefully and study these things and I thought at the time, "Well, this is one of the more boring jobs I could have," but I had to do it. And I recall we had a briefing and analysis about an act of malice against the commercial nuclear power plant in the United States. It was quite clear that the affects would be of historic proportions. I tried to tuck that away as an abstraction. And I recall then on September 11`h in the morning, watching television with my 18-year old daughter and I was about to drive her off to school and watched this horror unfold just a few miles away from my home. And I began to think about this more carefully. In doing that, what I discovered is that this county here, Orange County, has played a very critical role in forcing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into making some very important concessions about the nature and risk of spent fuel fires (applause). The nation of Germany had come to this conclusion 25 years ago. I think that the problem we face in adding on to what Ed was saying with respect to the consequences of a fire; if you look very carefully at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's entire approach to risk associated with accidents or acts of malice, they do not consider land contamination. They do consider evacuation, but they do not consider when it is safe to return. From the perspective of spent fuel, there is general agreement if the industry is going to be intellectually honest and open that this poses the most severe radiological vulnerability in the United States and the world. We are talking about some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity in the planet in our backyards — in conditions where they should not be stored. They should not be stored in water, they should not be density compacted. We have technologies, moreover, to put them in safer, hardened, secure storage. Now, what are the lessons that we have learned from this? We should have learned lessons from Chernobyl. Chernobyl, while it was a reactor accident, involved two major explosions and a fire that went on for ten days. It subsequently involved 600,000 emergency responders to deal with. Over 220,000 people were permanently relocated. Today, 74,000 square miles of land in northern and eastern Europe are contaminated with Cesium 137 at levels in this country that would not be considered acceptable or tolerable for habitation. Why haven't we learned this lesson as a society, as a nation, as a government? I think the problem is pretty straightforward. We have a system that is in denial. We are not talking about generating electricity anymore and making money from electricity. We are talking about public safety, public security, and how we define these priorities. On the short list of those priorities, from my own personal and professional perspective, is the safe and secure storage of spent fuel. You have heard that the technologies exist, this is not something that is exotic. It takes will and the desire and an admission by this industry that this is not a safe way of going about doing business. There is legislation before the United States Congress, the Nuclear Security Act-1746, which was introduced by Senators Lieberman, Clinton, Reid, and Jeffords. It is a very important piece of legislation because what it does, among many things, is that it federalizes the security forces around commercial reactors. You have heard this today about the deficiencies of the protection that exist today at commercial reactors. It expands the emergency planning zone from ten to fifty miles. We know that radiation does not sort of obey geographical boundary rules. It, most importantly, requires the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to come up within 18 months of enactment of this bill, what is called a new design basis threat. This is the envelope in which the protection and security this plan is based upon that takes into account what happened on September 11`h, not just a handful of people going in and taking over, but as many as 20 people. It requires that these tests, these OSRE tests be done with great rigor, and that there be penalties assigned to the reactor owners who fail these tests. And it also calls for the placement of spent fuel from pools into dry hardened storage modes (applause). Now, in the scheme of things, given the fact that we now live in this unfortunate and increasingly dangerous world, we have to start assigning risks and making tough decisions about what are the pious risks. And quite frankly, from my own personal point of view, the closure of a reactor at this stage in history is not going to significantly reduce our risk, but the safe secure storage of spent fuel would be a first order priority. The Yucca Mountain repository, you may have heard from many politicians that this is going to make our spent fuel secure. Well, assuming under the most optimistic scenario that we will open a repository by the year 2010, we are looking at a 40-year window of time when this stuff will be moved. And assuming that we will continue to generate this waste, based on various assumptions, we will probably wind up with as much stuff in the pools as we do now by the time we have emptied out the current inventory to go to Yucca Mountain. Yucca Mountain is a mythological thing when it comes to protecting us in the here and now. I only want to conclude by extending my thanks to Orange County. I do not think you really appreciate the role you have played in pushing an intractable, monolithic institution such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as you have, in coming to terms at least, on paper. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has conceded that there is no decay time at which spent fuel cannot catch fire, that the dense compaction of this fuel will worsen the fire. These are all issues that Orange County forced the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to come to terms with. Last summer, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, true to form, presented a document to the commission requesting some policy changes. They made these acknowledgements, and they also said, "Oh, by the way, our design basis threat for spent fuel is not protected against acts of sabotage." Staff then proceeded to recommend reducing the security, the insurance requirements, and the emergency planning requirements around decommissioning reactors that have spent fuel, closed reactors that have spent fuel. Thank God this was pulled off the table after 9/11. We are at a stage right now where we have a regulator that is a co-dependent with the regulatee. We have a system in our federal government, having worked there in reasonably high levels where I kind of saw some of this going on firsthand, where an event like this (September 11`h) has triggered a lot of competing forces which is leading to paralysis. And we are stuck— us as citizens in forcing the system to do the right thing. And it is very heartening to see people come out for something like this, and I hope that you will keep at it. Thank you very much (applause). Mayor Foy: Thank you Dr. Alvarez. Do we have questions from anyone? Question: I have a question, I think it is for Dr. Lyman, but I have a comment first. Because part of the way through the meeting I got distracted by a comment that was made and I did not appreciate it. And since we are all equal and we all have a right to express our opinion, I respect that opinion, but I also feel like I can voice mine. Mayor Foy asked this speaker to please ask her question and refrain from making the comment because of time. She indicated that the person would hear from her privately. What I would like to know, with all the discussion about the NRC and what it seems to prevent or counteract, certain things that were supposed to be positive, that were supposed to help bring information to the forefront. I was wondering who controls the NRC? It seems like I got the impression that it was doing whatever it wanted to do and there was nothing to regulate the NRC, the NRC was in charge of regulating others, and it's choice was not to regulate anything. Dr. Alvarez: The NRC was set up in 1975 as an independent agency with significant sweeping powers. The most important power was the power to require immediate shutdown of a reactor and the power to impose severe penalties, both civil and criminal upon licensees who operate reactors. What has happened over a period of several years, but made worse in recent years, is that this agency has become captive of the industry it is supposed to regulate. It meets on a regular basis in secrecy with the lobbying arm of this industry, the Nuclear Energy Institute, which boasts about this openly in Washington, DC. The people who are candidates to serve as members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which have limited terms, have to be vetted by the nuclear industry in order to be approved because there were a few occasions where a few independent people snuck in and did things to cause them heartburn. We have a Congress that is so pro-nuclear because of the cash and carry economy of our political system that, as far as I'm concerned, you have to put aluminum borate panels between these guys to keep them from going critical. And as a result, in 1998, one member of Congress that was most powerful had control over the NRC and how NRC spends its money - which it gets from the industry it regulates - basically attempted to cut their personnel budget by one third, which sent an unmistakable message to back off, which they have done. We have a very difficult and profoundly corrupt situation, unfortunately, where an agency that was set up with the best of intentions that was meant to regulate has now become codependent on the entity it is supposed to regulate. The only way we can change things like this is through federal legislation and through encouraging Congress to carry out its oversight responsibilities, to make sure this agency is doing its job. It is outrageous and disgraceful for this agency to hold hearings in secrecy because, while it is true that there is certain information that people should not be made aware of because of the potential risks it may pose, it is also true and also rightful for the public to know if this agency is doing its job. And there is a fundamental lack of oversight in Congress, and this is something we really need to correct (applause). Mayor Foy: I have a written question from a member of the audience that says, "If a dam holding Harris Lake were blown up, how would the waste pools be affected?" Does anybody have the answer to that? Mr. Lochbaum: I do not know the answer specifically for Harris, but I know in general nuclear power plants have to be designed so that if there is a dam break, either intentional or accidental, that the water level, once the rush occurs, is still sufficient to provide cooling for both the reactor and the spent fuel pool, but I have not verified that for Harris. In general, that is the criteria. Question: My question is for the Emergency Management folks. When do you think that we will have a new emergency plan that would have the authority to evacuate within a 50-mile radius and when would the schools get that information that are outside of the ten-mile radius at that time? Secondly, how long do you think it would take to evacuate a 50-mile radius? And, thirdly, how many cancer deaths might we assume would happen due to that exposure over a duration of that kind of evacuation? Nick Waters: I can't give you a definite timeline on how long it is going to take to get a plan. I can tell you that there is an increase in interest in regional planning, and there are three or four initiatives going on now to look at regional planning concepts. As to whether we have an evacuation plan or a full response plan outside the 50-mile, I'm not sure we need to wait on CP&L to do that, I think we need to start doing that county by county. And that is our intent to start working on those kinds of things immediately. As to the number of cancer deaths, I'll defer to someone else. Dr. Alvarez: You have to think of this not only in terms of what your risk of cancer is going to be as you flee. You have to think of this in terms of what does this mean for a large area of land that may be uninhabitable for 300 years. What would be the risk of people if they return over time, not only in terms of their risk of cancer, but the other disturbing finding that is coming out of the Chernobyl emergency responders is that they are now discovering that the genetic harm that is manifest in the emergency responders is being directly passed on to their offspring. So now we have to think broadly. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is erroneously addressing the nature of this risk by only looking at fatal cancers and prompt fatalities. The underlying problem with these types of facilities is that they can render large areas uninhabitable and make them poisonous to human beings for long periods of time. And that's the kind of risk we need to come to terms with and understand to prevent certainly, and certainly do our best to respond to. Dr. Lyman: To answer the question directly, the numbers that I cited before were simply for people who were affected during the emergency phase, which is according to the code I used one week after the accident. So to try to calculate the long-term consequences, there are so many assumptions involved, it is essentially a very hard exercise. But just focusing on the people who are caught by the initial plume can be a very substantial consequence on the order of tens of thousands of cancers for a moderately populated area. Dr. Wing: I would just agree with the earlier speakers in saying that it is very hard to estimate a number. It is done all the time, but there are so many assumptions involved about things that are really wild guesses, there is no way to know what direction. Does the plume go towards Raleigh? It will be a very different number if it goes towards Raleigh then if it goes towards Pittsboro because of the different number of people. So I guess the answer to me is that there would be too many. Question: If it took a week to evacuate that many people, and how fast does a plume travel? I bring this up because our governor did not want to bring potassium iodide to our state for free because he assumed we would have a very fast evacuation. Of course that is not the only thing you need to take into consideration in terms of evacuations and consequences, that's what my question was about. Mayor Foy: OK, thank you. Next question. Question: I'm actually the Acting Coordinator of the Chapel Hill Citizens for Nuclear Safety and I have a question. Let me first note that our next meeting is next Wednesday, 7:00 p.m. at the Carol Woods Retirement Community. My question is, current scenarios seem to involve coolant failures. So has it been examined, what might be the outcome of a containment breach, let's say by explosives, followed by explosions in the waste pool itself? Dr. Alvarez: The studies that have been done that looked at this, the most recent one was done in October of 2000 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And it did look in very general terms at this. We do not know the sequencing of events. We do know that the study says that a large aircraft can cause the pool to breach, can cause the water to drain. We do know that explosions could lead to relatively prompt drainage of the water. But what happens after that, by the time the water gets down to, let's say there's about 15 feet of water above the cores, by the time it gets down to two or three feet above the cores, the radiation doses are so high that the area is uninhabitable, and the people who are supposed to go in there and fix it can't go in there without risking their lives through prompt radiation exposures. Once it gets down to exposing the core, depending on the age of the fuel, the study indicated that the time it would take for the fuel to catch fire would be somewhere between eight and ten hours. Once the fire starts, it starts to get worse because it strips off the hydrogen from the steam, which feeds the fire, and then the fire cannot be put out. And conceivably, given the Shearon Harris scenario, it could spread to other pools. But we are dealing with a situation, which is still based on, I guess you would call some sound science, chemical and physical principles, but a lot of things that happen we can only look to other analogs and the closest analog I can think of is the Chernobyl accident where you had something not at all similar but roughly analogous where an event occurred over a period of ten days that had profound radiological implications involving fire. Dr. Lyman: As I said in my talk, there is a requirement that there has to be some protections against truck bombs at nuclear plants. But one of the measures that the NRC imposed in February that nuclear plants are supposed to comply with had to do with doing new analyses of the potential impacts of truck bombs, and it is classified information what exactly those analyses entail. But what we do know is that almost 75% of the plants who were asked to do this said that they did not have enough information within 20 days to give the NRC a schedule on how they were going to figure this out and do what was necessary to be done within six months. So that means that there are big gaps in the information based on how the vulnerabilities of plants today to certain types of truck bombs, which the NRC is worried about. So there is a gap right now, which has not been closed. Mayor Foy: We are going to call this to a close pretty soon. I'm going to have one more question, and ask everyone else who has a question, please fill out one of these orange forms and the answer will be provided in the summary. If you include your name and address, then the summary will be mailed to you. So, thank you for your questions, and we will have one final question. Question: I live in Apex, so I live within the ten-mile radius of the plant. There is one issue that I have not heard discussed very much this evening. I have been online for a long time looking at Chernobyl and the effects of Chernobyl afterwards, especially the Chernobyl Children's Project, where they indicate that children in Belarus and the Ukraine, etc. are suffering from thyroid cancer at rates that are astronomical. And that is a product of the release of iodide 131. The FDA and the United States recommends potassium iodide in the event of some exposure to iodide 131. The NRC recommends that. We have lots of incidences of that. I'm questioning why I have not heard a lot of information. I mean, you have talked about prompt fatalities and first responders, but the lingering effects of exposure in children especially are incredible. The question is why are we not hearing more about the potential effect on children of these kinds of things?Why are we not talking about emergency planning with regard to children in the ten-mile radius that might be affected yet are not being offered potassium iodide? Dr. Wing: I would note that you are right, there is an incredible rate of thyroid cancer and thyroid disease in children in the area affected by Chernobyl fallout. It is my understanding, and I would defer to the engineers here, that the primary scenario where the radio-iodide would be in a reactor meltdown, or a reactor, not in a fuel pool fire, such has been the main focus here, where the cesium 137 is the primary contaminant of concern. But you are very right and there have been proposals to make iodide available for the local population and it is my understanding that our elected officials in the area have chosen not to pursue that path and make it available. Mr. Lochbaum: One of the things that Bob Alvarez mentioned earlier was this legislation before the Senate that calls for a number of things. One of the things it calls for that he did not mention is potassium iodide stockpiling, not make it an option anymore, make it a requirement. So we are hopeful that that legislation will pass for all of the things that Bob said plus the potassium iodide stockpiling thing. Dr. Alvarez: It is something that is now in the Environmental and Public Works Committee of the United States Senate and there have been no hearings scheduled for it. The other co-sponsors from North Carolina and other states are conspicuous by their absence. So I think we have an uphill struggle with this legislation, but it is there and it is something that we should focus our energies on. Mayor Foy: Please submit your questions, and I'm going to ask one of the leaders in this effort to come forward with closing remarks, the Chair of the Chatham County Commissioners, Gary Phillips (applause). Chair Gary Phillips: Panel thank you for your intelligence, for your organization, and for your commitment, and we are very glad to have you here this evening (applause). I want to thank you folks for your perseverance and for your commitment. I was struck, when we talk about safety issues, perhaps the safest thing we could possibly do is to ask public utilities not to make political contributions (applause). Every single day those of us who are decision- makers in all of our small localities understand in a deeper and a deeper way that the boundaries between us are just political and that we must begin looking at regional issues in a regional way. I hope that the forum this evening and the conversation that began here can work itself in many other directions that we can begin discussing with each other the important questions that affect all of us, and that by working together and acting together and demanding together of accountability, that we can make changes, develop relationships, and we can protect each other and care for each other. So I thank you for your time this evening. I hope that materials will be generated from this that will be useful to everybody. Have a good evening and God bless (applause). At this time, the forum was dismissed. Barry Jacobs, Chair Beverly A. Blythe, CIVIC