Emergency Planning for Nuclear Power Plants

Paul Elkmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315399126
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a history of emergency planning with respect to nuclear power plant accidents from the 1950's to the 2000's. It gives an overview of essential concepts that a working emergency planner should know, including brief overviews of the health physics and plant engineering that applies to emergency planning. Each chapter covers topics unique to radiological planning that distinguish it from planning for natural disasters. Some of the topics include processes that damage fuel, reactor source terms, basic dispersion theory, protective measures for the public and emergency worker, environmental surveys, and the essential elements of a drill and exercise program.

Emergency Planning for Nuclear Power Plants is not intended as a guide to meeting regulatory requirements but provides an understanding of the essential concepts and language of radiological planning, so the planner can apply those concepts to their particular situation.

1

Overview and History

INTRODUCTION

Emergency preparedness is the discipline that ensures an organization’s readiness to respond to an emergency in a coordinated, timely, and effective manner. Radiological or nuclear reactor emergency planning is a subdiscipline that ensures a readiness to respond when that emergency originates from or includes a nuclear power reactor. The concepts and discussion in the book also apply to some degree to accidents involving low-power test reactors, to fuel cycle facilities, and to non-reactor installations possessing a large enough inventory of radioactive material to require a site emergency plan. This is a resource book that serves as an introduction to the technology of planning for, and responding to, incidents at nuclear power reactors. However, radiological response is closely related to all-hazard response, and radiological emergency planners should also have some familiarity with the generalized topic of emergency planning.

The terms incident, emergency, disaster, catastrophe, and calamity are frequently used virtually interchangeably, particularly by the media and by individuals (including emergency responders) speaking to the media. All of these terms refer to an unexpected event or condition with the potential to cause injury or death, harm, and/or physical damage. “Unexpected” in this sense refers to being unable to predict in advance the specific time the condition might occur or appear, not to an inability to predict the general nature and probability of the event, although for any particular incident type both could be true. An emergency responder or response manager should be able to use these terms with precision, for they denote a progression increasing in both scope (more persons at risk) and consequences (greater injury or damage). The following definitions are taken from the technical literature:

Incident—(1) An occurrence that requires action by emergency services personnel (Incident Command System, National Fire Academy, Federal Emergency Management Agency). (2) An occurrence or event, natural or human-caused, that requires an emergency response to protect life or property (USDHS, 2003c).

Accident—(1) Any unintended event, including operating errors, equipment failures, or other mishaps, the consequences or potential consequences of which are not negligible from the point of view of protection or safety (IAEA, 1999b). (2) Any accident involving fatalities or activities from which a release of radioactive material occurs or is likely to occur and which has resulted or may result in an international transboundary release that could be of radiological safety significance for another state (IAEA, 1986).

Emergency—(1) A serious situation or occurrence that happens unexpectedly and demands immediate action (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., 2000). (2) Any occasion or instance that warrants action to save lives and to protect property, public health, and safety (FEMA, 1996c). (3) As defined by the Stafford Act, “any occasion or instance for which, in the determination of the President, Federal assistance is needed to supplement State and local efforts and capabilities to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in any part of the United States” (USDHS, 2004).

Disaster—An occurrence of a natural catastrophe, technological accident, or human-caused event that has resulted in severe property damage, deaths, and/or multiple injuries. A “large-scale disaster” is one that exceeds the response capability of the local jurisdiction and requires state, and potentially federal, involvement (FEMA, 1996c).

Catastrophe—Any natural or manmade incident, including terrorism, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, and/or government functions. A catastrophic event could result in sustained national impacts over a prolonged period of time; almost immediately exceeds resources normally available to state, local, tribal, and private-sector authorities in the impacted area; and significantly interrupts governmental operations and emergency services to such an extent that national security could be threatened (USDHS, 2004).

As can be seen from these definitions, not all incidents are emergencies, all emergencies are not disasters, and not all disasters become catastrophes, although mismanagement by responders can turn one into another. As a natural progression, a calamity would be an extraordinary incident of severe disruption that overwhelms response from the local through the national levels and is extra-national (involving more than once country) in scope. This progression of severity also implies a progression in response, with an incident generally being within the capabilities of a single local jurisdiction, management of an emergency requiring several local jurisdictions to work together, a disaster requiring the aid of substantial state resources, and a catastrophe requiring substantial state and federal resources.

Emergencies, disasters, and catastrophes of all sizes occur routinely around the nation. Some are large-scale natural events, such as floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and wildfires; some are local events, such as house fires and pipeline explosions; and others involve technological events such as the release of hazardous materials. Although the time and place of individual disasters are random, in many areas they occur frequently enough it is certain that over a relatively short period of time—say, a few years—disasters will occur. In many places, most or all of the likely disasters can be anticipated and steps taken in advance to protect people and property from their effects. The ability through experience to predict the kinds of incidents an area is likely to have gives rise to emergency planning. This is also true of highly unlikely events, some of which may never have occurred but whose consequences are sufficiently calamitous and widespread to deserve anticipation and contingency planning. This book is primarily concerned with the response to emergencies at commercial light-water nuclear reactors, a rare event that nevertheless can be anticipated and whose probable scope can be modeled.

WHY PLAN? SOME HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Emergency response is concerned with managing command-and-control, personnel, facilities, information, and equipment resources to maximize the protection of affected and potentially affected members of the public from some significant or widespread hazard. Emergency preparedness is concerned with providing the needed resources and maintaining them in a state of readiness to initiate a rapid response when required. Assuming that the capabilities exist, an effective emergency response depends on two factors: the speed of communication and the speed of transportation. When the hazardous event or condition occurs, potential responders have to recognize the hazard and be notified to assemble, and persons at risk must be notified to escape. If the condition travels or expands at a speed faster than, or comparable to, the speed of communication then neither the responders nor at-risk populations have sufficient advance notice to do anything except limited ad hoc and rather local actions with no coordination with other persons in the same situation. Only if communication outpaces the spread of the hazard can responders assemble sufficient resources to attack (mitigate) the hazard and enable persons not yet affected to flee before its arrival. Prior emergency planning is largely ineffective if decision makers and those organizations providing resources cannot be informed about the hazards and magnitude of an event in time to make and implement practical decisions that have an actual effect on the safety and health of the affected population.

Similarly, if the speed of transportation is slower than, or comparable to, the speed of the hazard, then there is high likelihood that even with advance warning the hazard will overtake the fleeing population. The speed of transportation also affects the ability of predesignated responders to assemble and to move to where the actions are required to be taken. In cases such as floods, large-scale fires, or releases of poisonous chemicals into the air, where the only possible protective action is evacuation, the effectiveness of preplanned actions is undermined when people move more slowly than does the hazard.

The dependence of effective emergency action on speedy communications and transportation in part explains the hierarchy of local, state, and federal efforts in emergency preparedness. From the time of the settlement of America through roughly the era of World War I, most catastrophic events were natural phenomena, such as floods, hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, and blizzards. When news moved at the speed of a person’s walk, or when on horseback, an immediate response was only possible from persons within a few miles of the event. To send for help even 20 miles away meant someone coming perhaps 48 hours after the messenger set out. This alone limited practical emergency planning to the village or town level, because even persons in the same county were too far away to provide quick assistance. Planning at the state and national levels essentially did not exist, both because of political and cultural notions about separation of powers (especially in the earliest years of the American republic) and because of the knowledge gap created by the need to hand-carry messages.

Local notification was generally limited to the range of a bell tower (perhaps a mile or so in radius). The railroad and the telegraph were the first significant advances in transportation and communication, but their practical effect in emergency preparedness was minimal. Messages still had to be hand-carried to the telegraph office, telegraph equipment was owned by businesses and not individuals and most towns had only one telegraph office, people still had to walk or ride animals to railroad terminals, and both telegraph lines and railroad tracks could easily be disrupted by natural disasters. The introduction of radio (both as a widespread commercial service used by the general public and for point-to-point communication by emergency services), the telephone, and at about the same time the automobile had significant effects on the viability of emergency planning. For the first time there existed viable notification technologies that were in significant use by the general population and which provided relatively fast communications over wide areas. The automobile provided a means of escape for the population that was much faster than anything previously available. In addition, unlike the telegraph and railroad, neither radio nor automobiles had the physical restrictions that limited the usefulness of the older technologies.

The industrial revolution had been underway for more than 100 years by the time of World War I. Although hazardous materials were in use in a variety of industries, such as mining and smelting, kerosene production, dye-making, and gunpowder production, the amounts were relatively small and so were the populations that could be affected by their release. Following World War I, new chemicals were invented, and progressively more massive facilities were built to produce them. Beginning in the 1920s and over the subsequent 40 to 50 years, the toxicity of chemicals significantly increased, chemicals began to be much more widely used (for example, as fertilizers and in the production of plastics, another invention of the 1930s and 1940s), and much more of the population became the potential targets of a chemical release.

New industries and facilities based on radioactive material arose beginning in the early 1940s (for military uses) and later in the 1950s (for civilian uses). Although radioactive materials had been known since the end of the 19th century, and their potentially dangerous effects were recognized by the early 1920s, the creation and storage of large inventories of radioactive materials, often in conjunction with chemically toxic materials, presented fundamentally new hazards to the population.

Providing for emergency planning, event response, and post-event reconstruction is not among the enumerated powers of the federal government according to the Constitution; therefore, according to a strict constitutional interpretation, doing so is (was) a function entirely reserved to the states. During the first half of the United States’ existence, there was a political and legal consensus about strictly prescribed roles for the federal and state governments that was largely supported by national leaders of the time (the Civil War notwithstanding). Since that time, national leaders of all political viewpoints have slowly but steadily became less concerned with certain of the historic limitations on the federal government and have come to a common viewpoint that emergency preparedness and response are aspects of the common defense clause of the Constitution. The author could speculate that much of the changes in these attitudes were facilitated by the same advances in communication technology that made it possible for state and federal capitals to know immediately about events that previously would have taken weeks to be communicated. It would be accurate to state that the basic documents concerning the federal role in emergency preparedness response do not clearly articulate why this has become a federal function in the absence of specific constitutional authorization.

Beginning with the Great Depression and continuing for most of the rest of the century, the general public and its elected leadership have gradually became more concerned with protecting the lives and the livelihoods of individuals from both physical and societal disasters; these attitudes grew out of some of the same religious and cultural movements that also resulted in the founding of the American Red Cross, temperance, and Prohibition. As a result of the confluence of changing ideas about the role of government and the individual’s right to protection, over the last 100 years a moral and legal consensus has emerged that holds that government at all levels has a duty to actively limit the occurrence of disasters where this is practical, must respond forcefully to protect the population when disasters do occur, and must compensate or otherwise aid disaster victims to make an affected area whole again after the disaster abates. In addition, the consensus holds that possessors and operators of potentially hazardous facilities have a duty to protect both their employees and the general public from the possible harm associated with those facilities or the materials they contain. This duty is partially expressed by requirements that local governments and possessors of designated quantities of hazardous materials (typically, but not always, industrial-scale users) preplan for actions to take in the event of an emergency. Operators of facilities containing hazardous materials (including nuclear power reactors) also have other incentives to do advance planning to prevent, contain, and respond to emergencies at their facility, such as receiving lower rates from insurers and limiting their potential legal liability under tort law.^*

OVERVIEW OF RADIOLOGICAL CONCEPTS

Radiological emergency preparedness is intended to protect people from radiation originating from uncontrolled radioactive sources and radioactive material, rather than from radiation-producing machines. Commercial nuclear power reactors would not be potential threats to the health and safety of the public around them except for the radioactive properties of their fuel and the large inventory of radioactive materials that develop in their coolant systems. The accidents of concern are therefore ones that allow radioactive material to escape into the environment. The proper public health response to an accident is selected based on radiation exposure to the public and on its consequences. This operational focus on radiation exposure consequences requires emergency planners and event responders to be familiar with radiological concepts, units, measurements, and terminology. This discussion of radiological concepts is intended as an introductory overview for readers unfamiliar with the radiological sciences. It is brief and necessarily omits a great amount of the technical detail not required to understand and implement public protection schemes. Readers who are already familiar with radiation and health physics concepts do not require this section. Many of the detailed health physics calculations are not discussed because most emergency planners do not require that level of health physics proficiency. Additional information about radiological concepts can be found in many introductory health physics textbooks. Readers can also find information on the websites of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (www.nrc.gov), Environmental Protection Agency (www.epa.gov), Health Physics Society (www.hps.org), National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement (www.ncrponline.org), and Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors (www.crcpd.org).

Radioactive materials are substances that create or emit radiation. At its simplest, radiation is a directed flow of energy. The energy can be carried on a particle as momentum (mass times velocity) or can be carried by an electromagnetic wave. To complicate the situation further, if particulate radiation is an ion, meaning that it carries an electric charge, it has electrical interactions all along its path at atomic distances that can disrupt other atoms.

Although there are many forms of radiation, four forms are of primary interest in radiation protection at commercial nuclear power plants, three of which could reach the public after a major accident. The radiations of interest are designated alpha (α), beta (β), and gamma (γ); alpha and beta are particulate radiations that carry an electric charge, whereas gamma radiation is an electromagnetic wave that does not have a charge. The fourth radiation, neutron (η), is also a particle that does not carry an electric charge. An alpha particle consists of two protons bound to two neutrons (identical to a helium nucleus, at a +2 charge); alpha is a massive and heavy subatomic particle with a very short range, delivering a large amount of energy. The range of an alpha particle in air is up to a few inches and is a few millimeters in soft tissues (skin and organs). A beta particle is a free electron, a very light subatomic particle at a −1 charge; it delivers intermediate amounts of energy per length along a relatively long path. The range of a beta particle in air is up to a few meters and is a few centimeters (1 to 2 inches) in soft tissue. A gamma “particle” is an electrically neutral photon packet that delivers a relatively small amount of energy per length over a very long path. The range of gamma radiation in air is tens to hundreds of meters, and, except for very low energy radiation, gamma completely penetrates through a body. The characteristic range of a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Equations
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Overview and History
• Chapter 2 Protective Responses
• Chapter 3 Core Damage and Related Concepts
• Chapter 4 Basics of Dispersion
• Chapter 5 Environmental Monitoring
• Chapter 6 Emergency Response Organizations and Facilities
• Chapter 7 Drill and Exercise Programs
• Chapter 8 Regulatory Environment
• Bibliography
• Index