Karl Grossman at it again: Diablo Canyon vulnerable to earth quakes.

On Aug 27, 2014, at 9:49 AM an article titled "Will Diablo Canyon survive the next big earthquake?" was circulated on the ANS socialmedia list.

That article, by Karl Grossman, concluded with the following scary paragraph.

An analysis done in 1982 by Sandia National Laboratories for the NRC, titled “Calculations for Reactor Accident Consequences 2,” evaluated the impacts of a meltdown with “breach of containment” at every nuclear plant in the U.S.—what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants as a result of an earthquake. For the Diablo Canyon nuclear plants, it projected 10,000 “peak early fatalities” for each of the plants and $155 billion in property damages for Diablo Canyon 1 and $158 billion for Diablo Canyon 2—in 1980 dollars.

The NRC recently performed a more extensive analysis of the consequences of reactor accidents.

That analysis, conducted under the title of State of the Art Reactor Consequences (SOARCA), was completed in June 2012 and the final report was released (with essentially no fanfare or press releases). 

(Any guesses who was Chairman at the time the document was released?)

The SOARCA final report is a lengthy document with detailed analysis and methodology descriptions.

Here are the key take aways, which can be found on page 85 of the final report 

(http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1233/ML12332A057.pdf):

• The individual early fatality risk from SOARCA scenarios is essentially zero.
• Individual LCF risk from the selected specific, important scenarios is thousands of times lower than the NRC Safety Goal and millions of times lower than the general cancer fatality risk in the United States from all causes, even assuming the LNT dose-response model

You can read more at http://atomicinsights.com/spreading-calm-certainty-and-reassurance-about-nuclear-energy-counteracting-focused-fud/

The detailed information page about the project (http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/research/soar.html) and the FAQs (http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/research/soar/faqs.html) still imply that the project is in progress with no final report available.

Rod Adams

Publisher, Atomic Insights