One of the most lethal patches of ground in North America is
located in the backwoods of North Carolina, where Shearon Harris
nuclear plant is housed and owned by Progress Energy. The plant
contains the largest radioactive waste storage pools in the
country. It is not just a nuclear-power-generating station, but
also a repository for highly radioactive spent fuel rods from
two other nuclear plants. The spent fuel rods are transported by
rail and stored in four densely packed pools filled with
circulating cold water to keep the waste from heating. The
Department of Homeland Security has marked Shearon Harris as one
of the most vulnerable terrorist targets in the nation.
The threat exists, however, without the speculation of terrorist
attack. Should the cooling system malfunction, the resulting
fire would be virtually unquenchable and could trigger a nuclear
meltdown, putting more than two hundred million residents of
this rapidly growing section of North Carolina in extreme peril.
A recent study by Brookhaven Labs estimates that a pool fire
could cause 140,000 cancers, contaminate thousands of square
miles of land, and cause over $500 billion in off-site property
damage.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has estimated that there
is a 1:100 chance of pool fire happening under the best of
scenarios. And the dossier on the Shearon Harris plant is far
from the best. In 1999 the plant experienced four emergency
shutdowns. A few months later, in April 2000, the plant's safety
monitoring system, designed to provide early warning of a
serious emergency, failed. And it wasn't the first time. Indeed,
the emergency warning system at Shearon Harris has failed
fifteen times since the plant opened in 1987.
In 2002 the NRC put the plant on notice for nine unresolved
safety issues detected during a fire prevention inspection by
NRC investigators. When the NRC returned to the plant a few
months later for reinspection, it determined that the corrective
actions were "not acceptable." Between January and July of 2002,
Harris plant managers were forced to manually shut down the
reactors four times. The problems continue with chilling
regularity. In the spring of 2003 there were four emergency
shutdowns of the plant, including three over a four-day period.
One of the incidents occurred when the reactor core failed to
cool down during a refueling operation while the reactor dome
was off of the plant-a potentially catastrophic series of
circumstances.
Between 1999 and 2003, there were twelve major problems
requiring the shutdown of the plant. According to the NRC, the
national average for commercial reactors is one shutdown per
eighteen months. Congressman David Price of North Carolina sent
the NRC a report by scientists at MIT and Princeton that
pinpointed the waste pools as the biggest risk at the plant.
"Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up
relatively rapidly and catch fire," wrote Bob Alvarez, a former
advisor to the Department of Energy and co-author of the report.
"The fire could well spread to older fuel. The long-term land
contamination consequences of such an event could be
significantly worse than Chernobyl."