Archive for the ‘Oil Spill’ Category

Nuclear Townhall
January 12, 2011

You didn’t used to hear the nuclear industry held up as a model for safety practices but it’s becoming more common all the time.
 
Writing in the Tampa Tribune yesterday, former Florida Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham told readers that the industry’s safety regime at the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) should serve as a model for efforts to improve safety in offshore oil drilling. Graham now serves as co-chairman of President Obama’s Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.
 
“Our commission is urging the offshore oil and gas industry to follow in the path of other high-risk industries such as nuclear power and chemical, which have established industry organizations to assure the highest standards of safety and complement effective governmental regulation,” Graham told readers. “Each of these organizations was established in the wake of a disaster ­ Three Mile Island and Bhopal. It is an open question as to whether the offshore industry leaders will see Deepwater Horizon as a similar mandate and opportunity to act.”
 
Graham, a Democrat, did not make a case for expanding nuclear power but did argue that we should replace oil in some unspecified way:  "Unless we develop and sustain a national energy policy which will fundamentally change our petroleum addiction, the only choice our generation will have is whether to leave to our children or to our grandchildren an America totally dependent on foreign oil producers for its national security, economy and way of life,” he concluded. It’s not clear exactly how this can be accomplished, but unless we are to revert to burning even more coal, nuclear is obviously going to be part of the answer.

Read more at the Tampa Bay Tribune

By Steve Hedges

WASHINGTON — Amid the chatter about the BP oil spill, lost jobs, billion-dollar escrow funds and political fallout, The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith notes in a story today something that people in the nuclear industry have been talking about ever since the first hint of the Deepwater Horizon explosion and underwater gushers:
Why doesn’t the oil business have something like the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations – the industry oversight arm that was established after the 1979 Three Mile Island incident?

It’s a good question, especially given the long-lasting effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill. Government regulations on tankers and oil operations were revamped after Valdez. But the oil industry itself, as the fallout from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico has shown, hasn’t done enough to police its own work, especially when it comes to the deep-water technology involved in offshore drilling.
The lackadaisical testing of the blow-out preventers that are designed to stop deep sea gushers is just the start. Until now, most environmentalists might have guessed that the petroleum industry had better internal oversight than America’s nuclear power grid.
They’d be wrong.

As the Journal story notes:

“William K. Reilly, a Republican and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under the first President Bush, said an organization modeled on ‘Inpo’—the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations—wouldn't be a substitute for stronger federal oversight but could "create the safety culture that's needed" in offshore drilling.
“Atlanta-based Inpo was created in 1979 following the nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. Today its inspection teams conduct regular evaluations of nuclear plants and assess training programs. It is credited with improving plant safety and performance. A nonprofit corporation, it is funded by $100 million a year in industry fees.”

The key elements of INPO are that it is industry driven, funded and managed. That, and the fact that it works, as the Journal story notes. People have lost their jobs after poor INPO inspections.

The nuclear industry realized quickly after Three Mile Island that the high stakes of an accident or even a minor incident: the risk of unnecessary and even permanent shutdown, increased and highly-politicized government scrutiny, higher operating and recovery costs and long-lasting damage to community trust.
BP is living that nightmare scenario right now. But the oil industry appears content to have let BP flop around the oily deck of its own disaster. While environmentalist and oil industry opponents are talking about stronger offshore drilling regulations or even halting offshore work for good, few in the business are suggesting something like INPO, an “in-house,” self-regulatory process will make things safer for all oil producers.

As in other industries where safety, technology and regulation meet – Aviation comes quickly to mind – reasonable, industry-wide precautions taken by solid operators can prevent disasters like the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill.

Read more at the WSJ:

Bromwich named to head oil regulator

Obama: BP will pay for the damage it has done

Obama's political oil fund

A cartoon in Monday’s Politico says it all.

President Obama is giving a speech with an offshore oil platform in the background. “Improvements in safety mean we can once again begin drilling offshore,” he announces.

“Kaboom!” goes the platform in the background and catches fire.

An aide rushes to his side. “You’d better change the subject, Mr. President.”

Final panel:  Nuclear reactor in the background. “Improvements in the safety of nuclear reactors mean we can once again start building them.”

You can look at it both ways. The accident at the Horizon platform in the Gulf certainly shows that all energy technologies have their downside and nuclear isn’t the only one that involves risks.

Still, there’s that nagging anxiety in the back of the mind of every nuclear advocate. What if we have another reactor accident?  It could be another Three Mile Island, where no one was even hurt. Still, the public’s fear of radiation seems to trump everything. A small tritium leak that didn’t even reach the EPA’s level of concern has been enough to threaten the shutdown of Vermont Yankee. What if the industry experiences its own Horizon oil spill?

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was asked this question yesterday by NPR’s Tom Ashbrook. “We want very much to restart the nuclear industry,”
Chu responded and outlined some ways that today’s reactors are safer than the generation built in the 1970s and 1980s. .

As you can see from the reader responses, NPR listeners do not share his enthusiasm for nuclear power.

Read more at NEI Nuclear Notes

- William Tucker