Nuclear Policy

Robert Alvarez, a nuclear waste storage expert from the Institute for Policy Studies, said the quake pointed out a need.

"This indicates that reactors that have these dry casks in these earthquake-prone areas, they're going to have to do more to protect them from ground motion. One thing is to bolt them to the pads. And that's not a Home Depot-type job," Alvarez told the Washington Post.

Who got what dose from Fukushima?  Nobody knows, not even in Japan.  So proper epidemiological studies will be nearly impossible to accomplish.  Three radiation experts — Robert Alvarez, Joseph Mangano, and Janette Sherman — have made an attempt to calculate Fukushima’s impact.  They estimate that nearly 14,000 excess deaths may have occurred (including over 800 infants) in America in the first few months after Fukushima (see below).

"I believe, with the exception of Jaczko, that the NRC has an unhealthy co-dependent relationship with its licensees," said Robert Alvarez, an Energy Department official during the Clinton administration and now a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies.

"Whether or not Jaczko behaved inappropriately is a side-show to a larger battle going on about the safety of an aged U.S. reactor fleet and an industry that has very much had its way for nearly 20 years until, perhaps, now."

It’s true, as IPS’s Robert Alvarez informs us, that “since 1990, Energy has remained prominent on the GAO’s list of high-risk federal agencies vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Robert Alvarez, who served as a special assistant to the energy secretary in the Clinton administration, said there were strong reasons for elected officials to oppose closing big Energy Department laboratories or operations centers.

“In Western states and some Southern states, it dominates the wage and benefit structure in large areas,” Mr. Alvarez said. Still, he said, “the Department of Energy has always been a loose confederation of programs that have been vaguely tied together,” so restructuring their operations could help.

Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert and a former special assistant to the United States secretary of energy, echoed those calls, saying the citizens’ groups’ measurements “raise major and unprecedented concerns about the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.”

This heightened interest stemmed from the January 31, 2003, paper by Robert Alvarez, of which I was a co-author.

“This indicates that reactors that have these dry casks in these earthquake prone areas, they’re going to have to do more to protect them from ground motion,” said Robert Alvarez from the Institute for Policy Studies, who has extensively studied nuclear waste storage. “One thing is to bolt them to the pads. And that’s not a Home Depot-type job. The pads themselves also need to be examined to see if they’re durable enough.”

Yet not all that money was spent on safety, and the regulatory process is "based on industry self-assessment," says Robert Alvarez, scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and former senior adviser at the Department of Energy. "You can imagine the conflicts of interest that arise."

So how prepared each nuclear plant is for an earthquake, he says, is "pretty much what the operators say it is."