Nuclear Policy

Dr. Robert Alvarez, a former top advisor at the US Department of Energy, confirmed the fears of Wyden and Gundersen when asked by Japanese diplomat Akio Matsumura to review the situation at Fukushima. Alvarez responded:

"The No. 4 pool is about 100 feet above ground, is structurally damaged and is exposed to the open elements. If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain this could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cesium-137 released by the Chernobyl accident"

"It's a problem," said Robert Alvarez, a former policy adviser to the Energy Department, which maintains the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Evidence from dual-use facilities, he said, can be mixed and leave too much room for interpretive spin.

"These inspectors must render an informed technical judgment in a loaded political environment," Mr. Alvarez said last week in an interview. "The competing pressures put them in a very difficult position."

Mr. Alvarez wrote... "The irradiated nuclear fuel stored in spent fuel pools amidst the reactor ruins pose far greater dangers than the molten cores. This is why: Nearly all of the 10,893 spent fuel assemblies sit in pools vulnerable to future earthquakes, with roughly 85 times more long-lived radioactivity than released at Chernobyl."

A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the nuclear accident called this pool "the weakest link" at Fukushima. Robert Alvarez, former senior policy adviser at the US department of energy said: "If an earthquake or other event were to cause this pool to drain it could result in a catastrophic radiological fire involving nearly 10 times the amount of Cs-137 released by the Chernobyl accident."

One of the authoritative voices behind the petition, Robert Alvarez, who is a leading American nuclear safety expert and a former senior policy adviser to the US Energy Department’s secretary, believes the nuclear waste in the cooling pond at Unit 4 contains ten times the amount of radioactive cesium that was blown into the atmosphere when Reactor 4 exploded at Ukraine’s Chernobyl in 1986 – making an accident involving this spent fuel pool potentially nearly ten times as devastating as the Chernobyl disaster.

Robert Alvarez, a nuclear waste expert and former senior adviser to the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, has crunched the numbers pertaining to the spent fuel pool threat based on information he obtained from sources such as Tepco, the U.S. Department of Energy, Japanese academic presentations and the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), the U.S. organization created by the nuclear power industry in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

What he found, which has been corroborated by other experts interviewed by AlterNet, is an astounding amount of vulnerably stored spent fuel, also known as irradiated fuel, at the Fukushima Daiichi site. His immediate focus is on the fuel stored in the damaged unit 4's pool, which contains the single largest inventory of highly radioactive spent fuel of any of the pools in the damaged reactors.

"All of this in my opinion is a sign of a desperate struggle going on involving the NRC," said Robert Alvarez, a nuclear expert at the Institute for Policy Studies. "The majority of commissioners were put there largely with the blessing of the nuclear industry, and are now pushing back over potentially expensive upgrades to the reactor fleet after Fukushima."

"They love the false dichotomy of prohibition and drug war versus total anarchy and selling heroin in candy machines to children," Tree said. "The goal, in my opinion, should be to begin a multi-year discussion about what a post-prohibition regulatory environment would mean to the region and the world."

We should note that these reports aren't the end all be all of government oversight—according to POGO Senior Investigator Peter Stockton and Institute for Policy Studies Senior Scholar Bob Alvarez, they are largely based on contractor self-reporting, and therefore aren't exactly the most hard-hitting evaluations under the sun.