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Studies show county nuclear evacuation plan is fraught with problems

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The federally mandated nuclear evacuation plans in use in this country have always been out of sync with the time it actually takes radiation to spread. Mecklenburg County's plan for the evacuation of up to 195,000 people from the EPZ around McGuire in under eight hours may meet federal guidelines, but by the federal government's own standards, that's not nearly fast enough to keep fleeing people out of the path of radiation. According to a FEMA report called Dynamic Evacuation Analysis, which does not take into account terrorist attacks, it would take only half an hour to two hours for a radiation release to travel five miles from the plant, and from one to four hours for it to spread 10 miles.

"You can absorb enough radiation in a short period of time that you experience radiation poisoning which can lead to death in a few days or a few weeks," said Edwin Lyman, scientific director at the Nuclear Control Institute, a non-profit organization in Washington, DC that examines risks of nuclear terrorism. "That kind of exposure is only five to 10 miles from the site. Within two hours, radiation exposure will be well beyond 10 miles. Can they evacuate the 10-mile zone in two hours? Notification alone might take two hours. But if they could do it with a well-functioning evacuation plan, they could get it down to a few hundred deaths."

Lyman says the reason that more realistic, two-hour evacuation plans aren't required by law is that they would be nearly impossible to carry out. And if they were nearly impossible to carry out, nuclear energy plants would never be approved anywhere, because they must present workable evacuation plans to federal regulators as part of their licensure.

Experts like Bevan and Ziegler, who have extensively studied the Chernobyl disaster, say even eight-hour evacuation plans like ours far underestimate the amount of time it would take to move people out of the EPZ. They say the faulty time assumptions begin to crumble the moment crisis occurs at the plant. As with other plans across the country, the evacuation time estimates in Mecklenburg County's plan are based on the assumption that the utilities' operators will immediately notify emergency planners that there has been an accident or a terrorist attack.

"We would know quickly the magnitude of the radiation," said Mecklenburg Emergency Management Director Wayne Broome.

But history shows that that isn't typically what happens. During the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, plant managers didn't tell the media or public officials the full extent of what was going on, and went so far as to convey the impression that the accident was substantially less severe, and the situation more under control, than it actually was, according to a summary of US House of Representatives hearings on the matter.

It happened again in February 2000, when Consolidated Edison delayed calling public officials for an hour after the reactor at Indian Point Power Plant blew a steam tube and released radioactive steam into the air. When company representatives finally did notify officials outside the plant, they denied that any radiation had escaped the reactor, though in fact it had. The plant was later shut down for 11 months.

"In scientific terms, that's called operator optimism," said Paul Gunter, Director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, DC. "Rather than send out an emergency announcement that will alarm the public, they will sent out a less serious warning or no warning at all to delay the evacuation to buy time to try to bring the plant in order."

Of course, that's if the plant's operators can quickly pinpoint the problem among the plant's multiple, complex systems. As the accident at Three Mile Island played itself out, there was genuine confusion, even among Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners, over what was actually happening and how to respond to it. After Three Mile Island, it took a full five years for nuclear experts to agree on what caused it.

News Spreads QuicklyFrom the first moment of a large-scale nuclear crisis, evacuation plans like Charlotte-Mecklenburg's would be heavily dependent on emergency workers on the ground, particularly bus drivers who would move children and special populations who can't drive themselves, police and fire personnel whose job it would be to set up road blocks and control the flow of traffic, and medical personnel who would treat the injured.