Limited appearance statement of Richard Wilson appearing in his personal capacity. Written for the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board in the Operating license hearing for the Seabrook Nuclear power plant. October 3rd 1987 Richard Wilson, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Harvard University. Ladies and Gentlemen. I send this testimony to you, rather than delivering it in person, because I understand that you are not receiving oral testimony from the public. I note that I testified before you in a limited appearance, in the Construction Permit hearing, on behalf of the Boston Building Trades Union, local number 5 I believe. Although I have good reason to believe that the union would agree with what I write here, I have not verified it, and this is therefore a personal statement. I understand that before you is the consideration of the adequacy of emergency plans for possible sheltering or evacuation from around the Seabrook Nuclear Power plant should a severe accident make that desireable. In this consideration, I believe that you should find it useful to know how well evacuation worked in the only case where it was desireable - from Pripyat and nearby communities after the accident at the VI Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, near Chernobyl, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Since I am one of the few Americans to have visited there, and to have discussed the evacuation with those who were responsible for carrying it out, I believe that my comments may be useful for your deliberations, and I submit them for the record. My primary field of research is in elementary particle physics. I do not intend to discuss this. But I am asking you to save money and lives, by considering emergency plans responsibly and thoughtfully. In addition to my knowledge of basic physics, I have developed in recent years some expertise in nuclear reactor safety; in understanding of risks, of managing risks, and emergency planning in particular. I have been an occasional Consultant to the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards for 10 years, and commented upon the present rules for emergency planning in 1980 in that capacity. I also, in 1979-1980, was Chairman of a committee, appointed by the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachussets, to recommend action that he should take in response to the accident at Three Mile Island. I was appointed by the President of the American Physical Society to be Chairman of a study committee of the society on "The radiological consequences of severe nuclear power accidents." which reported to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on or about February 16th 1985. The report is published in the "Reviews of Modern Physics." I have written about nuclear power; about accidents; about risks, most recently in the April 17th 1987 issue of SCIENCE. I was a consultant to the Attorney general of the Sovereign State of Maine at the time of the Operating licence hearing for the Maine Yankee Atomic Power plant in 1972/3. I was not content at that time that the Maine Yankee Atomic Power company was taking severe accident possibilities seriously enough, and I took it upon myself to be sure that there were adequate plans to evacuate if that should prove to be necessary. However, the head of the Maine State police dampened my enthusiasm by telling me that it is much easier to evacuate people from around the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant than to evacuate people from a remote forest fire, where the roads are few. Forest fires are also under his jurisdiction. I had had personal experience with evacuation. In September 1938, I and my schoolfellows, left London for the countryside, with our gas masks, because of the possibility of war. I repeated this, with 2,000,000 other children on September 1 1939, an evacuation completed in 3 -4 hours. The second time I went by bicycle. My name is on a list, prepared by the Scientists Institute of Public Information, (SIPI) of persons who are willing to talk to the press about radiation and nuclear power. As a result, I was asked about the Chernobyl accident by reporters from the major newspapers as early as April 28th 1986. In August 1986, Ambassador Richard Kennedy, our representative at the IAEA, invited me to be a consultant to the American delegation at Vienna and attend the "Post Accident Review Meeting" held by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), where the Soviets frankly discussed the accident at the VI Lenin power plant at Chernobyl and its consequences. In February of this year I was invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences to visit Moscow, and then to visit the VI Lenin Nuclear Power plant near Chernobyl. I went with my Geiger counter, and confirmed a few of their measurements. At the meeting in Vienna, at an informal meeting in Rome in November, at Moscow, Kiev, and at Chernobyl itself, I had the opportunity to discuss the accident, the evacuation, the radioactivity measurements, and ways of describing the effects on public health, with many Ukrainian and Russian authorities. I have met in particular, Academician Leonid Ilyin, Vice President of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences and director of the Institute of Medical Physics, who spent 3 weeks in Chernobyl in April and May advising on evacuation; Dr Angelina Guskova, Director of Hematology at Moscow Hospital number 6, who was in charge of the care of the 297 victims of acute radiation sickness; Professor Pavlowski, Institute of Medical Physics, Moscow, who has correlated, and is correlating, all the measurements of radiation dose both internal and external; with Dr Lev Michaelovich Khitrov, oceanographer at the Vernatsky Institute of Geochemistry who has been measuring the radioactivity in the river waters; with General Kimstych, commander of the Pripyat Fire Brigade from which 6 brave men died, and who was recently honored with a medal by US firemen in New York; with Chief Engineer Komarov, now in charge of the Chernobyl district facility including the power plant; with Dr Nicholai Fedorovich Lukonin, the Minister of Atomic Energy, Dr Petrosyants, the Chairman of the State Committee on Atomic Energy, my old friends Academician Andrei Sakharov, and Academician Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa, Academician Eugenii P.Velikhov, Vice President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and scientific advisor to General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachov, and Mr Gorbachov himself. Since I met many of these people more than once, I was enabled to ask supplementary questions when they were appropriate. It is well known that some communities, including those from my own state, have doubts whther an adequate evacuation plan is possible from around Seabrook. Since these doubts are obviously based, in part, upon the fact of the accident at Chernobyl, USSR, a year ago, I suggest that anyone who wants to really understand when an evacuation is appropriate, and whether it is possible to evacuate, should invite someone from the USSR who is knowledgeable to come and talk to them. I suggest Academician Ilyin, director of the laboratory for Medical Physics in Moscow, who was a principal advisor on the medical effects of the emergency from April 26th onwards. In his absence I will do what I can. Firstly you must be clear what actually happened at Chernobyl. Then you might ask, "Was the emergency well handled, and could the handling be improved upon?" Finally you might ask "Could it happen here, or if not, what could happen here?" Thirdly, you might ask "Are our preparations sensible?" At 1.23 and 48 seconds unit 4 of the 4-reactor complex at Chernobyl exploded a few seconds after it suffered a prompt critical power excursion. The steam rapidly produced in a small volume raised a 1000 ton top plate, and turned it on its side; it blew off the roof and left the reactor open to the sky with no barriers remaining between the radioactivity in the fuel rods and the public. The graphite moderator caught fire, and for several days burnt (just like a huge coal fire) heating the fuel and making sure that almost all the volatile materials left the reactor. Between 20 and 60% of all radioactive iodine left the reactor building, 20% of the cesium, and even 3% of the solid material was thrown out of the building, onto the roof, and spattered for 1/4 mile downwind. It is very hard to imagine a worse accident in any nuclear power plant. The initial accident had caused fires in the power plant and on the roof which I believe was made of bitumen. At the Vienna meeting, General Kimstych described laconically all the errors in construction and in materials. The roof was not supposed to burn - but it did. Cans labelled "non -flammable" (or to be more precise the Russian or Ukrainian equivalent) burnt merrily. The apparatus to fight a fire on the roof remotely from the ground, did not work and it was necessary for men to go up on the roof in person. The Soviet response was heroic. Firemen came at once from the nearby town of Pripyat, and although their radiation meters went off scale, and the air was blue with the ionization of the air by the radiation, quickly went to fight the fire. When several collapsed after 10 minutes, more firemen came from the district center of Chernobyl, 8 miles away. 300 firemen came in all. This heroic activity, which has properly won the admiration of the whole world, prevented the spread of the fire to the other units. The person in charge at the time of the accident ran into the reactor room to find out what had happened, and got a radiation dose of about 600 Rem - and died a week later. 300 firemen and plant workers got acute radiation sickness, and in all 31 people died. It remains, however, tragic, that if proper attention had been paid to using inflammable materials, and to fighting a fire on a roof 150 ft up in the air, all the firemen would have survived. I believe that the design and operation of Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant attends to such fire prevention and fire fighting matters somewhat better. Attempts were also quickly made to douse the fire with water; but the water ran along corridors and passages to the other undamaged units so that this attempt had to be stopped. In retrospect it was a serious design flaw that prevented the isolation of the units. This does not apply to Seabrook. The first radioactive plume went high into the air - about 10,000 feet- and blew westwards. The large height of the plume prevented a high radiation exposure of the local populace, and also it went 1/2 mile south of the center of Pripyat, the workers' town 2 miles from the plant. As a result, the radiation doses in Pripyat were modest on Saturday April 26th - about 20 mr/hr, not enough to suggest an evacuation. The fire increased; the wind changed; and the plume height fell to 1000 ft, so that the radiation levels in Pripyat rose to 1 R/hr at the street nearest to the power plant, and an evacuation was ordered. This was carried out between 2 pm and 4 pm on Sunday April 27th, with 1,100 busses from the streets of Kiev, which formed a line 12 miles long along the narrow 20 ft wide road. This can be seen from the map of the Chernobyl area which I attach to this testimony. Although there was a prepared evacuation plan, this was jettisoned, because the radioactivity had gone west along the route of the proposed evacuation. The actual plan was therefore ad hoc and piecemeal. People were not all evacuated at once, but day by day as the radiation levels on the ground increased with continued releases of radioactivity. Peasants in the countryside were evacuated later than the people in the towns. Many of them would not move until their cow, their chickens and pigs - in fact their livelihood - were moved also. The district center of Chernobyl was evacuated after May 1 when the wind had moved. Very few people were moved from the east of the plant, and the final evacuation zone was an average of 10 miles radius, rising to 18 miles in the west - the direction of the initial plume. Nonetheless, Academician Ilyin is very proud of the fact that noone in the general public got acute radiation sickness - which means that they got doses of 80 Rems or less. Within hours of the accident some of the best and brightest in the Soviet Union offered their help to the local authorities, and this help was gladly accepted. Boris Cherbina, Vice President of the Soviet Union arrived on Saturday to take administrative charge. After 2 weeks of 18 hour days, he was replaced by Silyaev. Academician Leonid Ilyin, who I believe is deputy minister of health, arrived to advise on evacuation. Dr Ilyin told me that he would make no major changes in these plans, but he insists on the importance of having one man in charge. In all human activities it is important to be clear what one is aiming at. The aim of evacuation should be to prevent, in so far as possible, a dose that leads to acute radiation sickness (a dose greater than 80 Rems), with a probability of death due to radiation if the dose exceeds 300 Rem. Smaller doses, might lead to an increased risk of cancer (less than 1% chance of dying of cancer in a lifetime), are of less concern, and certainly less short term concern. It is important not to take drastic actions for these smaller risks, which might cause great dislocation and therefore greater risks than the ones being avoided. The International Commission on Radiological Protection, (ICRP), has made a recommendation that persons be evacuated from an area if it is estimated that their dose, integrated over several months, would otherwise exceed 50 Rems. The Soviets adopted and still recommend this idea, with a 25/75 modification. If the dose is expected to reach 25 Rems, evacuation should be considered. If the dose is expected to reach 75 Rems, an evacuation plan should already be implemented. FEMA/NRC/EPA use an absurdly low level of 5 Rems for some purposes, and 1 Rem for others. As a radiation worker my allowed dose is 5 Rems in a year. I consider it to be a waste of time to evacuate to prevent xposure at levels I can encounter at work; moreover, since evacuation itself has its hazards, I believe it is more dangerous o evacuate at those levels than to stay in place. At Chernobyl the evacuation plan was delayed, but it accomplished the above aims. Noone outside the plant got acute radiation sickness. The evacuation was to prevent accuimulation of exposure over a long term which might increase the risk of cancer or other chronic ailments. The 45,000 people evacuated from the town of Pripyat got an average dose committment of 3 Rems, less than a radiation workers' permitted dose for a year. Some persons in the countryside were evacuated later, as the wind changed. Even some who were under the first plume, and evacuated later, got only 43 Rems. Although 43 Rems is above dose limits recommended by ICRP for anyone except an astronaut or emergency worker, it adds only 0.5% to the probability of dying of cancer in a lifetime. It is important, however to remember that at these doses noone will be immediately sick. This compares to a 16% probability of dying of cancer from all other causes, and 10% for cigarette smoking alone. Although public opinion is changing, noone has yet suggested compulsory evacuation from a smoke filled committee room at a political convention, or a smoke filled restaurant. For the persons living in the Ukraine and Byelorussia but not in the evacuation zone, we also have estimates of doses and dose committment. One way of expressing these is by direct comparison to radiation doses in other situations. By this means we avoid the uncertainty of speculating about the effects of low doses of radiation. Anyone in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, will receive less dose from Chernobyl, than the increase one of you would get in moving for 10 years to the mile high city, Denver, where cosmic rays are more intense, and there is more radioactivity on the ground. Persons in other parts of Europe will receive less still. Could it have been worse? Anyone with imagination can always imagine something worse. For the local population, there is the unlikely possibility of a wind blowing over Pripyat, with a rain shower just at the time the plume passed overhead. For the rest of the world, the accident is about as bad as we can imagine. In a major respect it was better than was previously anticipated for an accident of this size. That is because the deliberately pessimistic procedures used to calculate the consequences of accidents omit the fact that if the accident occurs rapidly, the large radioactive plume will be hot and rise above peoles' heads. In an accident that develops more slowly the rise may not be the 10,000 ft of Chernobyl, but only the 1,000 ft measured in subsequent days at Chernobyl. However this is still enough to reduce the radiation dose to the local populace considerably. Could the same sort of accident happen in our reactors? To that the answer is unequivocally no. There are too many design differences. While one must admit that the quantity of radioactivity is the same, for similar total electricity output, it is very unlikely that it could be released in the same way. Several important design criteria prevent this. Our reactors are designed to be stable when operating conditions are changed slightly. The RBMK reactors are unstable at low power and can very quickly become uncontrollable. This was only prevented by strict operating rules - 6 of which were deliberately violated during April 25/6, for which violations Chief Engineer Fomin and 5 others have been given jail sentences by the Peoples' Court at Chernobyl. I am glad to say that small but important palliative changes have been rapidly made to all operating RBMK rweactors to mitigate the effects of the instability and to prevent this particular type of accident from ever occuring again. Even more important, the Soviets have announced that they are starting no more of these reactors, but are going to switch to the VVER - 1000 design which is modelled after our pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) such as that at Seabrook. We must also remember that Seabrook has a double containment and other features that make such large , prompt, releases, almost impossible. It was a surprise to western reactor experts that anyone would contemplate a design with such an instability. In American reactors, such instabilities are avoided by design. It would be very much more difficult to create a power excursion in an American reactor such as happened on April 26th, and would involve actions which would have to be deliberately intended to cause an accident, and would involve collusion of a number of persons with a deliberate attempt to destroy the reactor and themselves. This is usually considered to be virtually impossible. Then, if a power excursion of the magnitude that happened at Chernobyl took place, the steam and other products would almost certainly be contained in the large volume containment vessel that surrounds the reactor. The contrast between the uncontained RBMK reactor at Chernobyl and the Seabrook containment can be seen easily from a comparison of the drawings which I attach to this testimony. In this connection, I note that recently a test, to a 1/6 scale , of a containment was made at Sandia National Laboratory at Alberquerque, and the containment failed at 3 times the nominal design pressure. Moreover, it failed in a favourable way; a crack appeared to release the pressure slowly, rather than suddenly, so that most radioactive particulates would be retained. The Seabrook containment which would probably have held the products of the Chernobyl explosion, will more easily hold the products of a slower failure that might occur in a US reactor. As a result of these design differences, I would put the probability of a major (Chernobyl size) release from the Seabrook reactor as considerably less than once in a million years, and probably as low as once in a billion years. In a million years there will have been a lot of other major industrial accidents in New Hampshire. We must also be aware that we have considerably more monitoring equipment in place around the Seabrook nuclear power plant than do the Soviets. For example we measure the winds at all times; the nearest wind tower to Chernobyl was at Kiev airport, 100 km away. The plots of radiation levels at Pripyat start only 2 hours after the accident; those in communities further away, a day later; those for places upwind (like Kiev) after a few days. These were adequate for their decisions. Our problem will be different; not to decide which measurements to take, but which of the thousands of measurements to ignore as irrelevant. With this experience in front of us, I have developed some strong opinions about emergency plans which I want to share with you. Advanced planning for emergencies should concentrate on how to get the necessary and proper information, such as radiation levels or the status of the reactor, to the persons with authority, so that they can make a proper decision on when, or whether, to evacuate. The person in authority will have a surfeit of information so that he must have a clear procedure for deciding what is relevant. In this, there is no substitute for the clear understanding of a competent, broadly trained, man or woman. You could well make sure that the State of New Hampshire has such a competent person. I know that Massachussets has - Dr Gerald Parker. Secondly, emergency planning should not be synonymous with evacuation planning. All too often it is assumed that in an emergency, evacuation will be mandatory. There are other actions, less drastic than evacuation, which are often more appropriate. For example, it has been calculated, using the deliberately pessimistic calculational procedure of 10 years ago, that even if radiation release is known to be imminent, that it is better to wait indoors (sheltering) rather than evacuate immediately, for all distances greater than 3 miles. A later evacuation, for those down wind, might still be decided upon, but would then be better and safer than a more general early one. This applies even more with today's understanding of probable accident consequences. The conclusion that staying indoors gives excellent sheltering was well born out at Chernobyl. The modern brick apartment buildings of Pripyat gave at least a factor of 4 reduction by shielding. Measurements of radiation levels around Chernobyl today show this effect; radiation levels indoors are 5 to 10 times smaller than those out of doors. For example I measured the radiation level in the parking lot of the power plant to be 0.4 millirads/hour. Inside the power plant buildings, in the control room, the turbine room and the lunch room, it ranged from 0.05 to 0.07 millirads/hr It is also important to realize how much easier it is to move people from around Seabrook - even from the beaches - than from around Pripyat. I have seen the roads in both places with my own eyes. The Pripyat evacuation used a line of 1100 busses, taken from the streets of Kiev, that was 12 miles long, along a narrow road, about 20 ft wide. The line of busses even had to cross, on arrival, the line of maximum radioactivity; just south of the railroad bridge in Pripyat, at the traffic circle where the road goes 2 miles East to the power plant. In contrast, just 2 miles west of Seabrook is the 6 lane highway route 95, and traffic can go N, S or SW on another 6 lane highway, route 495. From Hampton beach, roads 30ft wide or more go both N and W; from Seabrook beach 206, 30ft wide, goes west a few miles to 95; from Salisbury beach, it is 4 miles W to 95, along 1 30ft to 40 ft road, and one can also go south. The only real bottleneck would be the 20 ft wide bridge on route 1A over the inlet, but that would not normally be the preferred route for getting away from the plant. It has been said that the traffic jams at Seabrook beach are frequent and make evacuation obviously impossible. I have been in a traffic jam. But it was trying to get to the beach; not away from the beach! Every summer Sunday, between about 4pm and sunset, the beaches are evacuated with very little help from anyone. One may reasonably assume that in an emergency, police will prevent traffic entering the area. I wish to repeat a recommendation that I make whenever possible. Emergency plans should be integrated with plans for other emergencies. Unfortunately, this integration is becoming less, rather than more frequent, because of regulatory differences. There are three reasons why emergency plans should be integrated. (a) Plans need practice. There are fortunately few nuclear emergencies, yet many emergencies of other technologies. By integrating the plans, the nuclear plans will get practice which they will otherwise not get. Practice in a simulated situation is no substitute for practice in a real emergency. (b) By integrating the plans, regulators and the public alike will gain perspective on the relative frequency of accidents in different technologies, and scarce resources of money, and more importantly competent personnel, will be more wisely allocated. There are a number of situations where absolute protection of the public in an emergency is not possible. For example, there is no way there can be adequate warning, and e vacuation, if a fully loaded 747 aircraft were to crash into the crowd in the middle of a baseball game, with a huge loss of life. Yet this hazard cannot be truthfully claimed to be absolutely impossible. I believe it to be much more likely than a severe accident with appreciable loss of life at Seabrook. (c) If the plans are integrated, the civil authorities can protect the public from emergencies with no legislative, or budgetory, attention using the facilities developed for those emergencies in the public eye. In this connection, I note with approval, that an amendment to the Superfund legislation requires states to have plans for emergencies caused by spills of toxic chemicals. These, like nuclear emergencies, must be integrated with the others. In conclusion, I feel that while meeting your legislative mandate to plan for a nuclear emergency for a region 10 miles in radius, I would prefer that plans do not include an immediate evacuation for anyone beyond 3 miles from the plant, but only evacuation if it seems appropriate after measurements have been made. General plans, such as making sure that local police and officials know which citizens, and which persons in authority , understand radiation, are of course, always helpful. I append to this testimony 3 articles that I have written that give more information. 1) A guest Editorial for Health Physics on Emergency Planning, that has received some praise, and so far as I know, no criticism; 2) Testimony this spring that I gave before a committee of the US Senate, Chairman Senator LeBreaux of Louisiana. 3) An article on my visit to Chernobyl that appeared recently in Science. 4) An article for the Chicago Tribune, August 7th: "When there is an accident, who is to blame?" 3 Figures attached to original copy.