The February 2012 petition, filed by the Maryland-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service and several environmental groups, asked that the regulatory agency expand the current 10-mile emergency planning zone to 25 miles.
The primary concern regarding this zone is the public’s exposure and inhalation of airborne radioactive contamination, and some residents living within this zone could face evacuation in the event of a nuclear emergency, said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.
“Computer models would be used to determine the movement of a radioactive plume from the plant and would factor in wind speed and direction,” he said.
The same 10-mile zone circles the FirstEnergy Corp.-owned Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Plant in Shippingport. Company officials have said in the past that it would take three to four hours (depending on weather conditions) to evacuate the 10-mile emergency planning zone around the Beaver Valley plant.
“(FirstEnergy) regularly performs studies to validate there is ample time for orderly sheltering or evacuation of the 10-mile emergency planning zone around the Beaver Valley Power Station in the unlikely event of an emergency at the plant,” said company spokeswoman Jennifer Young. “Results of these studies are shared with offsite agencies to assist with their emergency planning efforts.”
The petition had also asked for an expansion of the Ingestion Pathway Zone from 50 miles to 100, an area where the primary concern is the ingestion of food and liquid contaminated by radioactivity, officials said.
It also called for the establishment of a 50-mile “emergency response zone” around plants, which currently does not exist, and asked that nuke plants’ emergency plans be tested regarding the potential for natural disasters and how they could affect an evacuation.
In the years since these emergency zones were established, several factors have changed, including the “increasing age and vulnerability of operating reactors,” changing weather patterns and more people living near reactor sites, the petition argued.
But NRC officials said existing zones are sufficient.
“The NRC is denying the petition because the agency concludes that the current size of emergency planning zones is appropriate for existing reactors and because emergency plans will provide an adequate level of protection of the public health and safety in the event of an accident at a nuclear power plant,” Sheehan said.
These emergency planning zones, established in November 1976, were determined by a task force of NRC and Environmental Protection Agency representatives, he said.
“Out of that comprehensive evaluation came a recommendation that a 10-mile-radius EPZ would assure that ‘prompt and effective actions can be taken to protect the public in the event of an accident’ at a plant,” he said.
“This was based on research showing the most significant impacts of an accident would be expected in the immediate vicinity of a plant and therefore, any initial protective actions, such as evacuations or sheltering in place, should be focused there,” Sheehan said. “Put another way, the projected radiation levels would not be expected to exceed EPA protective action dose guidelines ... beyond 10 miles under most accident scenarios.”
Sheehan also noted the zones’ dimensions vary by location.
“For planning purposes, the NRC defines two emergency planning zones around each nuclear power plant,” he said. “The exact size and configuration of the zones vary from plant to plant due to local emergency response needs and capabilities, population, land characteristics, access routes and jurisdictional boundaries.”
This isn’t the first time a group has spoken out in favor of extending these zones.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office released a study questioning the effectiveness of the evacuation zone around the nation’s nuclear reactors should a disaster occur.
U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr. at that time called on the NRC to study the population living just outside the 10-mile evacuation zones — which equals about 10 million Pennsylvanians — to determine the level of knowledge and adjust emergency management planning accordingly. Casey also warned of “shadow evacuation,” the phenomenon that in the case of a nuclear disaster, those living outside the 10-mile radius evacuation area also will evacuate, increasing traffic and preventing or delaying the escape of others.
Sheehan said in a past interview that the NRC does not believe shadow evacuations would have a large effect on evacuations after an event at a nuke plant, and that the NRC calculated the probability of shadow evacuations itself, and believed that 20 percent was a “reasonable estimate” of those beyond the 10-mile radius who would also evacuate.
©2014 the Beaver County Times (Beaver, Pa.)
