That was the assessment of federal officials, who spoke during a Thursday morning briefing at the Nebraska Public Power District’s emergency operations center in Auburn, Nebraska.
The test, conducted Tuesday, is intended to probe how well agencies, other organizations and the utility itself would react to a crisis involving the Cooper Nuclear Station — positioned along the Missouri River three miles south of Brownville, Nebraska. NPPD owns and operates the plant, and representatives also attended Thursday’s briefing.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency had planned the one-day exercise for those entities in Cooper’s vicinity. The list included representation from groups in Atchison County, Missouri, and Richardson and Nemaha counties in Nebraska.
“It was a very productive event,” said Chuck Gregg, a senior planner with FEMA in Kansas City. “There’s a lot of good things that came out of this.”
The exercise is a biennial requirement of the government, intended to highlight and address the health and safety of those who live and work near the plant. It measured adequacy of state and local radiological emergency readiness and response plans, and required activation of emergency facilities.
Officials cautioned the briefing was only held to describe and explain the test itself — while actual results, in an earliest draft form, won’t be available to the governments for about a month.
About 55 county, state and federal agencies participated in off-site exercises related to the plant. Those organizations are being evaluated by the Technological Hazards Branch of the National Preparedness Division of FEMA’s Kansas City office.
A team of 25 evaluators will write reports covering 140 criteria at various locations. The reports will be assembled into a comprehensive analysis that will be distributed to the governments. Comments on the report will be due back from the agencies within 60 days of the test, while FEMA will have to finalize its own report within 90 days.
The report must be approved by FEMA and then sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the states of Nebraska and Missouri.
The exercise covered such sectors as emergency operations management, protective action decision making, and emergency notifications and public information.
“Does the information get out to the public in a timely manner?” said Gregg of the latter category’s purpose. “Is it accurate?”
Rhonda Wiley, emergency management and 911 director for Atchison County, participated in a rundown of the exercise for the agencies, which was held prior to the briefing. She said the graded exercise is valuable for a host of reasons.
“It works good for floods, for tornadoes, for radiological,” she said. “It’s an all-hazards type planning approach, which is what we utilize.”
Wiley maintains emergency plans for Atchison County, and works with area governments and the utility to ensure the approaches are updated.
A final report on the exercise is expected to be released in the fall.
In an unrelated matter, the Omaha Public Power District — which has been operating Nebraska’s other nuclear plant, Fort Calhoun — announced Thursday that its board had voted to shutter the plant. Fort Calhoun, near Omaha, is the smallest nuclear power plant in the nation.
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