Societal Burdens Imposed by Nuclear Accidents

Abstract

Nuclear power plant accidents place extraordinary burdens of crisis management, leadership, and rulemaking upon governmental authority. Societal burdens of this kind far outweigh the monetary cost of cleanup operations, which realistically may not even be possible.

Aaron Datesman is the primary author of this chapter.

Nuclear power stations are like stars that shine all day long! We shall sow them all over the land. They are perfectly safe! (Medvedev, 1991)− Academician M.A. Stryrikovich, Soviet power engineer

The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl this month 20 years ago, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed … Chernobyl opened my eyes like nothing else: it showed the horrible consequences of nuclear power, even when it is used for non-military purposes. (Gorbachev, 2006)− Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union in 1986

The Canadian Meltdown

Although the technology was invented in the United States, the first meltdown of a nuclear reactor occurred in Ontario, Canada, when the NRX reactor at the Chalk River Laboratories suffered a serious accident in December 1952. The NRX reactor was a research facility, small by the standards of a modern commercial nuclear power station. In addition to radioactive gases that may have been vented to the atmosphere in the absence of monitoring, the accident is believed to have released 10,000 Curies of radioactivity contained within 1.2 million gallons of contaminated water that flooded the basement of the reactor building.

The Curie (Ci), named in honor of Marie Curie, is a unit of activity indicating a quantity of radioactive material. One Curie represents the number of disintegrations that occur per second in one gram of radium. It is a large unit: one Curie indicates an activity of 37 billion disintegrations per second. Often the Becquerel (Bq), representing just one decay per second, is a more useful description. There is no direct, universal conversion between activity and dose. Each situation involving exposure to ionizing radiation requires its own careful description and analysis.

It required the efforts of more than one thousand persons to clean up the damaged reactor, which after a few years was placed back into operation. A team from the Naval Reactors program in the U.S. was dispatched to lead the repair effort. The person in charge of that unit of twenty-three individuals was a 28-year-old lieutenant from Georgia named James E. Carter. The thirty-ninth president of the United States is pictured in his dress whites in Fig. 5.1. President Carter shared the following recollection with a Canadian journalist in 2011:

It was the early 1950s ... I had only seconds that I could be in the reactor myself. We all went out on the tennis court, and they had an exact duplicate of the reactor on the tennis court. We would run out there with our wrenches and we’d check off so many bolts and nuts and they’d put them back on... And finally when we went down into the reactor itself, which was extremely radioactive, then we would dash in there as quickly as we could and take off as many bolts as we could, the same bolts we had just been practicing on. Each time our men managed to remove a bolt or fitting from the core, the equivalent piece was removed on the mock-up. (Milnes, 2011)

Because the environment inside the NRX reactor building was so dangerous, individuals were permitted to enter in shifts lasting only 90 s. Even wearing protective gear, crew members acquired a dose equivalent to a year’s worth of permitted exposure during each brief shift. The total dose Lt. Carter received exceeded limits considered acceptable today by a factor of about one thousand. He was told it was likely that he would never have children. (Thankfully, the prediction was not correct; President and Rosalynn Carter had four children.) Lt. Carter’s urine was radioactive for 6 months after the accident.

Fig. 5.1

(left) Lieutenant James Carter, who served with the Naval Reactors Branch of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, headed by then-Captain Hyman Rickover. (right) President Jimmy Carter visiting the stricken Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear power station, in April 1979

Twenty-seven years later, President Jimmy Carter visited Central Pennsylvania in the wake of a serious accident at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear power station in Middletown, PA, near the state capital of Harrisburg. The accident began early in the morning on Wednesday, March 28, 1979. Carter is pictured in the TMI-2 control room, on Sunday, April 1, 1979, in the photograph on the right in Fig. 5.1.

All Technologies Are Accident-Plagued

Accidents are how engineers learn. There should be nothing surprising about this simple idea. For instance, if one desires to learn the fracture strength of a material, it is necessary take a piece and break it. “Engineering is an art form that makes use of scientific principles,” wrote journalist Ira Rosen and engineer Mike Gray, “and this marriage confuses a lot of people. We tend to think of engineering itself as a science, but it is nothing more than advanced carpentry. The practitioners learn by doing.” (Gray & Rosen, 1982) Their correct insight appears in the introduction to their book about the Three Mile Island accident, titled The Warning.

Accidents happen, full stop: any other position is fantasy on the level exhibited by the Academician in the first quotation. Despite public-facing assurances of safety and competence, in fact the authorities understand the reality of the situation. For instance, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1985 asserted as a goal that there should be not more than one incident of core damage per 10,000 years of reactor operation. There have been at least ten incidents of core damage over the history of nuclear power technology in Western nations.

Although one might argue over whether certain instances should be excluded on the basis of dual use (both military and civilian) or experimental design, it is inarguable that four commercial nuclear power stations designed by U.S. firms have melted down, with accompanying large releases of ionizing radiation. These are Three Mile Island (TMI) Unit 2, in Pennsylvania in 1979, and Fukushima Daiichi Units 1, 2, and 3, in Japan on March 11, 2011. Additionally, one commercial power reactor of Soviet design melted down¹ in Ukraine, on April 26, 1986. That facility was the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Unit 4, a graphite-moderated RMBK reactor lacking a containment structure.

As of 2019, worldwide cumulative reactor operating experience exceeded 18,000 reactor-years. Therefore, considering only these five serious accidents, the frequency of meltdown events (much more severe than “core damage”) accompanied by a serious radiological release has been one per 3600 reactor-years. The historical performance of nuclear power stations has not met NRC’s stated goal for operational safety.

Common Threads

The nuclear disasters in Ukraine and in Japan were vast and complex events, fundamentally disruptive to the societies in which they occurred. For instance, as stated in the second quotation opening this chapter, the Chernobyl disaster may have been the most significant single factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. No useful effort can be made in this space to provide a comprehensive description of either accident. The authors wish instead to examine the societal dynamics surrounding nuclear power plant accidents in the context of the Three Mile Island accident, with which they have a connection through ongoing scientific work. There are a handful of common threads: contamination of foodstuffs, long-distance dispersion, and government and corporate secrecy, along with displaced populations, and massive personnel requirements for cleanup and remediation.

The consensus position of the scientific establishment (as expressed by the National Academy of Sciences BEIR VII committee) is that there is no such thing as a safe dose of ionizing radiation. Every exposure carries with it the possibility of harm, in a manner that increases with the degree of exposure. Nevertheless, there exist exposures that are “allowable,” including levels of contamination in drinking water and foodstuffs.² In the U.S., permitted levels of radioactivity in foodstuffs are set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The radioisotopes cesium-134 and cesium-137 are permitted at levels up to 1200 Bq/kg. The regulation limiting cesium radioisotopes in the European Union is set at 600 Bq/kg. Meanwhile, according to the Food Sanitation Act in Japan established in 2012, the permitted level of radiocesium in general foodstuffs is much lower: only 100 Bq/kg. It should therefore be understood that permitted levels of contamination are a legal matter − in fact, a social and political determination. They are not scientific.

The accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima were not localized events. As was also true during the era of nuclear weapons testing,³ the deposition of fallout due to these accidents was worldwide. The international community first became aware of the Chernobyl disaster because radioactivity was noticed in Sweden; the mainstream academic journal Health Physics has a topic keyword “Turkish tea” due to contamination from the accident. Radiation from Fukushima likewise appeared on the West Coast of the United States within only a short time after the accident. Radioactive contamination was found in produce grown in California by the technical staff of the Department of Nuclear Engineering of the University of California at Berkeley.

Secrecy and distrust are a final common element. For instance, the New York Times reported the following about investigations of the Chernobyl disaster undertaken in 1991, the year the Soviet Union dissolved:

The opportunity to ask questions, limited as it may be, has still allowed the Supreme Soviet’s commission investigating Chernobyl to uncover two high-level secret government orders: one from 1987 classifying as secret any information on the extent of radiation contamination, and one from 1988 decreeing that no medical diagnosis may connect an illness with radiation exposure. (Barringer, 1991)

The nuclear power plant accidents at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island were monumental events with vast consequences, for which governmental authority bore significant culpability. Information provided by these same governments should not necessarily be regarded as trustworthy, authoritative, or complete, even in the absence of other sources of reliable information. The reality that one’s government cannot be fully trusted is one of the costly societal burdens imposed by nuclear power technology.

Chernobyl and Fukushima

The two most significant radioisotopes released by nuclear power plant accidents are believed to be cesium-137 (Cs-137) and iodine-131 (I-131). According to an evaluation published by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, the Chernobyl accident released about 2 million Curies (2 MCi) of Cs-137, and 27 MCi of I-131, into the environment. The reactor’s entire inventory of the radioactive noble gas xenon-133 was also released, although because it dispersed widely the impact of this release is generally neglected. About 3% of the fuel escaped as particles, amounting to as much as six tons of highly radioactive material.

The 49,000 residents of the town of Pripyat − an atomgrad, or atomic city, with special privileges and a high quality of life − were evacuated in haste on 1100 buses the day after the accident began. Although most believed they would return to their homes after a few days, in fact Pripyat was abandoned after the accident. Altogether about 200,000 people were relocated from contaminated areas after the Chernobyl disaster. The criterion for relocation was a level of Cs-137 exceeding 40 Curies per square kilometer. Spread uniformly, by this criterion the 2 MCi of radiocesium released by the accident would render an area of 18,000 square miles uninhabitable. The area is three-quarters of the size of the entire state of West Virginia. The actual off-limits area amounts to about 6000 square miles, about the size of the state of Connecticut.

The idea of allowable levels of contamination was an urgent matter for authorities in the Soviet Union in the wake of the Chernobyl meltdown, especially since the affected regions were important agricultural areas. For instance, meatpackers were given special instructions on how to process radioactive meat.

The instructions ordered butchers to grade the meat by radioactivity. Packers were to grind up radioactive flesh and mix it with appropriate proportions of clean meat for sausage. The experts in accident logistics were thinking along the commonly understood belief that diffusion⁴ was the solution. Spread the contaminated meat broadly so each person across the vast USSR unknowingly ingested their own small part of the tragedy. Preparing the goods for sale, the packers were told to “label the sausage as you normally would.” (Brown, 2019)

Meanwhile, privileged sectors of the society, including KGB employees, took measures to ensure that they received foodstuffs free of radioactive contamination. When radioactive meat turned up in Moscow, messages were sent to Kyiv demanding that such shipments should not reoccur.⁵

While striving to manage the disaster, it was necessary also for the authorities to learn about what was happening, and to try to understand it.

Kyiv researchers kept a close eye on livestock in farms in the Narodychi and Chernobyl regions, areas that were heavily contaminated and easy to reach from Kyiv ... “In fact,” the researchers summarized in 1988, “damage over a protracted period does not correspond with the [non-acute or low] dose, but looks like acute radiation symptoms.” The researchers suggested the need to recalculate the method of extrapolating the effects of large doses to small doses. (Brown, 2019)

The idea that protracted exposures may be much more dangerous than commonly understood is a theme of other chapters in this book.

The “liquidation”⁶ of the Chernobyl disaster, “was a task on a scale unprecedented in human history, and one for which no one in the USSR − or, indeed, anywhere else on earth − had ever bothered to prepare.” (Higginbotham, 2019) At least seven hundred thousand people − many inadequately equipped, poorly trained, and unaware of the risks − contributed to liquidation efforts. One of the liquidators, a radiation biologist named Natalia Manzurova, worked in the exclusion zone for more than four years. She recorded the following memory of her experience, relating to the abandoned kindergarten pictured in Fig. 5.2.

Fig. 5.2

The abandoned Pripyat kindergarten described by liquidator Natalia Manzurova. (From Manzurova & Sullivan, 2006)

I was amazed by the luxury of that kindergarten when I visited it to look for furniture I could use in the new lab and office. There were Chinese rugs and different matching color schemes for curtains and bedspreads in each sleeping room and a sea of stored toys, visual aids and games. New bed linen, towels, aprons and white dressing gowns were neatly piled and hung up. Looking at the rows of children’s slippers and photos of their owners on the wall, I wondered where they might be now and how they were doing...

One time when I touched a table in the kindergarten, I felt a jolt of pain in my thumb. I had probably touched a ‘hot particle’, the same type of large radioactive particle that injured Chernobyl’s first liquidators through inhalation and skin burns. It hurt immediately and my finger swelled, turned a blue-lilac color and later the skin peeled off. (Manzurova & Sullivan, 2006)

Because the GE boiling water reactors that melted down possessed containment vessels, and because most of the fallout from the disaster blew eastward, into the Pacific Ocean, the 2011 accident in Japan seems to have been less severe than Chernobyl. According to modeling performed by the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency, the releases from the Fukushima disaster were about one-tenth as great as those due to Chernobyl: 0.3 MCi Cs-137, and 3.2 MCi I-131. Since only about 20% of the radioactivity released contaminated land, the exclusion zone near Fukushima has an area of only 143 square miles. Like the Chernobyl accident, however, the radioactive contamination released by the accident spread worldwide. The sensitive monitoring network operated by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization measured fallout from the Fukushima accident even in the southern hemisphere within a month of the tsunami and triple meltdown.

Nine days after the accident, the radioactive cloud had crossed Northern America. Three days later when a station in Iceland picked up radioactive materials, it was clear that the cloud had reached Europe ... As of 13 April 2011, radioactivity had spread to the southern hemisphere of the Asia-Pacific region and had been detected at stations located for example in Australia, Fiji, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. (CTBTO, 2011)

The number of persons displaced from contaminated areas near Fukushima Daiichii in Japan is nearly 120,000. Although a liquidation effort at the scale of Chernobyl was not implemented in 2011, more than 77,000 persons worked in remediation efforts at Fukushima through the first five years after the accident. Human rights experts working for the United Nations have expressed concern over exploitation and coercion of those individuals, whose health may also have been negatively impacted. There were 46,000 individuals employed at Fukushima in 2016. Cleanup efforts continue as of 2023 and will continue for many additional years.

The idea that protracted low-level exposures may be more harmful than the authorities assert is consistent with the following observation from Japan in the wake of the accident at Fukushima Daiichi:

One of Japan’s most vocal physicians, 95-year-old Shuntaro Hida, charged in the summer of 2012 that people in Japan were already starting to develop symptoms of internal radiation poisoning, including fatigue, diarrhea, and hair loss, resulting from the ingestion and/or inhalation of radioisotopes. Dr. Hida is a native of Hiroshima. After the bombing there he treated patients exposed to the fallout ... Hida told the Japan Times: “I am worried because I received calls much earlier than I expected.” (Nadesan, 2013)

A rigorous scientific test of the hypothesis, described more fully in a separate chapter, remains for the future.

An Impossible Battle Against Dust

As a young man, one of the authors (AD) for a time held a work-study job in a chemical engineering department. The work was involved with the topic of combustion aerosols. He remembers the safety protocol for a liquid mercury spill (one should sprinkle powdered sulfur on it), and the insight offered by the graduate student mentor. “The more you know about dust,” the mentor said, “the less you want to breathe it.”

While pure uranium is metallic, for use in a nuclear reactor the uranium is converted into a ceramic powder of uranium oxide, pressed into pellets about 3/8“ in diameter and 5/8” long. The material is brittle, fracturing along grain boundaries due to thermal stress. The fracture stress decreases as fission products build up during operation of the reactor; that is, the integrity of the material degrades the longer the reactor operates. The fuel pellets (there may be as many as ten million of them in a reactor) are encased in long, slender fuel rods made of zirconium metal.⁷ Zirconium alloys are chosen for this application due to their low neutron cross-section and excellent corrosion resistance. However, the material becomes brittle during reactor operation due to both corrosion and irradiation. Under certain circumstances, it can even burn. The Chernobyl RMBK reactor furthermore utilized a graphite moderator, adding yet another brittle ceramic material to the mix.

The appearance of such terms as “ceramic”, “brittle”, and “fracture” (not to mention the idea that the cladding and moderator might burn) should evoke an important, though prosaic, concern: dust. The loss of containment accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima released vast clouds of radioactive dust to the environment. One of the locations the radioactive dust created by the meltdown and explosion at Chernobyl Unit 4 wound up was in the fuzzy wool coats of sheep.

In a chorus of voices, the women described the slowly dawning realization in the summer of 1986 that the distant nuclear accident had entered their lives ... By the end of May, many workers suffered mysterious nosebleeds. They complained of scratchy throats, nausea, and fatigue. Union records show that a couple of drivers, after helping out in the fields, sought medical treatment. In the sorting shop, the hay bales measured up to 30 μSv/hr. The wool workers did not know that picking up the most radioactive bales was like embracing an X-ray machine while it was turned on. (Brown, 2019)

The reactors at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan possessed containment structures that the Chernobyl RMBK reactor lacked. Therefore, for technological as well as for sociological, cultural, and political reasons, the situation in Japan is not the same as in Ukraine and Belarus. (It might be more correct to make a comparison between certain areas of Japan and areas of Europe heavily contaminated with Chernobyl fallout. That topic is outside the scope of this discussion.) There are similarities, however. Soil is another place where radioactive dust winds up. Particles of radioactive cesium bind chemically to small particles of clay.

The only possible remediation is to scrape off and bury contaminated soil. At the Interim Storage Facility between the towns of Okuma and Futaba near Fukushima Daiichi, remediation efforts have buried 14 million cubic meters of soil − enough radioactive soil to fill the Tokyo Dome eleven times. The government of Japan has committed to moving this enormous quantity of material again, to a final disposal site, before the year 2045. Even if the plan as described can be executed successfully, the local environment will not become clean, since the nearby forests will remain highly contaminated. The situation in Japan has been perhaps less urgent, but it is certainly similar to the emergency disposal of highly radioactive wool, meat, and animal hides that was necessary in the agricultural regions surrounding Chernobyl a few decades ago.

Tiny particles of radioactive dust contaminating a vast quantity of buried topsoil may be difficult to visualize, but the issue possesses more immediate impact if those particles threaten to accumulate in one’s own airways and body. On March 15th, 2011, while the accident at Fukushima Daiichi was still ongoing,⁸ a scientist employed by the University of Tokyo wore a face mask while mostly outside for eighteen hours. At that time, a plume of radioactive material from Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2 passed over the Kanto area of Tokyo, about 130 miles away. It was possible to create an image of the radioactive material captured by the mask by simply placing a plate with a photographic emulsion on top of it, as shown in Fig. 5.3.

Fig. 5.3

Radioactive materials trapped on a breathing mask worn by an individual in Tokyo, 220 km from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, in 2011. The left and right sides of the same mask are shown. (Image from Higaki, 2023)

The mask shown in Fig. 5.3, placed in a sealed bag, was subsequently placed in storage. It was not forgotten, however. Using a refined technique, the investigator recently examined the mask again, looking for the presence of localizable radiocesium-bearing microparticles around one micron in size. Twenty-two particles⁹ were found, with a combined activity of about 8 Becquerels. The result was published in the mainstream academic journal Health Physics.

The devil is in the details. A vast collection of hazardous particles too small to see, which end up essentially everywhere and may be recycled through the environment over and over, may constitute an important, hidden or neglected dirty truth about the risks of nuclear power. Radioactive dust poses a difficulty without a very sensible solution.

Central Pennsylvania, 1979

The accident at Three Mile Island Unit 2 was not as severe as later events at Chernobyl and Fukushima. For instance, because there was no melt-through¹⁰ of the containment vessel, widespread contamination of foodstuffs with radiocesium did not occur. Nevertheless, accident consequences lie on a spectrum. The same set of concerns identified for the more severe loss-of-containment accidents also arose in Central Pennsylvania. Identifying common themes in the context of a less cataclysmic event is therefore a useful exercise for understanding the societal burdens imposed by nuclear power plant accidents.

Like cesium contamination in root vegetables in Ukraine, or tritium accumulating in seafood in the Pacific Ocean near Fukushima, contamination of milk by radioiodine was an important worry in Central Pennsylvania. The nationally famous Hershey’s Chocolate factory lies in the region, which has long been known for the quality of its dairy products. Long-distance dispersion of contamination was also observed. The only location where xenon-133 released during the initial phase of the accident was directly measured was a laboratory operated by the NY State Department of Health in Albany, NY, 375 kilometers away from Three Mile Island. Cleanup required more than a decade and $2 billion (in 2022 dollars).

Secrecy and distrust, relating to both government authority and to the corporate operator of the nuclear power station, are the final components of the discussion. Both were prominent aspects of the accident at Three Mile Island and its aftermath. For instance, while a general evacuation order was never given, the governor of Pennsylvania did recommend that pregnant women and young children should evacuate from a limited area on Friday, March 30 (two days after the accident began). As many as 150,000 people left the area, very often in a state of considerable panic. Resident Bill Peters, pictured in Fig. 5.4, shared the following recollection of his own decision to evacuate:

Fig. 5.4

Bill Peters at his home near the Three Mile Island nuclear power station, in 1986. Mr. Peters evacuated from the area on Friday, March 30, 1979, two days after the start of the accident. In this image, in his left hand he holds an ordinary dandelion leaf. In his right hand, he displays a mutated dandelion leaf, harvested from his property. Gigantism is known to be one impact of ionizing radiation exposure on plant life

(Friday afternoon) while in the process of leaving, the Fairview Township police come down the road and he hollered, “Bill, get the hell inside! I mean it. Get inside. Don’t breathe the air! Close your doors and windows!” So I waved to him, I said, “Yeah...keep going!” (Laughter) “I’m getting out of here! I’m not staying!” (Smith Katagiri, 1989)

The governor’s decision came amidst conflicting information and the absence of clear guidance. The situation is recorded by the NRC historian:

The central concern at the White House, as at the NRC and the governor’s office, was the advisability and feasibility of evacuation. William Odom of the National Security Council staff informed Zbigniew Brzezinski on Saturday morning [March 31, three days after the accident began] that “a major population crisis relocation would probably occur “sometime today”. Other federal officials urged that the White House seriously consider recommending that [Pennsylvania Governor] Thornburgh order an immediate evacuation. (Walker, 2004)

In the author’s view, it is in this context that President Carter’s visit to Middletown on April 1st should be understood. The Three Mile Island accident precipitated a national security crisis, exactly as the disasters at Fukushima and Chernobyl did. Nuclear power technology is so dangerous that its failure is a matter of national security. The potential for serious crisis is the cost the technology imposes on society.

This national security crisis was traumatic for the affected community. The situation is summarized well, though somewhat dryly, in a recent review published in the journal Risks, Hazards, & Crisis in Public Policy:

By 1981, the prevalence of major depression and/or generalized anxiety was estimated to be 29%, and half of mothers interviewed expressed concern that their children’s health would be affected ... Some women, classified as depressed immediately after TMI, continued to be symptomatic for as long as a decade afterward ... in the decades following TMI (1979–1998), deaths from heart disease were 67.2% higher among women and 32.1% higher among men exposed to the lowest likely level of radiation (<8 mrem) within the TMI 5-mile radius when compared with surrounding communities ... (Wilson et al., 2022)

The terrible impact to the community was evident to outsiders on the ground at that time. One of the experts brought in to deal with the hydrogen bubble in the TMI reactor was a member of the NRC staff named Victor Stello. Stello was a native of Pennsylvania who had served in the Army, where he lost an eye, and began his career helping to develop a nuclear-powered airplane with Pratt and Whitney.

Having resolved the bubble issue to his own satisfaction, Stello, who was “a good Catholic,” decided to attend Sunday mass in Middletown. The service was sparsely attended, and Stello was surprised when the priest offered general absolution to the congregation. The rite was given in rare cases where ... large-scale loss of life seemed imminent. It was an emotional moment for the parishioners. “Everybody started crying, and I started crying,” Stello recalled ... He returned from the church service in a highly emotional frame of mind and remarked unhappily to [NRC Public Affairs Officer] Joe Fouchard, “Look what we have done to these fine people!” (Walker, 2004)

Summary Points

• 1. Accidents at commercial nuclear power stations are national security incidents. The burden imposed by a societal crisis of this sort is vast, and likely immeasurable.

• 2. Governments and the corporate managers/owners of nuclear power facilities cannot be trusted to provide, or even possess, accurate, correct, and timely information about nuclear power plant accident status and consequences.

• 3. Accident consequences do not obey regional, or even national, borders. Fallout from both the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents extended worldwide. Fallout from Three Mile Island was definitively measured hundreds of miles away.