Greg Palast released an excerpt from his new book Vulture's Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters on Thursday of this week in FreePress.org. Entitled Fukushima: They Knew, the excerpt is about a handwritten log book kept by a senior engineer at the Shoreham nuclear plant in New York during its construction. Palast still has a copy of that log, which he'd luckily kept at home so it survived the total destruction of his previous office on the fifty-second floor of WTC building 1.
Palast obtained the log in 1986 when the engineer and a colleague met with Palast in 'secret' as they blew the whistle on nuclear construction contractor Stone & Webster Engineering, the builders/designers of Shoreham and a third of all nuclear power plants in this country. And, coincidentally (or not), Fukushima Daiichi's nuclear plants (as Shaw Contruction). Moreover, Stone & Webster is the designated builder of all four of the new nuclear power plants the Obama Administration has gifted billions of dollars in subsidies for.
The problem that brought the engineers to Palast's office had to do with the "SQ" tests at Shoreham. SQ stands for "Seismic Qualification," the assurance that a plant won't melt down if it gets shaken by an earthquake. All nuclear power plants in the U.S., Europe and Japan must be SQ certified, and it is the building engineering contractors that perform the SQ tests and certify the results, which the NRC keeps in its files without feeling any need to do their own testing and certification. What the notebook revealed was that Shoreham dismally failed to meet the international seismic rules - in the event of a good shake in New York state, Shoreham would melt down.
Here's what we learned: Dick's subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn't want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:
Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] "I believe these are bad results and I believe it's reportable," and then he took the volume of federal relations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.
Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn't report the deficiencies, he would be breaking federal law…
Palast goes ahead and connects dots to Fukushima that may or may not actually connect, given that his evidence of SQ falsification at Shoreham is not evidence of falsification at Daiichi, even though the same contractor built - and certified - both installations. Shoreham was never brought on line due to serious resistance from local residents and New York governor Mario Cuomo's agreement to charge Long Island residents for most of the $6 billion the Long Island Lighting Company [LILCO] had sunk into the boondoggle. For some unexplained reason, Stone & Webster's falsification of the SQ tests did NOT factor in any of the actions to stop the plant from operating. Nor, apparently, did the NRC ever get itself publicly involved in the fight to prevent this nuke from ever being turned 'on'.
In the wake of Fukushima, where what amounted to a "design basis" earthquake (~8.0 at the facility) led to the gravest nuclear disaster the world has ever seen - ongoing as I write - we have been reassured by the NRC that all our nuclear plants are certified to be seismically qualified. No doubt because some NRC flunky or other pulled the files and confirmed that Stone & Webster or Bechtel or some other notorious nuclear building contracting outfit's senior engineers had signed off on the "SQ Tests" back in the day. How comforting…
Not. It's all about the money, of course. It's always been about the money. The technology that people like Hyman Rickover developed to such exacting specifications for powering the U.S. Navy's ships and submarines simply does not scale well into multi-megawatt electrical generators for the big cities they were sited way too close to. The outrageous costs - not a single nuke in this country ever came on line at projected cost - are far too great even when corners get cut and lesser materials used and important engineering requirements get blatantly falsified. To build them as they should be built (which they never will be and never could be), as far from population centers as not one but TWO "Blue Ribbon Commissions" recommended in the wake of Three Mile Island's meltdown in 1979, would put a quick end to the obscene profits of multinational gigacorps paid billions by the taxpayers every year to run these things with no real liability for what happens if they melt down and/or spew deadly radiation across vast swaths of the countryside.
This is the first I've heard of Palast's copy of the 'Engineering Log' and its evidence of falsification of now known to be important "SQ Tests" by one of the biggest nuclear construction outfits on the planet. I think this amply justifies immediate, strident insistence that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission go to work finding out just how many plants have been allowed to operate under falsified documentation, and shut those suckers down right now. Oh, and they also need to stop taking the compromised utility's word for these things, and cut off the operating licenses for North Anna 1 & 2 while rescinding all construction permits for their planned unit 3. Right now.