|
| |
The Strange Saga of the Rasmussen Report
Ernest Partridge
(1980)
From 1980 to 1982,
The Gadfly was a Visiting Associate Professor in the
Environmental Studies Program at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. While at UCSB, he taught a course in
"Philosophical Issues in Environmental Policy Analysis," which
he later taught at UC Riverside and the University of Colorado. The course
concluded with a "case study" of nuclear energy policy. While I devoutly
hope that the students learned a great deal from the course, I can testify
that the Professor did. Most of all, I learned how public relations,
economic imperatives, and unexamined preconceptions can overwhelm sound
judgment and endanger public safety. The "showpiece" exhibit that supported
this claim is "The Rasmussen Report" which I
summarized in the classroom handout which follows.
As I was assembling this month's
upload of The Online Gadfly, I noticed that we had just passed the
20th anniversary of the de-authorization of the Rasmussen Report -- and
event that I felt was well worth
celebrating. (April, 1999)
Concerned about public criticism of their nuclear energy
ambitions, the promoters of commercial atomic energy in the Atomic
Energy Commission initiated in 1972, the "Reactor Safety Study,"
which was to become known as "The Rasmussen Report," after its
Director, Norman Rasmussen of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. In August, 1974, the draft Report was released with much
fanfare in a public-relations extravaganza that prompted one
newspaper to proclaim: "Campaigners Against Nuclear Power Stations
Put to Rout." Following this triumphant entrance, scrupulous
scientific assessment began behind the facade, after which it was all
downhill for the Report. The AEC's successor organization, the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), quietly withdrew endorsement of
the Rasmussen Report in January, 1979.
Rushed into print to provide support for a renewal of the Price
Anderson Act, an eighteen page "Executive Summary" of the final
Report was distributed to Congress and the Press in October, 1975,
and in advance of the release of the full, 2300 page Report.
Perhaps the most famous item of the Executive Summary was the
claim that the chances of being killed by a nuclear power plant
"transient" is about equal to that of being killed by a meteorite.
This mind-catching statistic has proven to have a longevity far
exceeding that of the Report which spawned it). In general, the
Summary concluded that
... The likelihood of reactor accidents is much smaller
than that of many non-nuclear accidents having similar
consequences. All non-nuclear accidents examined in this study,
including fires, explosions, toxic chemical releases, dam
failures, airplane crashes, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes,
are much more likely to occur and can have consequences comparable
to, or larger than, those of nuclear accidents.
Closer examination revealed a startling discrepancy between the
cheerful reassurances of the Executive Summary and the nine-volumes
of technical information. In his splendid book, The Cult of the
Atom (based upon tens of thousands of pages of AEC documents,
pried loose by the Freedom of Information Act), Daniel Ford observes
that
as one moves from the very technical material ... to the
Executive Summary ... a change of tone as well as of technical
content is evident... In the "back" of the study, there are
cautionary notes, discussion of uncertainties in the data, and
some sense that there may be important limitations to the results.
The qualifications successively drop away as one moves toward the
parts of the study that the public was intended to see. In the
months following the study's completion, the honesty of the
official summary ... became the most controversial issue.
The reassuring conclusions of the Rasmussen Report were based upon
numerous highly questionable assumptions and methodologies. Among
them:
-
By definition, the report estimated damage and casualties due
to anticipated events. There is no clear acknowledgment that all
possible significant events were not, and could not be, covered by
the study. As it turned out, the near-disaster at Three Mile
Island was just one of several "unanticipated" events.
-
In fact, whole categories of failures were excluded from the
risk estimates. For example, it was assumed that back-up safety
systems would always operate in case of the failure of a primary
system. Given this assumption, the risk of a catastrophic accident
would be the product of the probability of the independent failure
of both systems, and thus highly unlikely. However, this
discounted the possibility of a "common-mode failure," such as
that at Browns Ferry, Alabama, in 1975 (soon after the release of
the Report), where, due to faulty design, an accidental fire
disabled both systems at once -- yet another event excluded by the
Rasmussen rules.
-
The Report focused on mechanical and equipment failures, and
discounted design flaws and "human error," as if these were in
some sense insignificant. Also overlooked was the possibility of
sabotage.
-
The report adopted the so-called "fault-tree" method of
analysis, described by the Report as "developed by the Department
of Defense and NASA ... [ and] coming into increasing use
in recent years." Not so. As Daniel Ford reports, "long before
{Rasmussen] adopt the fault-tree methods ... the Apollo
program engineers had discarded them." [146]
-
The "probabilities" assigned to the component "events" in the
"fault tree," leading to a hypothetical failure, were based upon
almost pure speculation, since, due to the newness of the
technology, they lacked any precedents upon which base probability
assessments. (Both Rasmussen himself, and his Report, [1a]
admitted as much). [Ford 141] Thus, because the Report was
fundamentally an advocacy document, this gave its pro-nuclear
investigators the license to concoct unrealistically low risk
assessments.
-
These "low risk estimates" in the Executive Summary were
startling, to say the least: "non-nuclear events," it claimed,
"are about 10,000 times more likely to produce large numbers of
fatalities than nuclear plants." But the footnote to this
statement gave it away, when it added that such "fatalities ...
are those that would be predicted to occur within a short period
of time" after the accident. However, few fatalities due to
radiation exposure are "short-term." In fact, as Physicist Frank
von Hipple pointed out, a careful reading of the voluminous
technical material would disclose that for every ten "early
deaths" conceded in the Summary, the same accident would cause an
additional seven thousand cancer deaths. (This was only one of the
several scandalous discrepancies between the "public" Executive
Summary and the Technical material in the Report, which led Morris
Udall, then Chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and the
Environment, to demand a new Executive Summary. The NRC
refused).
-
The "peer review" of the Report was perfunctory at best. The
reviewers were given eleven days to assess an incomplete 3,000
page draft report -- a schedule virtually designed to yield
invalid assessments. Even so, many of the referees returned
withering criticisms, especially of the statistical methods
employed by the studies. The findings of this review group were
not released by the AEC or the NRC, and the published Report was
unaltered by these criticisms.
These and numerous other flaws in the study led one critic to
wryly comment, that "the chance of the Rasmussen Report being
substantially wrong is somewhat more than the chance of your being
hit by a meteorite."
Though the general public was much impressed by the public
relations show orchestrated by AEC, informed professional
investigators immediately began the erosion of credibility. Among
these were the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Union of
Concerned Scientists, and, most significantly, an independent panel
set up by the American Physical Society and chaired by Harold Lewis
of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Each of these
returned serious criticisms of the Report.
All this bad news eventually led the Reactor Safety Study into the
halls of Congress. Daniel Ford describes what followed:
In some cases [congressional] members and staff
probed the issues [of reactor safety] carefully, prepared
detailed follow-up reports, and tried to bring about needed
reforms. Congressman Morris Udall's Subcommittee on Energy and the
Environment, for example, held extensive hearings on the validity
of the Reactor Safety Study. His protests about the misleading
manner in which the report's findings were presented to the public
forced the NRC, in January 1979, to repudiate the results of the
study. [p. 226]
And so, at length, the relentless discipline of science and
scholarship, combined with a rare display of uncompromising
congressional oversight investigation, brought about the downfall of
the AEC/NRC "Reactor Safety Study."
The NRC's "withdrawal of endorsement" stood in stark contrast to
its release, scarcely four years earlier. This time there were no
publicity releases, media interviews or press conferences. It was
hoped that the announcement would go unnoticed amidst the usual gross
output of news out of Washington. Given the widespread public
opposition to nuclear power, this expectation was bound to be
frustrated.
As with Alvin Weinberg's "Faustian Bargain," and the
Price-Anderson waiver of substantial liability, the Rasmussen Report
was yet another attempt at justification of "the peaceful atom" which
backfired on the proponents. Historians looking back on this
technological extravaganza may note, with some bewilderment, that
however severe the attacks by the critics, commercial nuclear power
was, in the final analysis, inadvertently done in by its
defenders.
Copyright 1993, by Ernest Partridge
|
