U.S. regulators privately expressed doubts some of the nation's nuclear power plants are prepared for a Japan-scale disaster, documents obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists show.
Obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by the activist group, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission e-mails and memos questioned the adequacy of the backup plans to keep reactor cooling systems running if offsite power was lost for an extended period.
Those concerns contrast with the confidence U.S. regulators and industry officials have publicly expressed since the crisis began to unfold on March 11, the UCS said Wednesday.
"While the NRC and the nuclear industry have been reassuring Americans that there is nothing to worry about — that we can do a better job dealing with a nuclear disaster like the one that just happened in Japan — it turns out that privately NRC senior analysts are not so sure," Edwin Lyman, a UCS nuclear expert, said in a statement released along with the documents.
The e-mails were part of a federal review of how the operators of nuclear plants in Delta, Penn., and Surry County, Va., would cope with a prolonged power outage that knocked cooling systems offline — as occurred at the Fukushima plant in Japan.
A NRC staffer e-mailed last July 28 that contingency plans for the Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Delta "have really not been reviewed to ensure that they will work to mitigate severe accidents."
Another, undated document said backup plans included just having equipment on the plant grounds that could be useful "when used by knowledgeable operators if post-event conditions allow."
The document went on to note: "If little is known about these post-event conditions, then assuming success is speculative."
The Peach Bottom site, operated by Exelon Corp., uses a General Electric reactor with a similar design to four of the reactors at Fukushima. (GE is a part owner of NBCUniversal, which co-owns msnbc.com through a joint venture with Microsoft.)
Officials at the NRC and Exelon did not immediately respond to calls seeking a comment.