By: Donald V. Watkins
Copyrighted and Published on July 10, 2023
Yesterday, Southern Nuclear Power Company operators tried to resume power ascension testing at the Southern Company’s Vogtle Unit 3 nuclear reactor near Waynesboro, Georgia. However, the reactor scrammed when 45 percent power was reached due to a problem with the reactor pumps that caused low coolant flow. A "scram" is an emergency shutdown of the unit. The unit is still at zero power.
This important update was posted today by Edwin Lyman, the Director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, DC. This organization works to make nuclear power safer and more secure.
As we have reported previous, Unit 3 is fatally flawed from a design, engineering, construction, and quality control standpoint. What is more, tests results at Vogtle 3 have been falsified.
The independent nuclear experts we have consulted expect Unit 3 to experience a Level 7 nuclear event within 90 days after it becomes fully operational. When this catastrophic event occurs, an estimated 4,000 to 60,000 people within a 40-mile radius of Vogtle will die from radiation poisoning.
A Level 7 nuclear event is on the scale of the worst nuclear disasters at Chernobyl in the old Soviet Union in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011.
The Southern Company’s political influence peddling at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, U.S. Department of Energy, and Georgia Public Service Commission is too great to prevent this catastrophic event from happening. Politics and the flow of "dark money" contributions have trumped public safety at Vogtle Unit 3.
President Joe Biden and his White House have been too preoccupied with Hunter Biden’s acknowledged crack-cocaine addiction and related-criminal problems to pay any attention to the imminent nuclear dangers at lurking Vogtle 3.
The silver lining in this catastrophe-in-the-making is this: Our published investigative reports on Vogtle Units 3 and 4 now provide the legal foundation necessary for federal and state prosecutors to charge NRC commissioners, Georgia PSC members, Southern Company executives, and others who acted in concert with them, with mass murder for the 4,000 to 60,000 deaths that are expected to result from the Level 7 nuclear event at Unit 3.
I fully expect their criminal trials to resemble the post-World War 11 Nuremberg trials.
Federal and state regulators likely know what we know about Vogtle Unit 3 – it is a deathtrap waiting to meltdown. The deaths and property destruction from this Level 7 event will be horrendous.
The regulators and corporate executives who caused and/or contributed to this catastrophic event should be mindful of this historical fact: No group of government officials and corporate executives in the Western world that has engaged in corrupt practices and reckless conduct that killed 4,000 to 60,000 innocent civilians has escaped criminal prosecution for mass murder.