Via the Associated Press. Even though we have 23 nuclear power plants with the same flawed design as Fukushima, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and FEMA thinks it's more important to practice for terrorist assaults than the very real danger presented by these aging plants:

Without fanfare, the nation's nuclear power regulators have overhauled community emergency planning for the first time in more than three decades, requiring fewer exercises for major accidents and recommending that fewer people be evacuated right away.

Nuclear watchdogs voiced surprise and dismay over the quietly adopted revamp - the first since the program began after Three Mile Island in 1979. Several said they were unaware of the changes until now, though they took effect in December.

At least four years in the works, the changes appear to clash with more recent lessons of last year's reactor crisis in Japan. A mandate that local responders always run practice exercises for a radiation release has been eliminated - a move viewed as downright bizarre by some emergency planners.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which run the program together, have added one new exercise: More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, state and community police will now take part in exercises that prepare for a possible assault on their local plant.

Still, some emergency officials say this new exercise doesn't go far enough.

[...] An AP investigative series in June exposed weaknesses in the U.S. emergency planning program. The stories detailed how many nuclear reactors are now operating beyond their design life under rules that have been relaxed to account for deteriorating safety margins. The series also documented dramatic population growth around nuclear power plants and limitations in the scope of emergency exercises. For example, local authorities assemble at command centers where they test communications, but they do not deploy around the community, reroute traffic or evacuate anyone as in a real emergency.

The latest changes, especially relaxed exercise plans for 50-mile emergency zones, are being flayed by some local planners and activists who say the widespread contamination in Japan from last year's Fukushima nuclear accident screams out for stronger planning in the United States, not weaker rules.

Mary Osborn Ouassiai, Harrisburg resident, at the Health Effects of Three Mile Island Nuclear Policy Institute symposium, presented by Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Physicians for Social Responsibility-Chicago and Dr. Helen Caldicott.

I've been listening for days now to TV talking heads explaining that potential radiation from a nuclear accident is not usually such a big deal, and they often bring up Three Mile Island as an example. ("If this is as bad as it gets, it's all good!") But nuclear energy lobbyists are working overtime to make sure no one looks too closely at what really happened there. If you want to know, go read this entire story from On The Issues magazine:

Becky Mease, a nurse in her late twenties at the time, fled with her husband, eight-month-old daughter Pam, and two other adults two days after the accident, when then Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh suggested that pregnant women and preschool children within five miles of Three Mile Island evacuate. They drove more than 250 miles to Ocean City, Maryland, where they stayed for about three weeks.

Recounting her experience to citizen researchers Katagiri Mitsuru and Aileen Smith in October 1982, Mease said Pam, who had been outside playing in the grass the day of the accident, had gotten violently ill with diarrhea and projectile vomiting about two days after they left. A full battery of tests at a local hospital failed to find any bacteria or foreign organism, which could cause such symptoms, so the hospital staff told them to go to a civil defense station. Mease knew radiation sickness can cause vomiting and diarrhea, so she asked the people at the civil defense office to check their car and belongings with a Geiger counter. “It just went completely crazy… It went like nuts when it went over my pocketbook, too," she said. “They told us to go wash everything down."

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Pam's severe diarrhea lasted the entire three weeks they were away. “Her behind was so raw that we just left it lay on diapers. Didn't even put them on after a couple of days," said Mease.

In the summer of 1981, when Pam was two years old, she was diagnosed with severe cataracts in both of her eyes, which her doctor attributed to juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.

The Meases' ordeal was one of thousands area residents suffered in the aftermath of the accident. But the radiation effects weren't confined to humans. The evidence was visible across the landscape, too, with unprecedented numbers of sick and dying farm animals and strangely mutated plants.

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Not only is Fox News now racing to promote the narrative that the meltdown the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, in the wake of this week's killer earthquake and tsunamis, is really nothing for anyone (and especially not Americans!) to worry about, but the other night on Hannity, one of their "experts" -- Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute -- tried to claim that everything was working according to plan and no harm would come to anyone's health as a result of the radiation released.

HANNITY: How realistic is this threat?

LEHR: Sean, it's not at all realistic. I can tell you with the utmost confidence there will not be a health impact from anything that's going on at the Fukushima power plant.

Lehr was featured throughout Hannity's show, and he continued on in this vein -- minimizing the health effects of disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and attacking a nuclear engineer for saying that there is at least some concern about fallout drift to the West Coast of the USA.

As Digby sez: "Call me nuts but that fellow doesn't sound all that trustworthy."

He reminds Digby of a movie character, Gen Buck Turgidson. He reminds me, on the other hand, of another character altogether. You remember J. Frank Parnell, don't you?

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J. Frank Parnell: Ever been to Utah? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was full to bursting. The next day - nothing. Swept away. But I'll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end.

Otto: Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?

Parnell: Not at all. Friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people - leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase. It's so small, no one knows it's there until - BLAMMO. Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead. So immoral, working on the thing can drive you mad. That's what happened to this friend of mine. So he had a lobotomy. Now he's well again.

It's been a long time since nuclear power was in the public eye, and now that we're running out of oil, it seems like a good alternative to people who weren't alive during Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. With President Barack "Clean Coal" Obama endorsing it in the SOTU address, new power plants are inevitable.

Hey, I'd love cheap, clean energy as much as the next person. But states that are dealing with the aging facilities know nuclear energy is not as easy as they'd like us to think. There's the problem of waste disposal, of course, and while the risks of a major event are allegedly small, the potential for human catastrophe is enormous:

But the leaks have the potential to slow, if not stop, the bandwagon. Crucial voices are calling for caution. “I am appalled by the safety procedures not only at Vermont Yankee, but at other nuclear facilities across the country who have failed to inspect thousands of miles of buried pipes at their facilities," US Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, said last week. Earlier this month, Markey asked the US Government Accountability Office to investigate the integrity, safety, inspections, and maintenance of buried pipes at nuclear plants.

Critics say the problems with buried pipes are evidence the plants are too old and poorly maintained to continue to safely operate as many - including plants in Seabrook, N.H., and Plymouth - seek extensions of their original 40-year operating licenses. Nuclear advocates, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, say that while the leaks of a radioactive form of water containing tritium are serious, those that have contaminated groundwater have not exceeded regulatory limits or harmed the structural integrity, operation, or safety of the plants.

“No leak of tritium has ever had a negative impact on the health and safety of the public," said Tom Kauffman, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a prominent industry group. In 2006, the industry took it upon itself to search more aggressively for problems with buried piping and tritium leaks.

“These are the most highly regulated, highly monitored industrialized [power plants] in the nation," Kauffman said. He said the nation’s 104 nuclear plants are some of the greenest sources of energy in the country. “It is very important to keep these plants working."

In other words, safe nuclear energy boils down to the same thing it always did: "Trust us." Well, do you? Do you trust them?

When I first wrote about this many years ago, I said that I would trust power company officials when they built their luxury houses on the grounds adjoining their plants, and moved in with their children and grandchildren to stay. I still say that.

If nuclear energy is as safe as they say, it shouldn't be a problem.

Check out this 1979 CBS news report of the incident.
reader D writes: "Twenty-seven years ago today, America experienced its worst commercial nuclear accident - an "impossible" partial meltdown of the reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. During the tension-packed week that followed, sketchy reports and conflicting information led to panic, and more than one hundred thousand residents, mostly children and pregnant women, fled the area."

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

Gary Hart, who at the time was head of the Senate Subcommittee on Nuclear Regulation discusses the event on today's Democracy Now.

AMY GOODMAN: Today is the anniversary of the near meltdown. Can you talk about it?

GARY HART: Well, it was scary. I think it was -- we were a lot closer to a major nuclear catastrophe than, I think, most people realized. I’m trying to reconstruct the timing of this. It seemed to me that the plant went critical on about a Thursday -- Wednesday or Thursday. I got an Army helicopter to take me and the minority member, Alan Simpson of Wyoming, to fly over the plant and be briefed up there...read on