Nuclear reactors operating in the United States are safe. They pose no threat to the people who live near them, even in the event of a severe accident.

Though many pro nuclear advocates believe that the above statements are true, we are generally reluctant to use those simple, declarative statements. Instead, we often obscure the truth with eye rolling complexity. We hedge our bets by talking about probabilistic risk models, worst case scenarios, and fault tree logic.

The official publications from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission available up until now contradict the simple statements; studies with “conservative” assumptions, including a rapid release of a large portion of the radioactive material from an operating core, have been published that calculate hundreds to thousand of early deaths. According to those old studies, some fatalities happen quickly and most of the rest are the result of increased cancer risk to a large population of exposed individuals.

In 2007, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission began a study designed to take advantage of many decades worth of testing, experience, analysis and risk assessment to determine a more realistic prediction of consequences. The study picked two reactors as generally representative of the types of reactors in operation in the United States. Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania was the chosen representative for boiling water reactors; Surry Power Station in Virginia was picked to represent pressurized water reactors with large containment buildings.

On February 1, 2012, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it had released the State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analysis (SORCA) research study. The complete report can be found by entering ML120250406 in the ADAMS public data base search engine. (After you click on the link, click on the “Content Search” tab to get the search term entry field.)