Book review: Worst Case Scenario by T. J. Newman (reviewed by Sharon and Ace Hoffman)

“Worst Case Scenario” by T. J. Newman (Copyright 2024)

Reviewed by Sharon and Ace Hoffman, December, 2024

Worst Case Scenario is a gripping fictional story about a commercial airline crash. Airline crashes happen with infrequent regularity, but in Worst Case Scenario, much of the debris from the crash impacts a nuclear power station with three operating reactors, three overcrowded spent-fuel pools, and on-site nuclear-waste dry-storage casks.

Unfortunately, such an event is very credible: There are over 45,000 commercial flights per day in the United States and over 90 operating reactors. In November 1972, hijackers considered crashing the plane they had taken over into nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The author is a former flight-attendant, and asked some of the pilots she flew with a question: “What’s your biggest fear as a pilot?” One replied: “My biggest fear is a commercial jet slamming into a nuclear power plant.” When Newman responded that such a scenario seemed impossible after 9-11, the pilot answered: “And that’s exactly what they want you to believe.” Indeed: The nuclear establishment has always treated low-probability incidents such as large earthquakes and airplane strikes as if they are impossible, rather than merely unlikely.

In the immediate aftermath of the fictional airplane crash, the station manager tells a shocked U.S. President that if a spent-fuel pool loses its water, the resulting fire would make one think: “Chernobyl was a campfire.” He explains that losing water in one spent-fuel pool would inevitably lead to cascading fires and explosions at all three spent-fuel pools, and all three reactors would soon also melt down, producing “an uncontrollable spread of invisible, toxic, cancer-causing radioactive particulates...”.

Newman’s story takes place on the banks of the Mississippi River. There are currently five operating commercial nuclear reactors located along the Mississippi River. A Worst Case Scenario at any of them would contaminate every city downstream and downwind of the event.

Newman emphasizes the complacent attitudes people have about nuclear power. A fictional scientist from the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) had tried to convince regulators and the nuclear industry to pay attention to “low-probability, high-consequence” events but was ignored. (NEST is a real agency (https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/nuclear-emergency-support-team-nest).) When the NEST scientist questions the station manager about the tight packing of nuclear fuel rods in the spent fuel pools, the manager explains that there’s no more space at the site for more dry casks. As real-life regulators keep extending licenses for nuclear power plants to 80 and even 100 years or more, this is a realistic situation.

Newman explores additional consequences of the accident. A first-grade teacher looks at her students and thinks about how much more vulnerable their growing bodies are to radiation than her own.

The risks from cascading failures is an important theme of the book. The emergency generators at the nuclear station crank up as soon as offsite power is lost, but nobody knows if the connection to the power grid can be repaired, or additional fuel brought to the site in time to avoid catastrophic problems when fuel runs out.

At Fukushima in 2011, flooding destroyed the emergency generators, which led to all three meltdowns. At Three Mile Island (TMI) a valve which should have closed automatically remained stuck in the open position, but the control panel indicated that the valve was closed. Another indicator light was hidden by a maintenance tag, causing the operators to miss important data. Given the confusing information, reactor operators mistakenly followed Naval reactor training which did not apply to the situation at TMI.

A potential nuclear disaster is one of two major story lines in Newman's book, which also focuses on the personal relationships between the characters. A collection of heroic actions and unlikely coincidences help avert an even worse catastrophe. But anyone reading the book can realize that it won't always work out that way.

After 9-11 the NRC and the nuclear industry were desperate to avoid explaining what would have happened if the planes had attacked the reactors at Indian Point, or if the plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania had instead crashed into TMI (possibly the hijacker's actual intention). Worst Case Scenario does a great job of showing that official information about nuclear safety is intentionally misleading. In an early scene the station manager admits to himself that: “… everyone who worked in nuclear power knew: The ‘tests’ the government had run in the wake of September 11 … were at best incomplete and at worst suspect. ... used small planes traveling only up to three hundred miles per hour.”

If an airplane (or a missile, tsunami, hurricane, tornado, or asteroid, or…) were to strike a nuclear power facility, it would, indeed, be a "Worst Case Scenario." Fortunately, so far, the book is still fiction.

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Notes:

For a unique perspective explaining why the TMI operators failed to recognize what was happening see: https://www.ans.org/news/article-1556/tmi-operators-did-what-they-were-trained-to-do/.

The possibility of an airplane crashing into a commercial nuclear power plant is nothing new and was well-known long before 9-11 -- although of course the nuclear industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have always downplayed the possibility of such an incident – whether accidental or intentional.

One thing that’s seldom discussed, but is emphasized in “Worst Case Scenario” is that if an airplane hit the spent fuel it could actually be WORSE, than if an airplane hit a reactor. There are several reasons this is true including the domes protecting the reactor. In addition, there's much more radioactivity in the waste than in the reactor. (That's why, first and foremost, we have to stop making more nuclear waste.)

The closest the world has come to a plane crashing into a nuclear power plant occurred on November 11, 1972 when a hijacker threatened to crash a plane into the nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge, specifically the High Flux Isotope Reactor. (The non-fiction book about this incident is “Odyssey of Terror” by Ed Blair with William R. Haas.)

Sooner or late an airplane will crash into a wind turbine, and the wind turbine will be blamed for causing the crash…but when an airplane crashes into a nuclear waste dump, the pilot will be blamed, or air traffic control, or the aircraft manufacturer...anyone except the reactor company which is responsible for putting a hazard in harms way and not protecting it properly from the inevitable.

Pictured: Still image from a 2005 animation, "One Bad Day at San Onofre" by Ace Hoffman. An airplane is about to strike the north dome, a terrorist is about to come into view, attacking from the south to lob mortars at the plant, an asteroid has destroyed the south dome and that reactor is on fire and melting down. An earthquake, tsunami and tornado are also arriving...and the operators probably got nervous and are pushing the wrong buttons.