This from an article The Nuclear Phoenixhttp://www.emagazine.com/november-december_2001/1101feat2.html:

The Bush Administration and nuclear industry are proposing that the current liability limit of $9 billion be extended for another 10 years. The initial $560 million cap rose to, in recent years, $9 billion. Still, notes Alvarez, this is all just a fraction of what the NRC itself has concluded would be the financial consequences of a nuclear plant accident. Those figures are contained in a 1982 report prepared for the NRC by the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories entitled Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences for U.S. Nuclear Power Plants. It calculates (in 1980s dollars) costs as a result of a nuclear plant disaster as high as $314 billion at the Indian Point 3 nuclear plant north of New York City and $174 billion for the Millstone 3 nuclear plant in Connecticut. The report projects “early fatalities” with figures as high as 100,000 dead for the Salem 1 nuclear plant in New Jersey and 72,000 dead for the Peach Bottom 2 nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

(and this is calculated according to local census figures, not with the annual summertime influx of millions of tourists to the region -- note: Hope Creek and Salem are the same complex)

This from a recent Garden State EnviroNet article http://www.gsenet.org/library/11gsn/2001/gs10108a.htm

Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear-safety engineer at the Union of Concerned
Scientists in Washington, D.C., said radiation from a single ruptured
tube most likely would be caught before it reached the river. The
bigger threat is the theory that one rupture could lead to multiple
broken steam tubes, Lochbaum said.

"Emergency systems are only sized to deal with one tube failure at a
time," he said.

Any radiation leak would more likely escape the plant in the form of
steam through Salem's rooftop vents, he said.

Water for the steam generators comes from wells, while the plant's
cooling water comes from the Delaware. Neither water supply is
supposed to be exposed to radioactivity before being discharged to the
river.

Another concern implicit in the whistleblower's letter, Lochbaum
said, is that he felt compelled to take his concerns to the NRC.

"Plant workers are the first line of defense," said Lochbaum, a
former PSE&G employee. "If they are reluctant to go to plant
management with their safety concerns, that can be a problem."

A second letter from the whistleblower draws attention to Salem's
"snubbers," giant shock absorbers designed to prevent generator tubes
from rupturing in an earthquake. The snubbers were improperly
maintained and could fail in a seismic event, he charged.




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