Just one example of misunderstanding in the BEST/MATRR "report"

The BEST/MATRR report

In Section II. HEALTH HAZARDS POSED BY REACTOR MELTDOWNS - B. Estimates of Casualties (p. 15 of the pdf file), the authors cite casualty estimates based on a Sandia National Laboratories report entitled Technical Guidance for Siting Criteria Development/ (aka CRAC-2). A group named Riverkeeper tried to use the CRAC-2 report as a partial justification to impede the operation of the Indian Point nuclear plant via a 10 CFR 2.206 petition. The following is what Samuel J. Collins (the former Director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation of the NRC from 1997 to 2003) had to say in denying the Riverkeeper petition (pages 25-26 of the pdf and pages 12-13 of the decision):

"The Petitioners refer to the 1982 Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) Report, “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” (CRAC-2 Report), and cite this report as a basis for concern that a terrorist attack could result in a massive release of radioactive materials. The reactor siting studies in the CRAC-2 Report were performed as part of research on the sensitivity of various plant siting parameters. The studies used generic postulated releases of radioactivity from a spectrum of severe (core melt) accidents, independent of the probabilities of the event occurring or the impact of mitigation mechanisms. The studies were never intended to be realistic assessments of accident consequences. The estimated deaths and injuries resulted from assuming the most adverse condition for each parameter in the analytical code. In the cited studies, the number of resulting deaths and injuries also reflected the assumption that no protective actions were taken for the first 24 hours. The studies did not, and were never intended to, reflect reality or serve as a basis for emergency planning. The CRAC-2 Report analyses used more simplistic models than current technologies. The two basic conclusions from the SNL siting studies were that the mean estimated number of health effects from the assumed releases for all reactor sites varied by up to more than 4 orders of magnitude and that the financial costs of the releases were dominated by clean-up costs and replacement power costs. The SNL studies provided a useful measure to compare sites, not to analyze plant-specific accident consequences."

A more modern tool/study by the NRC is the State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequence Analyses (SOARCA).