State-level legal preparedness for nuclear and radiological emergencies in the U.S.: a network analysis of state laws and regulations.

An earthquake of magnitude 9 hit the east coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, and triggered a tsunami that severely damaged the building holding the Unit 1 reactor of the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The Japanese government declared a nuclear emergency and ordered an evacuation of 170,000 people within a 12-mile radius of the power plant.1,2 This accident precipitated the reassessment of nuclear and radiological response procedures in nations around the world.3 In the United States, there are 65 nuclear power plants operating 104 reactors, as illustrated in Figure 1. Eighteen of these reactors are—like Fukushima-Daiichi—more than 40 years old, and five of the nuclear power plants are located within or near areas of geologic activity.4,5 Assuming an affected area comparable with that of Fukushima-Daiichi, an evacuation around these reactors' range would affect at least several thousand and up to a half-million people. The total number of people living within the same distance from all the nuclear power plants is about 7 million—about 2% of the entire U.S. population.6 This number is steadily increasing,7 as America's rural areas become suburban population centers. Moreover, these power plants are aging, and the on-site storage of highly radioactive used reactor rods is increasing. Figure 1 Map of 65 currently operating U.S. nuclear power plants and the statesa whose statutes have been codedb The National Response Framework (NRF)8 prepared by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency describes the responsibilities of the federal departments and agencies governing immediate response and short-term recovery activities. The NRF specifies coordinating roles for the departments of Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It adds cooperating roles for most of those departments and also for the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs. The NRF recognizes that “state, tribal, and local governments have primary responsibility for the protection of the public;” thus, it provides information for state responders to emergency incidents and guides state-level planning and preparedness efforts. Many—though not all—responsibilities of state governments mirror those of the federal agencies listed in federal laws. In carrying out their public-protection responsibility, governments cooperate with and rely upon private-sector organizations and professionals that comprise state and local public health systems.9,10 Taken together, the governmental and private-sector entities contributing to a nuclear-radiologic disaster response constitute a network of actors also called a public health system (PHS), connected by mutual roles and responsibilities that are defined by laws, policies, and emergency plans. Network analysis11 is, therefore, a useful approach to analyzing the characteristics and qualities of disaster response networks. It can describe network characteristics, analyze complex patterns of relationships, and produce graphic results. Previous studies have applied network analysis to communication patterns of workers within local health departments,12 to word co-occurrence and citation patterns in the U.S. Code,13 and to citation patterns in French legal codes.14 However, network analysis has not previously been applied as a methodology to examine the legally directed functions among agents in a PHS.15 In this study, we used network methods to analyze the roles and responsibilities among these entities as specified by state and federal government laws for preparedness, response, and recovery activities in nuclear and radiological emergencies.