GE Hitachi to Pay $2.7M Over Flawed Nuke Design

[bananas]

Another nuclear whistleblower vindicated.
Of course, GE Hitachi continues to deny everything.

You just can't trust the nuclear industry.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ge-hitachi-pay-27m-false-nuke-claims-21638192

GE Hitachi to Pay $2.7M Over Flawed Nuke Design
WASHINGTON January 23, 2014 (AP)
Associated Press

A subsidiary of General Electric has agreed to pay $2.7 million to resolve claims its employees made false statements to the U.S. Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission about a reactor component.

The Justice Department announced the settlement Thursday with General Electric Hitachi Nuclear Energy Americas, a provider of nuclear energy products and services based in Wilmington, N.C.

According to the government, GE Hitachi made false statements to conceal flaws in a component of its advanced nuclear Economic Simplified Boiling-Water Reactor known as the steam dryer. GE Hitachi had received federal funding for up to half of the cost of designing and developing the new nuclear power system.

GE Hitachi spokesman Christopher White said the company denies the allegations, but determined that settling the case was in its best interest.

More info at Platts:

http://www.platts.com/latest-news/electric-power/washington/ge-hitachi-reaches-settlement-with-us-doj-over-21119616

GE Hitachi reaches settlement with US DOJ over alleged false claims

Washington (Platts)--23Jan2014/641 pm EST/2341 GMT

<snip>

GE Hitachi submitted the ESBWR design to NRC in December 2005 for certification that would allow the design to be used to build new US nuclear power reactors, subject to the issuance of construction permits and operating licenses for individual projects.

DOJ said Thursday that NRC's review requires that applicants "demonstrate that vibrations caused by the steam dryer will not result in damage to a nuclear plant. The government alleged that GE Hitachi concealed known flaws in its (ESBWR) steam dryer analysis and falsely represented (to NRC) that it had properly analyzed the steam dryer in accordance with applicable standards and had verified the accuracy of its model using reliable data."

Unanticipated excess vibration in steam dryers in both GE boiling water reactors at Exelon's Quad Cities-1 and -2 in Illinois damaged the dryers, requiring their replacement in 2005 at the cost of millions of dollars. The Quad Cities reactors and their original dryers used earlier designs and began operation in 1973.

DOJ said LeRay Dandy, a former GE Hitachi employee, first raised the ESBWR allegations in a whistleblower lawsuit.

<snip>

Dominion is considering building an ESBWR at its North Anna plant in Virginia, and DTE Energy is considering building one at its Fermi plant in Michigan. Both utilities previously have said they will not decide whether to build an ESBWR until after NRC certified the design.

<snip>

[bananas]

1. "GE Hitachi had received federal funding for up to half of the cost of designing and developing the"

GE Hitachi had received federal funding for up to half of the cost of designing and developing the new nuclear power system.

[kristopher]

2. "GE Hitachi concealed known flaws" & "falsely represented (to NRC)..."

How many accidents are waiting to happen?





http://www.weibull.com/hotwire/issue21/hottopics21.htm


Industry claims of nuclear reactor failure probability

The Frequency Fallacy

A second illegitimate defense of BSC is through the frequency fallacy, confusing core-melt-relative-frequency data with subjective probabilities. Yet ‘probability’ can mean: (i) ‘classical probability;’ (ii) ‘relative frequency;’ or (iii) ‘subjective probability,’ not all of which are applicable to nuclear-core-melt assessment.

Classical probability (i) is illustrated by card games in which the deck contains a fixed number of cards, for example 52. The probability of an event (e) thus equals the number of possible favorable outcomes (f) divided by the total number of possible outcomes (n): P(e) = f/n. Provided the deck of cards is fair, each card has an equal chance of being picked, and the probability (i) of picking an ace = 4/52. Thus, (i) assumes that all possible outcomes are equally likely and that we know n—neither of which is the case regarding nuclear-accident outcomes.

Relative-frequency probability (ii) is often used for cases where the number of outcomes (n) is so great that all typically cannot be observed, as in the probability (ii) that current 5-year-olds will contract cancer. We cannot observe all 5-year-olds throughout their lifetimes, but can reliably predict cancer probability for random, typical 5-year-olds, if we observe a large-enough, long-enough sample. Thus, if we observed 1000 5-year-olds over their lifetimes, if samples were representative and large enough, and if we observed 350 cancer deaths, we could say this cancer probability was roughly P(e) = 35.0% (350/1000). We cannot predict with certainty, however, unless we know the frequency of all relevant events—whether lifetime cancers or total nuclear-core melts. Given that preceding core-melt lists include all occurrences (consistent with the three caveats), those lists suggest an almost-certain, core-melt probability (ii) = core melts/total reactors = 26/442 = roughly a 6% probability (ii)—roughly a 1 in 16 chance of core melt—which is hardly a low probability.

Subjective probability (iii) relies only on what people think particular probabilities are. The odds people get when they bet at racetracks are subjective probabilities because if the probabilities were objective, smart players would always win. Obviously (iii) does not provide reliable nuclear-core-melt probabilities because it is based not on facts, but on what people think about facts. Nuclear proponents think the facts are one way, and opponents think they are another. Both cannot always be correct. Since (iii) is subjective and could be inconsistent, and because (i) would require knowing n and knowing a falsehood (that all reactor outcomes were equally likely), (ii) appears most relevant to nuclear-core-melt assessment.

As preceding sections revealed, however, typical atomic-energy advocates use (iii) not (ii) to assess core-melt probabilities, such as when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said core-melt accidents, for all 104 US reactors, would only occur once every 1000 years. Instead, the NRC should have made predictions based on government inspections, independent analyses, and accident-frequency data, not ‘on [subjective-probability] data submitted by plant owners’ (Broder et al., 2011, p. D1). The NRC predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) also has a long history of making BSC based on (iii). AEC said the probability of a US nuclear core meltdown is 1 in 17,000 per reactor year (AEC, 1957; Mulvihill et al., 1965).

Even universities erroneously use subjective probabilities (iii), not frequencies (ii), to assess nuclear-core-melt likelihood, particularly when pro-nuclear-government agencies fund their studies. For instance, although the classic, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-authored, government-funded, reactor-safety study had frequency data for various nuclear accidents that already had occurred after decades of US-operating experience, it did not use them; instead the MIT authors used subjective, pro-nuclear assumptions and conjectures about these accident probabilities (Rasmussen, 1975). When independent, university mathematicians compared US nuclear-accident-frequency data, reported from operating experience, with MIT guesses (iii), they discovered that all ‘guesses’ were far too low, by several orders of magnitude. None of the nuclear-accident-frequency data, based on reactor-operating experience, was within the theoretical, 90% confidence interval of the MIT ‘guesses.’Yet there is only a subjective probability of 10% that any of these true (frequency-based) probability values (for different types of reactor accidents) should fall outside this 90% interval. The conclusion? University mathematicians said that MIT assessors were guilty of a massive ‘overconfidence’ bias toward nuclear safety, a typical flaw in most industry-government-funded, nuclear-risk analyses (Cooke, 1982).

From the journal
Ethics, Policy & Environment

Fukushima, Flawed Epistemology, and Black-Swan Events
Dr Kristin Shrader-Frechette

The full discussion is available for download here
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21550085.2011.605851