nuclear safety rules may be relaxed

[dfong63]

Nuclear safety rules may change
If cables fail, workers race to burning areas

Matthew L. Wald, New York Times
Saturday, November 29, 2003

``...
Washington -- After 10 years of struggling to make reactor owners modify their plants to protect electrical cables from fire, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now proposing to amend its own rules, retroactively legalizing an alternate strategy used by many plants but never formally approved.

The change involves the cables that connect the control room with pumps, valves and other equipment needed to shut down a plant safely. Previously, the commission wanted the reactors to separate the control cables for redundant equipment, or install fire detection and suppression equipment or fire barriers, so a single fire could not disable all the cables. It now proposes to accept letting the plants designate technicians who would run through the plant and operate equipment by hand if the control cables had burned away.
...

The reason for the proposal, said Sunil Weerakkody, the section chief for fire protection and special studies, is that over the years the commission's inspectors in the field had informally approved such plans or that reactor owners had made such arrangements without asking permission. According to commission documents, some reactor owners simply asserted that they could use such alternate means under the terms of their licenses.

The commission's lawyers recently concluded that these approvals were not legal. The commission could require an application in each case and then evaluate each one, Weerakkody said, but it lacks the resources to do so and still keep up with its other work.
...

Gunter, in a telephone interview, said that relying on manual actions would mean that plant workers would be counted on to perform heroic, or even suicidal, tasks.
...''

[ConcernedCanuk]

1. workers would be counted on to perform heroic, or even suicidal, tasks

. . oh yah - GREAT idea

. . "I'm gonna save this place(maybe) and furget about living, my kids and wifey so the mega-rich can STAY rich"

. . Yup that'll work REAL well

[dfong63]

6. these are the geniuses

... who are entrusted with the task of protecting the public from nuclear disaster.

sleep well.

[Turbineguy]

2. Run through the plant?

Isn't that the first thing they teach you not to do? OK maybe after "I wonder what would happen if I pushed this button?"

[mbperrin]

3. Hmmm....makes sense as long as

the people wanting someone to run through the burning building are those who want the change.

And, of course, if no one in the surrounding civilian population has a problem with it. How bout a practice run in public on TV?

[Turbineguy]

4. As I recall

The Watch Chief Engineer at Chernobyl climbed on top of the burning reactor to try to manually lower the control rods.

He ended up in Seattle for a bone marrow transplant.

People do heroic things all the time. But to make it a requirement...

Maybe Osama bin Laden is behind these rules. It sounds like some idea he'd cook up.

[dfong63]

5. and for all the heroism,

the public still was not sufficiently protected.

stating a requirement for employees to be heroic, is no substitute for proper engineering safety measures.

[ramapo]

7. Rewarded for their failure....how typical

What good is redundant equipment if the control cables are not separate. That's not redundancy, that's stupidity.

[Dudley_DUright]

8. Well, that rule change has set nuclear safety back about 60 years

I am reminded of when the first nuclear reactor was built under the football stands at the University of Chicago by Enrico Fermi in 1942. There was a term called SCRAM which stood for "Safety Control Rod Axe Man"! There literally was a guy whose job it was to cut a rope to drop an emergency control rod into the pile if anything went wrong. This rule change is insane.

<snip>

To address the possibility of a failure, multiple safeguard were designed into the experiment. In the "pile" were three sets of control rods. The primary set was not used for safety at all, it was designed for fine control of the nuclear chain reaction. The other two control rods served the safety functions. One set was automatic and could be controlled by manual interaction and the other was an emergency safety rod. The automatic control rod was operated by an electric motor and responded to a "high" instrument reading from a radiation counter. Attached to one end of the emergency rod was a rope running through the pile and weighted heavily on the opposite end. During testing, this rod was withdrawn from the pile and tied down by another rope. It was the job of the "Safety Control Rod Axe Man" to stand-by ready to cut this rope with an axe should something unexpected happen, or in case the automatic safety rods failed. The acronym SCRAM from "Safety Control Rod Axe Man" is still used today in reference to the rapid shutdown of a nuclear reaction.

<snip>

http://users.owt.com/smsrpm/nksafe/forties.html