Former U.S. Nuclear Official Warns: It Can Happen Here

[kristopher]

Former U.S. Nuclear Official Warns: It Can Happen Here
Mar. 13 2011 - 2:20 pm

...Bradford, who served on the NRC from 1977 to 1982, also warned against a mindset common in the US nuclear power industry that what is happening now in Japan can’t happen here.

“The phrase, ‘it can’t happen here,’ has been a harbinger of trouble in the nuclear industry,” he said. “Soviet experts came to TMI and solemnly intoned that such an accident could not happen in the Soviet Union because they did not have that type of reactor. They got Chernobyl. After Chernobyl, experts from many nations deplored the unique inadequacies of the Soviet system — inadequate containment, dangerous design, complacency, secrecy. Of course the design did not exist in their countries, one of which now has Fukushima. No doubt the next accident will also be different in its specifics. Nuclear spokespeople in every other country will then spout owlish and well-financed explanations of why it cannot happen to them.”

Bradford’s experience at TMI — where the full extent of the damage to the reactor core wasn’t known until a decade after the accident — makes him skeptical of broad assessments concerning the current situation in Japan.

“It’s important to realize that we know only a small percentage of what we will need to know to reach firm conclusions one way or the other,” he says. “Three days into TMI, much that we believed we knew turned out to be wrong.”

http://blogs.forbes.com/oshadavidson/2011/03/13/former-u-s-nuclear-official-warns-it-can-happen-here/

[flamingdem]

1. I wish the TMI guys would speak out more often

They know what Tepco is up against

[AndyTiedye]

2. It Almost Certainly WILL Happen Here

:nuke: :hide:

[kristopher]

4. Most people in the US seem to agree with you.

Poll: Most Americans think a nuclear accident is likely here


By DAVID LIGHTMAN
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- Most Americans fear that the United States someday could face the kind of nuclear emergency that's plagued Japan in recent weeks, according to a new McClatchy Newspapers-Marist poll.

"There's clearly a good deal of concern, and there's division about whether we're suited to handle this," said Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in New York, which conducted the survey.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/26/2186643/poll-most-americans-think-a-nuclear.html

Paraphrasing poll questions:
Is a nuclear crisis probable?
Yes 57% No 40%

Is U.S.government prepared?
Yes 49 No 48

If a crisis happens...
56% think by accident, 40 percent due to terrorism.

[madokie]

3. Lots of people got shorter life times than they otherwise would have

but to a corporation peoples lives are only worth a few bucks the least they can get by with. What I don't understand is the working stiffs who side with the nukie boys on this. Theres no way we can build all the nuclear plants it would take to reverse co2. Where would they get the fuel for them, out of the ocean :-) yeah right. I see it as a determent to the predicament we're in today, not a solution. Actually a big assed headache. Where we going to dispose of all the radioactive concrete and Iron from these 104 nuke plants?
They've found out that Depleted Uranium makes good armor piercing projectiles so I guess as long as they can keep some wars going on they can get rid of some of the DU. I know theres not much radiation left but when it disintegrates when it hits a solid object into a fine powder and if it gets in your blood stream or lungs Its not good for living a long life.

Talk about buying a pig in a poke people sure did with nuclear power.
rec'd

[kristopher]

5. Didn't you know that the corporations behind spreading fission are honest and trustworthy?

Anyone would laugh in your face if you suggested that the American Petroleum Institute was a reliable source of objective information on something like the Deepwater Horizon disaster; but since the Nuclear Energy Institute employs some people with a background in physics to prepare their spin, you can trust them COMPLETELY.





:sarcasm:

[kristopher]

6. Wait, I just read on another thread that the US is immune to fission failure.

We are so much better than everyone else...







http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/vessel-head-degradation/images.html

Davis Besse


Tornado
On June 24, 1998 the station was struck by an F2 tornado.<7> The plant's switchyard was damaged and access to external power was disabled. The plant's reactor automatically shut down at 8:43 pm and an alert (the next to lowest of four levels of severity) was declared at 9:18 pm. The plant's emergency diesel generators powered critical facility safety systems until external power could be restored.<8><9>


Erosion of the 6-inch-thick (150 mm) carbon steel reactor head, caused by a persistent leak of borated water.



Reactor head hole

In March 2002, plant staff discovered that the boric acid that serves as the reactor coolant had leaked from cracked control rod drive mechanisms directly above the reactor and eaten through more than six inches<10> of the carbon steel reactor pressure vessel head over an area roughly the size of a football (see photo). This significant reactor head wastage left only 3/8 inch of stainless steel cladding holding back the high-pressure (~2500 psi) reactor coolant. A breach would have resulted in a loss-of-coolant accident, in which superheated, superpressurized reactor coolant could have jetted into the reactor's containment building and resulted in emergency safety procedures to protect from core damage or meltdown. Because of the location of the reactor head damage, such a jet of reactor coolant may have damaged adjacent control rod drive mechanisms, hampering or preventing reactor shut-down. As part of the system reviews following the accident, significant safety issues were identified with other critical plant components, including the following: (1) the containment sump that allows the reactor coolant to be reclaimed and reinjected into the reactor; (2) the high pressure injection pumps that would reinject such reclaimed reactor coolant; (3) the emergency diesel generator system; (4) the containment air coolers that would remove heat from the containment building; (5) reactor coolant isolation valves; and (6) the plant's electrical distribution system.<11> Under certain scenarios, a reactor rupture would have resulted in core meltdown and/or breach of containment and release of radioactive material. The resulting corrective operational and system reviews and engineering changes took two years. Repairs and upgrades cost $600 million, and the Davis-Besse reactor was restarted in March 2004.<12> The U.S. Justice Department investigated and penalized the owner of the plant over safety and reporting violations related to the incident. The NRC determined that this incident was the fifth most dangerous nuclear incident in the United States since 1979.<3>

Criminal prosecutions
On January 20, 2006, the owner of Davis-Besse, FirstEnergy Corporation of Akron, Ohio, acknowledged a series of safety violations by former workers, and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. The deferred prosecution agreement relates to the March 2002 incident (see above). The deferment granted by the NRC were based on letters from Davis-Besse engineers stating that previous inspections were adequate. However, those inspections were not as thorough as the company suggested, and as proved by the material deficiency discovered later. In any case, because FirstEnergy cooperated with investigators on the matter, they were able to avoid more serious penalties. Therefore, the company agreed to pay fines of $23.7 million, with an additional $4.3 million to be contributed to various groups, including the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Habitat for Humanity, and the University of Toledo as well as to pay some costs related to the federal investigation.
Two former employees and one former contractor were indicted for statements made in multiple documents and one videotape, over several years, for hiding evidence that the reactor pressure vessel was being corroded by boric acid. The maximum penalty for the three is 25 years in prison. The indictment mentions that other employees also provided false information to inspectors, but does not name them.<13><14>

2008 discovery tritium leak
The NRC and Ohio EPA were notified of a tritium leak accidentally discovered during an unrelated fire inspection on October 22, 2008. Preliminary indications suggest radioactive water did not infiltrate groundwater outside plant boundaries<15>

...

2010 Replacement reactor head problems
After the 2002 incident, Davis-Besse purchased a used replacement head from a mothballed reactor in Midland, Michigan. Davis-Besse operators replaced the original cracked reactor head before restarting in 2004. On March 12, 2010, during a scheduled refueling outage, ultrasonic examinations performed on the control rod drive mechanism nozzles penetrating the reactor vessel closure head identified that two of the nozzles inspected did not meet acceptance criteria. FirstEnergy investigators subsequently found new cracks in 24 of 69 nozzles, including one serious enough to leak boric acid. Root cause analysis is currently underway by the Department of Energy, First Energy, and the NRC to determine the cause of the premature failures.<17> <18> Crack indications required repair prior to returning the vessel head to service. Control rod drive nozzles were repaired using techniques proven at other nuclear facilities. The plant resumed operation in 2010. The existing reactor vessel head is scheduled for replacement in 2011.<19>


Future

The facility's original nuclear operating license expires on April 22, 2017. On August 11, 2006 FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC) submitted a letter of intent (Adams Accession No. ML062290261).<20> The submission date for the application is August 10, 2010. This initiates a long process that results in an application approval or revocation. Public hearings<21> are a vital part of any application review and information on this process can be found on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) website at NRC.gov. <4>. The site map contains many valuable links <22>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis-Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station#cite_note-21

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

That is a sketch of the facts. Below, the is the 28 page policy analysys by the Union of Concerned Scientists puts them into a meaningful framework built around the relationship between the industry and its regulators.

Davis-Besse: One Year Later
Nearly one year ago, on March 6, 2002, workers repairing a cracked control rod drive mechanism (CRDM) nozzle at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio discovered a football-sized cavity in the reactor vessel head.1 Their finding is linked to two other discoveries 15 years earlier. On March 13, 1987, workers at Turkey Point Unit 4 in Florida discovered that a small leak of borated water had corroded the reactor vessel head. Their revelation prompted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to require all owners of pressurized water reactors,2including Davis-Besse, to take specific measures to protect plant equipment from boric acid corrosion. On March 24, 1987, the NRC learned that control room operators at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania had been discovered sleeping while on duty. That revelation prompted the NRC to issue an order on March 31st requiring Peach Bottom Unit 3 to be immediately shut down.3

The three findings spanning 15 years are intertwined. Turkey Point demonstrated that a small amount of boric acid leaking onto the reactor vessel head corrodes carbon steel at a high rate. Had the FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company, the owner of Davis-Besse, remembered Turkey Point’s lesson, the serious damage at Davis-Besse would have been averted. Peach Bottom demonstrated that a pervasive safety culture problem creates unacceptable conditions for operating a nuclear power plant. Had NRC remembered either Turkey Point’s or Peach Bottom’s lesson, they would have issued the order they drafted to shut down Davis-Besse. It would have been the first shut down order issued by the agency since the Peach Bottom order. But both FirstEnergy and the NRC forgot the past and relived the wrong event from March 1987 by having yet another reactor vessel head damaged by boric acid corrosion.

Many individuals, from both within and outside the NRC, have accused the agency’s move towards risk- informed decision-making as the reason for its failure to issue the order to shut down Davis-Besse. On the contrary, the NRC’s handling of circumferential cracking of control rod drive mechanism (CRDM) nozzles as reported by the Oconee nuclear plant in February 2001 was a successful demonstration of proper application of risk-informed decision-making with the sole and significant exception of its mistake in not issuing the shut down order for Davis-Besse. But even that mistake, as bad as it was, does not impugn the risk-informed decision-making process for the simple reason that the NRC deviated from that process. Had the NRC adhered to its risk-informed decision-making process, it would have issued the shut down order for Davis-Besse and capped off a stellar example of how this process can and should be used.

In February 2001, the NRC learned of a new aging mechanism, the circumferential cracking of stainless steel CRDM nozzles based on inspection results from Oconee. The NRC properly reacted to this finding by revisiting the nuclear industry’s inspection regime for CRDM nozzles. It determined that the existing inspection regime did not provide adequate assurance that circumferential cracks would be identified and repaired. The NRC did not require all plant owners to immediately address this inspection shortfall, which would have imposed an unnecessary regulatory burden on those plants with low susceptibility for the problem. Nor did the NRC allow all plant owners to address the shortfall at their next regularly scheduled refueling outage, which would have imposed an unnecessary challenge to safety margins at those plants with high susceptibility. Instead, the NRC applied risk-informed decision-making by issuing Bulletin 2001-01 in August 2001 to all owners of pressurized water reactors. This Bulletin required the high susceptible reactors to resolve the inspection shortfall by December 2001, the medium susceptible reactors to resolve the inspection shortfall at their next regularly scheduled outage, and merely collected information from the low susceptible reactors.

Only two reactors with high susceptibility for circumferential cracking of CRDM nozzles did not conform to the inspection requirements...

At this point, the NRC abandoned its risk-informed decision-making process.....

http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/davis-besse_retrospective_030303db.pdf


Nah, it can never happen here...