How many people have to die before you stop playing Russian Roulette?

[kristopher]

What happened at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant in 2002?




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

Here is a quote that I think summarizes what the nuclear industry wants to become the conventional wisdom about the "lesson learned" from Fukushima, "A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation."*

But the fact is that someone decided to build the plant there; just as someone makes a decision about where every plant is sited. The origin of the siting issue, as near as I can determine, is that particular spot on the coast line was not considered to be a tsunami zone (at least according to my atlas).

Imagine the complexity of a nuclear plant, and the scale of the supply chain. Decisions equally as significant and equally subject to human error and failing are embodied in the matrix of the product and process to a degree that ensures that neither Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Davis Besse, nor Fukushima are one-off incremental issues whose fixing will ensure the "perfection" of nuclear power.

Davis Besse: Incident history

Over the years of its operation, the plant has experienced several incidents, none of which have resulted in exposure to dangerous levels of radiation.


On September 24, 1977, the reactor, running at only 9% power, shut down because of a disruption in the feedwater system.<4> This caused the relief valve for the pressurizer to stick open. As of 2005, the NRC considers this to be the fourth highest ranked safety incident.<5>

Loss of feedwater event
On June 9, 1985, the main feedwater pumps, used to supply water to the reactor steam generators, shut down. A control room operator then attempted to start the auxiliary (emergency) feedwater pumps. These pumps both tripped on overspeed conditions because of operator error. This incident was originally classified an "unusual event" (the lowest classification the NRC uses) but it was later determined that it should have been classified a "site area emergency".<6>

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>

2009 unintentional discharge of firearm
In November 2009, a plant security officer was using the restroom and his firearm discharged while in the holster. The officer sustained a non life threatening wound to his calf. No cause was found for the discharge.<16>

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


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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



*George Monbiot

[sabbat hunter]

1. would you rather live next to a coal fired plant or a nuclear plant?

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

I would choose a nuclear power plant every time.

[Fuddnik]

2. You mean there's ONLY two choices.

Would you rather be beaten to death or filleted?

Of course, you could have neither, or live, but I ain't telling you that.

[liberal N proud]

4. There are other options

[Javaman]

7. Love that strawman argument...

Why does that have to be the only choices?

When everything looks like a nail...

[enough]

3. Thanks for the information. This may be a moment when people will start to see the importance of

knowing what's happening with their local nukes.

[TBF]

5. I'm hoping for awareness and education as well -

building a nuclear plant on a known fault line ... probably not the best plan. Hopefully as a species we learn from this experience. My thoughts are with the survivors in Japan. Just awful.

[kristopher]

6. A football sized hole in DB's reactor head has nothing to do with a fault line does it?

What lesson is there in what happened at Davis Besse?

[TBF]

8. Can we guarantee that these plants are safe and maintained properly?

Nope - especially when we are trying to make a profit off them. Is it too much of a risk? That is where the awareness and education come in. I'll admit I don't know nearly enough about the technology to make an informed decision, and most Americans probably are in the same boat.

[kristopher]

10. The proper category for Nuclear Power in statistics

Are you familiar with the term "Black Swan Event"?

Nuclear accidents are in a class of low probability, high consequence events that standard statistical risk assessment cannot predict nor anticipate the full consequences of. Here is the first hit for /nuclear black swan event/

"A Black Swan event is a metaphor used to explain a disproportionate, hard to predict event that is beyond the realm of normal expectation in history, science, finance and technology. Coined by epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable", perhaps there is no more apt metaphor to describe the macabre ballet of destruction that has engulfed Japan.

It has been a little over one week since a massive 9.0 earthquake struck Northern Japan and a devastating tsunami pummeled its coastal cities. The number of lives lost continues to grow and millions have been left hungry, cold, without electricity and homeless. The Nikkei has plummeted. The explosions and release of radioactive caesium-137 and iodine-131 from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant pose a very real public health threat to those in surrounding areas and potentially to the entire country. This nuclear disaster is now considered by most to be the second worst in history. As Prime Minister Naoto Kan remarked, this is his nation’s worst crisis since World War II.

This catastrophe represents not only a turning point for Japan, but one for all nations that forces them to reexamine their energy policies and societal attitudes. Notwithstanding the Obama administration’s push forward with issuing construction permits for new nuclear plants, many countries including Germany are making significant policy shifts away from nuclear energy and looking to solar and wind installations as a safer and reliable alternative. Perhaps the tragedy in Japan and the unfortunate implications from this catastrophe will work to shift public sentiment around the world and force a global move towards a clean and safe energy future.

It is also important to note, given the seemingly apocalyptic chain of events and tremendous losses, that the bonds of Japanese culture have appeared to remain intact. There has been no looting, no crime, no mass stampedes or finger-pointing. Order and compassion prevail. Civility and honor have neither been swept away by a 30-foot wave or shaken by the earthquakes, aftershocks and threat of nuclear meltdown. I hope that this too is an outcome of this Black Swan event--a hidden lesson in humanity for people of all cultures and nations. It is worth acknowledging the Japanese resilience and dignity in these circumstances."
http://www.fastcompany.com/1741667/the-hidden-beuaty-of-japans-black-swan

The dichotomy the author observes is due to the fact that he is judging the effect on the japanese by their "bonds" remaining intact. He must be unaware of the fact that the Japanese have disasters hit them routinely. I left in '95 after more than a decade because of one.

[WatsonT]

9. I find it funny how many people oppose nuclear power on health grounds

who then smoke, or drink alcohol, or fail to exercise/eat healthy, or drive a car, or don't get regular medical checkups, or who have no issue living downstream from a large dam, etc.

As far as 'russian roulette' goes Nuclear power is pretty low on our day to day threats.

[TBF]

11. Smoking and drinking are individual behaviors within our control -

nuclear power cannot be compared to that.

[WatsonT]

14. So people are perfectly willing to accept risk constantly

for 'fun' things, but when it comes to something useful that is no longer acceptable?

BTW: second hand smoke and drunk drivers kill. Those are my not personal choice, but I'm affected by them.

And no comment on the potential for dams to burst wiping out everyone downstream?

[TBF]

15. There is potential for just about anything -

but the fact is that when a nuclear plant melts down we are talking about thousands of folks being poisoned by radiation and likely dying, as opposed to those who individually choose self-destructive behaviors and kill themselves slowly and painfully.

Personally I have no problem with smoking being highly restricted and drunk drivers riding buses rather than being granted driver's licenses.

[WatsonT]

16. Are we really talking about thousands dying?

How many die from coal?

I know the standard response: we'll just use wind/solar because those are perfectly safe. But the fact remains that these are not yet viable options to replace the bulk of our energy needs, even if we launched a crash conversion project and invested the bulk of our budget in to it.

That leaves chemical (coal, diesel, methane, etc) or nuclear. And of the two nuclear is preferable.

[bananas]

17. No, wind and solar are more viable than nuclear - that's the conclusion of the IPCC and others

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report

In terms of electricity generation, the IPCC envisage that renewable energy can provide 30 to 35% of electricity by 2030 (up from 18% in 2005) at a carbon price of up to US$50/t, and that nuclear power can rise from 16% to 18%. They also warn that higher oil prices might lead to the exploitation of high-carbon alternatives such as oil sands, oil shales, heavy oils, and synthetic fuels from coal and gas, leading to increasing emissions, unless carbon capture and storage technologies are employed.<33>

That's from 2007 when they were using absurdly low cost estimates from the nuclear industry. In 2009 MIT acknowledged that they underestimated the costs, but their new estimates are still too low, independent estimates are much higher.
Nuclear energy has actually declined to 13-14% of global electricity.
We need a massive build-up of renewables.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption

Mostly thanks to the Sun, the world also has a renewable usable energy flux that exceeds 120 PW (8,000 times 2004 total usage), or 3.8 YJ/yr, dwarfing all non-renewable resources.
...
Annual generation of nuclear power has been on a slight downward trend since 2007, decreasing 1.8% in 2009 to 2558 TWh with nuclear power meeting 13–14% of the world's electricity demand.<20>

[WatsonT]

19. You're missing a lot of key problems there

1) solar wind can't be ramped up to meet changing energy demands.
2) often they have to be put so far away from where people actually live that transmission becomes an issue.
3) they are not always on (can't turn the sun/wind on when needed).
4) the amount of land they take up to generate the same amount of energy as nuclear is tremendous.

[kristopher]

13. Safe until it isn't.

But I actually agree with you to an extent. Given the issue of global warming if safety were the only issue with nuclear I'd almost certainly recommend its expansion as a response to climate change.
However there are other issues that compound the safety issue. A pronuclear study by MIT in 2003 identified 4 areas that they said "must" be addressed before nuclear power should be widely deployed.

Cost safety waste and proliferation.

To that. I'd that they all need to be solved with a single design, because when nuclear supporters are confronted individually with items on this list, they like to share how "they HAVE solved that" with such and such design. what they fail to mention is that solving any one problem always makes at least one of the others worse.

To top that off the best study done (MIT) didn't even examine the long term effect on CO2 rates of the one design strategy that comes closest to solving all those issues - the "once through" fuel cycle.

We would need to build a very large new nuclear plant every week for 40 years to meet just 1/3rd of our predicted global electric needs. That would unquestionably result in fairly rapid depletion of the high quality ore and require us to use progressively lower concentrations of uranium. That physics of refining predict that would result in the long term carbon emissions of nuclear power rising to about the level of natural gas.

If that is where we wanted to end up, with (comparatively) very little investment we could do that right now with a minor expansion of our natural gas generating fleet, and turn off all the coal and nuclear in about 5 years. The economics would then propel renewable deployment like a rocket. If we invest so much in nuclear, renewables are dead.

Nuclear power is a scam.

6 Standard myths that the nuclear industry wants you to believe as identified by former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioneer Bradford.

1. nuclear power is cheap;
2. learning and new standardized designs solve all past problems;
3. the waste problem is a non-problem, especially if we’d follow the lead of many other nations and “recycle” our spent fuel;
4. climate change makes a renaissance inevitable;
5. there are no other large low-carbon “baseload” alternatives;
6. there’s no particular reason to worry that a rapidly expanding global industry will put nuclear power and weapons technologies in highly unstable nations, often nations with ties to terrorist organizations.

These are all false.

[Catherina]

12. Rec'd. n/t

[petronius]

18. Just one - me!

:rofl:

(Sorry, your subject line gave me a morning giggle...)

[Kablooie]

20. Whoops! There goes, another nuclear plant.

[vicarofrevelwood]

21. How Many Deaths will it Take till He Knows

That too many people have died.