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USA Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s safety claims are not convincing

the initial round of (inadequate) Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety assessments found enormous levels of risk at U.S. plants — particularly the backup systems that caused the problems in Japan. While the NRC’s summary blandly assured that “all the reactors would be kept safe, even in the event their regular safety systems were affected by these events,” the detailed reports by the inspection teams made it clear that these bromides were anything but reassuring.

Why They Don’t — and Can’t — Get It Right HUFFINGTON POST< Carl Pope,  05/17/11 Well, now we know that not one but three of Japan’s Fukushima reactors suffered core meltdowns within hours of the earthquake and tsunami that cut off their diesel-generated backup power.

And the initial round of (inadequate) Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety assessments found enormous levels of risk at U.S. plants — particularly the backup systems that caused the problems in Japan. While the NRC’s summary blandly assured that “all the reactors would be kept safe, even in the event their regular safety systems were affected by these events,” the detailed reports by the inspection teams made it clear that these bromides were anything but reassuring. At the Oconee nuclear plant in South Carolina, for example, inspectors found that “The licensee has stated that most fire suppression components may fail” in a quake. How the NRC can then say that Oconee would be kept safe is not clear…..

a sad and familiar story of regulatory capture. But what’s really scary is not that the NRC has failed to be the robust, arms-length overseer that we were promised, but another pattern that has emerged from the Times investigation and from other recent news stories.

Here’s a list of things that nuclear power plant operators, who you would think might have an incentive to prevent their extremely pricey assets from turning into radioactive junk piles, apparently thought were prudent business practices:

• Operating Vermont Yankee without having a clear set of blueprints of where the plant’s cooling system plumbing actually ran.
• Leaving the Indian Point reactor with a substandard electric wiring system that will withstand a fire for only half the time the NRC originally required.
• Ignoring corrosion at the Byron plant that the operator knew had left critical pipes with only 10 percent of their original strength.
• Delaying a critically needed safety inspection at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo for almost a year, resulting in reactor failure that almost led to a meltdown.
• Purchasing cheap fire-proofing materials from an unknown company using an unqualified lab certification even when known and safe products were available from reliable suppliers like 3M — to save trivial sums of money.
• Failing to inspect a series of critical valves and pipes at two reactors at the Oconee Plant to see if a gasket blockage that had occurred at the third Oconee Reactor was also a problem with its sister plants. (In this case the NRC insisted on an inspection, and the two other reactors also turned out to be at risk.)
• Diverting critical emergency backup safety equipment to other routine uses in plant operations, meaning that in a crisis the safety tools needed would not be available to plant operators, because they would be somewhere else in the reactor complex.
• Maintaining only four hours of battery capacity to guard against the loss of both grid and diesel power in a shutdown — only half as much as the Japanese plants that melted down had available. ………… Carl Pope: Why They Don’t — and Can’t — Get It Right

May 19, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA