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Fort Calhoun, just one of America’s problem nuclear reactors

In each of the last two years, at nuclear plants across the country, the NRC has uncovered about a dozen incidents that outside safety experts consider serious, from faulty plans to protect against floods to inadvertent reactor shutdowns to problems with cooling systems.

The NRC has traced many of them back to specific problems that the plant operators and the regulatory agency were aware of but never fixed.

Focus Grows on Nuclear Plant, WSJ 23 May 12,, Nebraska Reactor Illustrates Problem That Vexed Departing Federal Regulator At 9:27 a.m. on June 7, 2011, operators of the Fort Calhoun nuclear-power plant near Omaha noticed flickering lights on their control panels. A couple of minutes later, they heard the fire-extinguishing system kick in.

The fire cut off power for 90 minutes to a pool where radioactive spent-fuel rods are stored, and the pool’s temperature rose by several degrees. In the end, the fire didn’t release any radioactivity or cause major damage to the plant, which was already shut down at the
time because of flooding.

But Fort Calhoun is a prime example of a problem that has vexed departing Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko and, by his account, that never was fully resolved, even after Japan’s
catastrophic nuclear accident last year. That problem, he says, is the
slow response to safety issues, which often get bogged down in
bureaucratic back-and-forth for months or years.

Revelations this month about discord inside the NRC over Fort Calhoun
provide some of the strongest evidence of the problem: Even after the
fire shut down a critical cooling function, it took the agency 10
months to decide whether the incident could be judged a serious safety
threat.

After clashes with fellow commissioners during his tenure, Mr. Jaczko
said on Monday he would resign. In the year or so since Japan’s
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, he has called for U.S.
nuclear-power operators to move more quickly to adopt new safeguards.

“We don’t do a good enough job identifying issues and bringing them to
resolution in a timely way,” he said at a news conference Wednesday.
He said taking a decade or more to resolve safety problems “is not
helpful for anyone.”

Deciding the timing for reopening Fort Calhoun, and a troubled nuclear
plant in California, is likely to be among the top challenges for his
successor, who has yet to be named.
In each of the last two years, at nuclear plants across the country, the NRC has uncovered about a dozen incidents that outside safety experts consider serious, from faulty plans to protect against floods to inadvertent reactor shutdowns to problems with cooling systems.

The NRC has traced many of them back to specific problems that the plant
operators and the regulatory agency were aware of but never fixed.

“When known problems combine to cause near-misses, they are not
surprises—they are accidents waiting to happen,” wrote David Lochbaum,
a nuclear-safety expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a
March report……
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304065704577422570988414992.html

May 24, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety