nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Palisades Nuclear Power Plant needs new tank bottom

(includes slideshow) Palisades Nuclear Power Plant will remain closed until ‘early summer’ to replace bottom of leaking tank M Live Michigan Yvonne Zipp  21 May 13 Fifteen days after it shut down to find and fix a leak in its safety injection refueling water tank (SIRWT), Palisades Nuclear Power Plant announced Monday that it would replace the bottom of the tank and totally reconstitute its subflooring.

The repairs are likely to keep the Covert Township facility, which is owned by New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. offline until at least early summer, said Lindsay Rose, spokeswoman for Palisades in an email. While some Southwest Michigan residents and antinuclear activists had called for a complete replacement of the tank, David Lochbaum, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ nuclear safety project, said that replacement vs. repair “is not a black and white call.”

 Stressing that he had no specific, firsthand knowledge of the condition of Palisades’ SIRW tank, Lochbaum explained in an email that the failure rate is highest at both the beginning and end of a product’s lifespan.
“The high failure rate is attributed to factors such as bad materials, imperfect assemble, and user error that allow new products to fail,” he wrote.On the other end of the lifespan are factors such as embrittlement, rusting, etc.

Lochbaum cited as a recent example the San Onofre nuclear plant in California, whose owner paid $780 million to replace two aging steam generators on each of two reactors — one of which failed in January 2012, less than a year after installation. Workers found significant degradation on all of the replacement steam generators, caused by unexpected vibration.

Both reactors are still shut down and a restart date has not yet been set, said Lochbaum.

“Thus, Entergy’s choice on the SIRWT is to either repair an aging component that is heading towards if not already within the wearout zone or to replace it with a brand spanking new tank that inherently has a relatively high chance of failure, too,” wrote Lochbaum…… http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2013/05/palisades_nuclear_plant_announ.html

May 22, 2013 - Posted by | safety, USA

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

« Previous | Next »