Many incidents and near misses in USA’s nuclear reactors

The Truth About Nuclear Power – Part 16 Subtitle: Near Misses on Meltdowns Occur Every 3 Weeks Roger E. Sowell, Marina del Rey, California 25 June 15

This is the second of approximately one dozen articles on nuclear safety, these will (or do) include (1) the relationship between plant operators and the regulatory commission, NRC, and show that safety regulations are routinely relaxed to allow the plants to continue operating without spending the funds to bring them into compliance. (2) Also, the many, many near-misses each year in nuclear power plants will be discussed. (3) The safety issues with short term, and long-term, storage of spent fuel will be a topic. (4) Safety aspects of spent fuel reprocessing will be discussed. (5) The health effects on people and other living things will be discussed. The three major nuclear disasters (to date) will be discussed, (6) Chernobyl, (7) Three Mile Island, and (8) Fukushima. (9) The near-disaster at San Onofre will be discussed, and (10) the looming disaster at St. Lucie. (11) The inherent unsafe characteristics of nuclear power plants required government shielding from liability, or subsidy, for the costs of a nuclear accident via the Price-Anderson Act. (12) Finally, the serious public impacts of evacuation and relocation after a major incident, or “extraordinary nuclear occurrence” in the language used by the Price-Anderson Act, will be the topic of an article. Previous articles showing that nuclear power is not economic are linked at the end of this article.

In the four year period 2010-2013, inclusive, the US nuclear reactors had 70 near-misses. These occurred in 48 of the 103 reactors. Some, therefore, had multiple near-misses in the same year. One plant, Columbia, had 3 near-misses in the same year. Wolf Creek, and Ft. Calhoun each had one near-miss in three of the four years. On average, that is 17 near-misses per year, or roughly 17 percent of the reactor fleet. Put another way, every 3 weeks, another near-miss occurs. The frequency of near-misses is expected to increase over time, as the aging reactors have more equipment degrade and fail, and new systems are installed that are unfamiliar to the operators.

What is common in these incidents are old and degraded equipment that fails due to improper inspection, replacement equipment that either does not work as expected, or operators are improperly trained, and in one notable case, improperly trained workers left critical bolts improperly tightened on the reactor head.

The most serious incident, in my view, occurred at the Byron Station, Unit 2, in January, 2012, in Illinois. A complete loss of cooling water at Unit 2 was temporarily replaced with water from Unit 1. Had this been a single-reactor plant, with no operating reactor close at hand, the loss of cooling could have resulted in a partial or full core meltdown, exactly what happened at Fukushima, Japan. This is completely unacceptable.

Some, the nuclear proponents, will argue that the safety systems are adequate since no meltdowns occurred. However, the sheer number of serious incidents shows that eventually, another catastrophe will occur. The US has been lucky, but that luck is likely running out as the plants grow older and more mishaps occur.

Information in these incidents are taken from Union of Concerned Scientists’ series of annual reports, 2010 – 2013, inclusive. The commentary is my own. Links to the four (now five) reports are:

2010 see link
2011 see link
2012 see link
2013 see link
2014 see link (link added 5/10/2015)

Incidents in 2013 (Fourteen incidents)…………http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-16.html