nuclear-news

US allowing longer shifts at nuclear plants in pandemic,

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to temporarily allow longer worker shifts is one way the industry is scrambling to keep up mandatory staffing levels through what will be weeks or months more of the outbreak.

The shift extensions would allow workers to be on the job for up to 86 hours a week. Currently, they’re generally allowed to work up to 72 hours in a seven-day period. As part of the waiver, workers could be assigned to 12-hour shifts for as many as 14 days in a row.

Nuclear plant workers already are having their temperatures checked on arrival for each shift, and employers are studying options including having workers temporarily live at plants full-time……

“This is highly specialized work that needs a lot of attention and focus,” Treat, a nuclear safety activist, said by telephone. It’s a problem, she said, “if people are fatigued or sick…..

The NRC closely regulates total staffing and staff hours as a condition of reactors’ continued operation. Fatigue has often been deemed a factor in accidents at nuclear plants, as in the former Soviet Union’s 1986 Chernobyl disaster, where key plant staffers had worked multiple shifts.

In the United States in recent days, nuclear plants are reporting some of the first coronavirus cases among their workers.

Over the weekend, the NRC said it would consider on a plant-by-plant basis 60-day exemptions that would let plants keep workers on the job for up to 86 hours in a seven-day period, including up to 12 hours a day for 14 days straight. No plant had received a work-hour waiver as of Thursday, regulators said…….

But Edwin Lyman, a nuclear power expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists watchdog group, called proposals like Basso’s “alarming.”

“I hope that the NRC will conduct due diligence on industry claims that the best way to reduce the potential for COVID-19 spread among its personnel is to force them to work fourteen 12-hour days in a row,” he said in an email. He called that solution likely “untenable.”

If a plant fails to keep up minimum staffing requirements in the pandemic, regulators could order it to shut down, something that has happened rarely, if ever, to an operating plant, regulators said.

Besides the kind of crew consolidation Basso described, individual nuclear plants also are looking at the possibility of bringing former plant operators back into service. Another option is sequestering crews on site — keeping workers fed and bunked down at the plants during the pandemic, NEI spokeswoman Mary Love said…… https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3909533