Regulator and industry fight over unreliable containments at U.S. Fukushima-style reactors: Send a letter to NRC
March 7, 2013 Public Radio’s “Market Place” recently featured a story in its “BURN: An Energy Journal” series on the fight between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff and the nuclear industry over what to do with the 31 problematic Fukushima-style General Electric Mark I and Mark II boiling water reactors in the US. In fact, it is not the first time this confrontation has come up between regulator and industry over these proven dangerous reactors.
The current fight is over whether the agency’s five President appointed Commissioners will side with the nuclear industry’s position or support their own staff’s safety recommendation on the unreliable containment structures as demonstrated by multiple explosions in Japan following the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. In large part, the root cause of that disaster--and potentially the next--is a bad reactor design feature; during a nuclear accident the all-important reactor containment component is not expected to actually “contain” the tremendous pressure, explosive hydrogen gas and the massive amounts of radiation generated by a melting nuclear core.
The NRC staff, after much study and a visit to European reactors where filtered vents were largely installed after the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, determined that it is necessary to Order the industry to install a high-capacity filtered venting system on these unreliable containments. In the event of an accident, US operators will then have the option to temporarily release extreme pressures, high temperatures, explosive hydrogen gas rather than permanently rupture the final barrier system like those that exploded at Fukushima Daiichi. Installing the high-capacity radiation filter, the staff has determined would significantly restore much of the containment’s functional role during venting by capturing a large portion of the radioactivity, principally the micron-sized particulate, released from damaged reactor fuel.
However, the industry wants to focus all its resources on preventing core damage in the GE reactors. Industry argues that the “unlikely” event of fuel damage should be studied for several more years and then, maybe, put a filter on the venting system. Their position is that the public health and safety benefit of installing a filter in a containment vent is so marginal that the cost is not unjustified. The cost of a filtered venting system for the Mark I containment is currently estimated to be around $45 million per unit. The Mark II containment filtered vent system is more expensive and Beyond Nuclear has learned begins around $70 million per unit.
Even if the NRC issues a prompt Order as according to the staff recommendation, the nuclear power plant operators do not need to complete the installation until December 31, 2017. Meanwhile, the Fukushima-style reactors keep running and gambling safety margins with profit margins.
Sometime over the coming weeks, the five Commissioners will cast their votes either with their staff’s safety-minded professional engineering judgment or with the industry’s claim that the probability of another Fukushima can be made so remote that the cost of managing another meltdown isn’t justified.
In our view, this is the lesson of Fukushima unlearned in the United States.
In fact, this has been a recurring fight over the GE reactors since at 1972, when a chief safety officer then with the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) first identified that the GE design is fundamentally flawed and should be permanently shut down.
In a warning to his AEC colleagues, Dr. Stephen Hanauer penned a safety memo. Dr. Hanauer had concluded that GE’s 1960’s vintage reactor containment design, the final barrier to protecting public health and safety from the catastrophic release of radiation, was volumetrically too small to withstand the tremendous pressure generated under potential accident conditions. He urged the agency to discontinue all further use of the Mark I and not license any more units. The AEC and its successor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) would ignore his warning and license 16 more Mark I units for a total of 24 units operating in the US.
Thus, “Round 1” for the GE reactors ended with the nuclear industry edging out public safety concerns with expanded nuclear production capacity.
Following the 1986 nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl in Ukraine (where Russian nuclear technology was faulted for a reactor “without a containment”), the NRC revisited one of its own unreliable containment series, the GE Mark I. It had come to light that the Mark I’s small containment was built with less concrete and steel to gain a competitive edge over the larger Pressurized Water Reactors domed containments. Mark I reactors---like Oyster Creek just sixty miles from New York City---have a containment volume 1/6th the size of the larger dry containment structures like the ill fated Three Mile Island Unit 2 that melted down in March 1979. It was the summer of 1986 when NRC’s top safety officer Harold Denton summed up the GE Mark I containment risk with a 90% chance of catastrophic failure if faced with a severe accident.
“Round 2” of the regulatory fight over the safety of the Mark I containment was underway by 1989. The NRC staff sought to increase the reactors’ odds against containment failure by retrofitting the vulnerable structures with “reliable hardened vents.” The Mark I operators could then have the option to “temporarily” defeat containment to vent extreme heat and pressure in an effort to prevent fuel damage and the build-up of explosive hydrogen gas and large releases of radiation during an accident. In fact, the NRC staff had earlier chosen to ignore independent scientific experts Professor Frank von Hippel and Jan Beyea’s recommendation in 1982 that the GE reactors be fitted with containment vents specifically featuring high-capacity radiation filters to preserve some margin of the all important containment feature during venting operations in the event of an accident.
The apparently captured regulator could not then muster itself to “Order” industry to install the reliable hardened vents, let alone one with a filter. Instead, the NRC “requested” that the nuclear industry “voluntarily” install a containment venting system consisting of a “hardened” pipe with a set of control room operated valves to temporarily open a path from the vulnerable containment to a 300-foot tall stack to disperse heat, pressure, hydrogen gas and what ever amount of radiation to the atmosphere prior to any significant fuel damage. Moreover, the design and installation of the reliable vent was conducted under a set of NRC regulations governing “non-safety” related equipment that neither required NRC oversight or inspections and did not allow for independent expert and public hearings because the modifications presented no change in accident risk or hazardous consequence. Five of the 24 Mark I units in the U.S. initially refused to volunteer the safety changes. Four of the five units would eventually agree to voluntarily install the “hardened” vent. But the FitzPatrick nuclear power plant in Oswego, NY refused to make any modifications to its GE containment arguing that they already had a reliable venting strategy. In the event of a nuclear accident, the FitzPatrick nuclear power plant's venting strategy, as still approved today, is to release high pressure, extreme temperature, potentially explosive hydrogen gas and massive amounts of radioactivity into a duct work system adjacent auxiliary building that will "rapidly disassemble" blowing off the doors at ground level. FitzPatrick operators have assumed that there will be "no likely ignition points" in this process that might detonate explosive hydrogen gas.
So “Round 2” went to the GE reactors with a willy-nilly regulator that O.K.’d a dubious voluntary back fit to keep generating profits for operators with makeshift vents inconsistently installed throughout the fleet, without effective NRC oversight or any enforcement consequences on patently dangerous unreliable containment systems.
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company adopted the same NRC voluntary “reliable hardened vent” system for its GE Mark I reactors and completed installation in 1992. This is the vent system design and installation that would prove unreliable on the multiple unit reactor complex in the aftermath of March 11, 2011. Back to the drawing board.
“Ding,” the bell rings in the opening of Round 3 in the prize fight for production margins versus public safety margins.
The nuclear industry and its Capitol Hill champions are fighting to stave off a NRC staff recommendation to finally Order the costly back fit of high-capacity filtered hardened vents on the nation’s Boiling Water Reactors. The industry wants to keep its Fukushima-style reactors operating into their twenty-year license extensions at minimum expense and maximum profit. The identified vulnerable reactors have grown from the 23 GE Mark I units (Connecticut’s Millstone Unit 1 permanently shutting down in 1995) to include also the eight the Mark II boiling water reactors now similarly recognized with undersized containments.
The fight now is more over whether the NRC has a shred of meaningful regulatory authority and control to exercise its staff's professional judgment and fulfill its Congressional mandate to protect public health and safety with enforceable requirements on the nuclear industry.
The public and the communities that surround these dangerous reactors need to weigh in now with letters to the Commissioners supporting the NRC staff decision to require the installation of radiation filters in these vents on unreliable containments.
Send a letter to the Commissioners asking them to vote for the protection of public health and safety by supporting the installation of the filtered hardened vent on all Mark I and Mark II reactor containments.