NRC "unable to take the most basic actions to insure nuclear safety"

In an article entitled "Nuclear Dominoes Fall in California and Kentucky," published at EcoWatch, Geoffrey Sea of Neighbors for an Ohio Valley Alternative writes:

"The Paducah and San Ofre shutdowns have a number of important connections beyond that the former facility provided the latter with fuel, and that the two sites are located in earthquake red zones. In both cases, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proved itself incompetent and incapable, unable to take the most basic actions to insure nuclear safety. NRC should have flatly denied the San Ofre reactors permission to restart, and NRC should have revoked USEC’s operating license at Paducah after the company clearly could not meet financial capacity requirements. But the NRC failed in both cases, locked up in a kind of containment cell of quantum indeterminacy. Schrodinger’s cat , dead or alive, could do a better job of regulating the nuclear industry than the NRC as now constituted. [emphasis added]

This article is the 5th in a series. The 4 earlier installments, focused on the permanent shutdown of the Paducah gaseous diffusion plant, are accessible via links, above.

To see more news about the San Onofre reactor shutdowns, go to Beyond Nuclear's Nuclear Retreat page.

Palisades springs yet another leak into the control room: Failure of moisture barrier violates agreement with NRC

MI Radio image showing location of chronically leaking SIRWT above Palisades' control roomBeyond Nuclear and Michigan Safe Energy Future--Shoreline Chapter issued a media release on June 6thupon learning of yet another leak into Entergy Nuclear's Palisades atomic reactor control room (see image, left). The leakage has been a recurring problem for over two years now.

Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps stated: “When I raised the SIRWT [Safety Injection Refueling Water Tank] leak into the control room at Entergy’s public open house in South Haven on May 14^th, and on an NRC [U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission] Webinar May 23^rd, I was told by company and agency spokespeople that that issue was a thing of the past, that an installed moisture barrier had taken care of the problem. But as William Faulkner famously said, ‘The past is never dead. It's not even past.’ If Palisades can’t even prevent basic leakage through the ceiling of the control room, which has now been going on for over two years, what does that say about its reactor and radioactive waste safeguards? Entergy’s use of buckets, tarps, and ineffective sealant against this leak into the safety-critical control room begs the question, is it prepared to prevent large-scale radioactivity releases into the environment from a long list of severely age-degraded, critical safety systems, structures, and components?”

The leak, which was detected on June 3rd, was made known to the public in an NRC document released on June 6th.

Update on June 12, 2013 by admin

Lindsey Smith at Michigan Radio has reported on this story, including the fact that the sand bed region, an integral componet of the SIRWT structure, was never put in place 40 years ago. Blueprints at Palisades were never updated to document this fact. Thus Entergy's and NRC's assumption, that ongoing leaks from the SIRWT even after repairs had been made last summer were coming from the sand bed region, were erroneous and based upon a fantom architectural feature that in fact did not even exist. 

Update on June 13, 2013 by admin

WSJM has also reported on this story:

"A new leak at Palisades has led Entergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the discovery of a design flaw at the nuclear plant. Consumers Energy did not put the water tank, which is now being repaired, on a grout ring as the original blueprints indicated, and the NRC says Palisades and Entergy are working to fix that with new fiberboard and reinforced concrete..."

Entergy is aiming to restart Palisades by late spring/early summer.

Update on June 13, 2013 by admin

Entergy has provided this explanation for the 45-year-old construction error recently discovered at Palisades:

[Entergy] Communications Specialist Lindsay Rose issued a statement, saying, "The discovery of a lack of sandbed refers to Palisades Safety Injection Refueling Water (SIRW) tank, not the control room. We are currently undergoing work in the SIRW tank to replace the tank’s aluminum flooring and sub-flooring. When we removed the pre-existing aluminum floor plates, the condition of the subflooring was not as we had expected. It became apparent that the sand subflooring had not been installed many years ago as we had thought. We have subsequently installed fiberboard subflooring that has asphalt embedded to provide a more robust and reliable system to support the aluminum floor...".