Entergy Palisades: "The Candor Gap"

"The Candor Gap" is the title of an article by Andrew Lersten in the St. Joe-Benton Harbor Herald-Palladium in southwest MI.

The article reports on a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Office of Investigations (OI) report, five-years in the making, about "apparent," "willful violations" of NRC regulations by four Entergy Palisades employees in 2011.

Entergy's problem-plagued Palisades atomic reactor is located in Covert, MI, on the Lake Michigan shore (see photo, above).

The cover up involves leakage of corrosive and radioactive water, from the Safety Injection Refueiling Water [Storage] Tank, the SIRWT, through the ceiling of the safety-critical control room. The leaks, which went on for over a year, were captured in buckets, next to control room operator work stations. Electrical circuitry essention for running safety, cooling, and control systems was thus put at risk of short-circuiting.

On May 25, 2012, NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko, and his large delegation of high-ranking NRC officials (including Chuck Casto, NRC Region 3 Administrator, who had served as Jaczko's eyes and ears on the ground in Japan during the first nine months of the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe, as well NRC Office of Public Affairs Director, Elliot Brenner), were kept in the dark about the "crisis in the control room".

A few weeks later, thanks to whistleblowers' tips to attorney Billie Garde in Washington, D.C., who alerted Ed Markey, Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts, the "crisis in the control room" was revealed.

Jaczko demanded an OI investigation as to why he, and his entire entourage, had been kept in the dark. It has taken nearly four years, but the OI report appears to be nearing completion, in the next several weeks.

OI has not released its draft report to the public yet. It has offered Entergy Palisades a behind closed door meeting to explain itself, if it hopes to prevent escalated enforcement action. That is, the concerned public is not welcome at that meeting.

The largely to entirely unaddressed "crisis in the control room" ultlimately led to the spill of 82.1 gallons of radioactive water into Lake Michigan, in May 2013.

Lersten's article in the Herald-Palladium quoted Beyond Nuclear:

Kevin Kamps of the anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear Tuesday criticized Entergy regarding the allegations.

“The company should be held responsible,” he said. “If they were not privy to it, then they were incompetent. We’ve seen Entergy try to blame its own employees before. We can’t trust the company that’s running the plant to tell the truth, let alon[e] run the plant safely.”

Kamps also said “it’s absurd” that it took the NRC so long to complete the investigation and notify Entergy and the public of its findings.