NRC greenlights Peach Bottom 80-year license extension despite significant safety questions

NRC photoOn March 5, 2020, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) staff gave its “OK” to a second 20-year extension of the operating license of the Peach Bottom Units 2 and 3 nuclear power station in southeast Pennsylvania. Peach Bottom’s first 20-year extension to the original 40-year year operating license expires 2033 and 2034. But before it evidences getting too old and decrepit, the agency needs approval now to extend operations out to 2053 and 2054, respectively. Peach Bottom, a 1960’s vintage General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor design, is a controversial Fukushima-style reactor like those that exploded and melted down in Japan following the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Actually, the Mark I controversy goes back to 1972 when a top U.S. safety official with NRC’s predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, said that the containment by design is too small to withstand a severe nuclear accident and would like fail. As predicted, Fukushima demonstrated a 100% containment failure rate for the three units at full power during the natural disaster.

The NRC’s four seated Commissioners still have to rule on Beyond Nuclear’s legal appeal of the agency’s Atomic Safety Licensing Board (ASLB) order denying our November 19, 2018 request for a hearing and intervention opposing the extension. Beyond Nuclear, through its legal counsel and expert witness David Lochbaum, objected to the second license renewal because Peach Bottom’s owner and operator, Exelon, did not submit adequate age management programs according to NRC regulations to reliably track and manage ongoing deterioration of non-replaceable safety-related systems, structures and components (SSC) during the license renewal period. These SSC include hundreds of miles of aging electrical circuitry systems, their jacketing and insulation buried throughout the facility, the large steel and concrete reactor containment structure much of which is inaccessible to inspection, maintenance and surveillance and the 90-foot tall steel reactor pressure vessel component and internals that are embrittling from the combined extreme heat and radiation. Ironically, the licensing board ruled that the Beyond Nuclear argument was “too vague and speculative” to warrant a hearing for further scientific and regulatory scrutiny of Exelon’s safety crystal ball process for the projected period of 2033 to 2054.

But in order to do this, in the Fall of 2018, in the midst of the Peach Bottom  license renewal review process, the NRC staff erased many inconvenient scientific questions and recommendations from the government public record, evidence the NRC had contracted for from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) “in support” of  the Peach Bottom extension and many more nuclear power stations that will seek second license renewal. The federal lab report was downloaded by Beyond Nuclear from the federal laboratory's public website in Spring 2018. The PNNL report strongly recommended that the NRC and the DOE "require" strategically targeted autopsies from the now growing number of permanently closed reactors around the country in order to validate the second license renewal process at still operating reactors. But the federal laboratory scientific study was withdrawn from the public record in late September 2018 by NRC. According to the retracted PNNL report, putting these nukes on the slab, so to speak, was necessay and should "require”, for example, harvesting aged samples of base metals, weld materials, concrete cores to calibrate industry computer models for projecting aging  mechanisms like crack initiation and crack growth rates using these real time aged material from actual field experience.  The harvesting of aged materials would provide materials to observe, measure, quantify and analyze the science for dozens of real time aging effects constantly attacking reactor safety margins during harsh reactor operations (think radiation-induced embrittlement and microcracking of the steel base metal and weld materials, "concrete cancer", and a jillion synergistic effects). Harvesting, archiving and analyzing these real time aged material samples would provide the second or “subsequent” license renewal process with missing technical data for many significant safety knowledge "gaps." The PNNL report determined that NRC needs this analysis for the evidence before it can provide reasonable assurance of reactor safety performance and equipment reliability still decades into the future.  So the national lab said that NRC should "require" a combined effort of the DOE, NRC and the nuclear industry to afford strategic harvesting of aged materials for the analysis from closed reactors like Exelon's Oyster Creek in New Jersey---the world's first Fukushima-style reactor.  Exelon should look at the real effects of aging from its 49 year old nuke in NJ  to baseline the safe and reliable operation during the license extension of same design seeking a license extension at Peach Bottom in PA. 

The NRC staff argues that the PNNL report published in December 2017 was a premature "draft" despite the scientific study being posted to the government websites of PNNL, the Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The published scientific study had no markings of "draft" and had been publicly available for nine months with interceding meetings between the government agencies. Prior to the December 2017 release, the NRC staff had been fully engaged and commenting on the published paper. Still, in early April 2019, the NRC subsequently published its revised version of the PNNL report that has removed PNNL previous recommendations to require strategic harvesting at decommissioning reactors and dozens of references to the PNNL acknowledged technical knowledge "gaps" that must be addressed before permitting second license renewal applications. To date, the NRC revised version has not been publicly reposted to the PNNL, OSTI or IAEA websites.  Beyond Nuclear continues to process a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NRC filed on September 25, 2018 that NRC continues to slow walk and stall its full disclosure. 

With but a severely limited sample set of harvested materials as acknowledged by both NRC staff and the federal laboratories, the industry has been burying the bodies of its decommissioned nuclear reactors whole for decades. This is what happened at Yankee Rowe (MA), Rancho Seco (CA), and Trojan (OR), without an autopsy even to harvest archival material samples despite the repeated calls  from the scientific community for the public safety related activity. That's the way the NRC and the nuclear industry want to keep it now going out to 80 years.