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New Legislation Proposed For Nuclear Safety
mdsolar writes "Recent problems at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant have spurred Congresspeople from Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire to introduce legislation that would allow State governors to request independent safety reviews of nuclear power plants. The reviews would exclude NRC employees who usually work on that plant and include non-NRC reviewers. This review model is based on one that found problems at Maine Yankee before it closed. Problems at Vermont Yankee have included a cooling tower collapse, a SCRAM caused by an un-greased valve, and failure of a safety system during the SCRAM. The plant is coming off of heightened review after shipping nuclear material with insufficient shielding. The plant's application for a 20 year license extension is also currently under review."
Nuclear power does have a safety culture, using systems like lessons-learned to attempt to improve safety. But, pushing aging reactors past their design capacity or refueling faster with fewer people seem like lessons learned just waiting to happen. Shoestring methods lack the kind of redundancy that provides for safety margins.
I work in the nuclear industry. Decisions to uprate power reactors are not made willy-nilly. There is extensive engineering work done to provide technical justification to the NRC, who ultimately must approve it. The power rating for these plants was originally established with uncertainty margins reflective of when they were built: the 1960s and 1970s. As our engineering abilities have developed over the past 40 years, we've been able to trim some of that uncertainty. Larger uprates are sometimes contingent upon replacing old equipment.
The Simpsons are, in fact, not reality-based television. There are no rivers of green goo or three-eyed fish. Yes, these things are commercial operations, and there are schedule pressures. In every plant that I've ever been to, in every outage I've ever worked, the length of the outage has not been controlled by loading and unloading fuel. Lots of other stuff goes on. The reasons outage lengths have grown shorter have to do with better technology, improved scheduling and management, and a well-trained work force. Not with cutting corners on safety.
Vermont Yankee has been a sore subject in Vermont for a while, and not because of FUD. Doing things like losing spent fuel rods, and then trying to spin the situation as not-such-a-big-deal is not going to endear you to Vermonters or their neighbors.
v ermont-yankee-issues/location-spent-fuel-rod.html
Link: http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/plant-specific-items/
The rods are not in the cooling pool, they weren't found, and after observing this and other Yankee Nuke related issues as a concerned citizen I am convinced that Entergy and Co should get the fuck out of Vermont.
VT Yankee has been run too poorly for too long. Nuclear done right is a beautiful thing, nuclear done the VT Yankee way leads to disasters.
Regards from Burlington 05401.
I think this is an interesting point. Up until recently, problems at US plants had to be disclosed to the public and so there was a flow of information that could be broadly helpful. In Japan there have been coverups of problems that have lasted years and at the UKs Sellafield plant outside monitoring by non-governmental groups were needed to document the existance of problems. In the US, the culture is changing. For Official Use Only desiganations are being used to hide serious hazards and the DOE project at Yucca Mountian has experienced data falsification. In the linked article we see the NRC taking the position that the legislation would be duplicative with the plant operator cheering them on. Since when does a federal agency tell congress they can't pass legislation? They sound mighty defensive. I think that you are right that the US industry experiences too many problems and day-late-dollar-short maintenance can be seen as part of the reason. But, I'm not sure that what is going on elsewhere is better or if we just don't hear about the problems. As the US moves to greater secrecy, things may get worse everywhere.