NRC denies Oconee fire protection delay

More on the unsafe Oconee Nuclear Station, as originally reported here back in late September of last year.



The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will conduct a public meeting at 1 p.m. Wednesday at Oconee Nuclear Station’s World of Energy. Duke Energy officials will discuss major projects at the plant, including the fire-protection efforts.





From Sunday's Greenville News:

NRC denies Oconee fire protection delay
Agency says plant is safe, but wants protection system
by Eric Connor, staff writer

For years now, the Oconee Nuclear Station’s colossal three reactors have operated on the shores of Lake Keowee under fire-protection methods that the government says were only meant to be temporary.

However, federal regulators have now taken an unexpected stand – denying the most recent of voluminous deadline extensions Duke Energy has requested through the years as the company works to put its fire-protection practices at the forefront of the nuclear industry.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission – in recently citing a higher-than-acceptable safety risk under temporary fire-protection measures while at the same time insisting those temporary measures have been sufficient so far — is straddling a line with contradiction on either side.

If the risk of fire is great enough for regulators to stand ground opposite a powerful energy giant, then why are Oconee’s reactors still operating?

Or, if the plant can safely operate under interim measures as it has for years, why should a nuclear provider so integral to life in the Upstate be denied a pass in an industry known for the deadlines both it and the government itself frequently don’t meet?

The NRC insists that the plant is safe from fire, though the agency says the degree of safety could be as much as 40 times less than if Duke had kept to its deadlines.

Duke insists that it is working diligently and that the project is more complex than either it or the government had foreseen.

The answer, nuclear watchdogs say, lies in reading between the lines of a denial that they say borders on the unprecedented — and one that, if held to, could be an indication of a willingness for the NRC to take a stronger stance against criticism that it has become too cozy with the industry it regulates.

Our 2010 Green Party Senatorial Candidate, Tom Clements, is quoted in the article:

“This is almost unprecedented to me that the NRC would deny a request presented by a licensee,” said Tom Clements, director of the Columbia-based Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. “This is highly unusual, and it signifies how serious the NRC is taking this issue.”

Duke has a 30-day window to appeal the NRC’s denial.

The outcome — for instance a potential plant shutdown — could set a tone for the industry as dozens of reactors must make the transition, said Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project for the Maryland-based Beyond Nuclear watchdog organization.

“This is sort of a push-comes-to-shove moment for fire protection in the nuclear industry,” Gunter said. “We really need to see if the NRC will back up its enforcement policy. This plant shouldn’t be operating if it can’t meet fire-protection qualifications.”

The denial is even more astounding given that the NRC recently granted a one-year extension for Brown’s Ferry in Alabama, the genesis for the industry’s original fire standards following a fire at the plant in 1975, Lochbaum said.

“What about all the other plants that haven’t begun the transition?” Lochbaum said. “If two more years is unacceptable for Oconee, how is it OK for the four dozen other reactors? I guess Oconee spun the wheel of misfortune and it came up ‘no’ this time.”

The NRC determined that the “core damage frequency” rate is at least four times and as much as 40 times greater than if Duke had the pilot measures completed.

More here.

I probably will not be able to make it to Wednesday's Duke Energy meeting, but we are hoping we can hear from folks who will be? If you will be attending the meeting, please consider contributing your account to Occupy the Microphone, which airs on Tuesdays on WOLT-FM, 1-2pm, here in upstate SC. (OccupyTheMicrophone@Yahoo.com). We would like to have South Carolina Greens in attendance. Unfortunately, the meeting wasn't announced very far in advance, to allow people to travel from all over the state (especially from the more liberal coast).

And of course, we are hoping some of those rich folks around Lake Keowee make their feelings known.

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EDIT: Mary Olson of NIRS (Nuclear Information and Research Service) will be calling into the show tomorrow to talk about this issue in more depth, so tune in!

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EDIT 2/1/13: The January 29th Occupy the Microphone show in its entirety is HERE. My apologies for tardiness in posting it.

Oconee Nuclear Station unsafe

At left: The Oconee Nuclear Station is right around the proverbial corner from me, so now I am damn nervous.

There is also the fact Duke Energy is run by money-grubbing liars and it is therefore impossible to trust anything they say. (This has been true since... well, when HASN'T it been true?)

In a report on Huffington Post, the vulnerability and instability of the Oconee plant has been outlined, thanks to a letter from whistleblower Richard Perkins, an engineer. Perkins was one of the authors of a report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, detailing the problems at Oconee and similar plants.

Oconee was singled out as particularly vulnerable.

According to the above-linked Huffington Post piece:

[The] vulnerability at one plant in particular -- the three-reactor Oconee Nuclear Station near Seneca, S.C. -- put it at risk of a flood and subsequent systems failure, should an upstream dam completely fail, that would be similar to the tsunami that hobbled the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility in Japan last year. That event caused multiple reactor meltdowns.

In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Huffington Post, Richard H. Perkins, a reliability and risk engineer with the agency's division of risk analysis, alleged that NRC officials falsely invoked security concerns in redacting large portions of a report detailing the agency's preliminary investigation into the potential for dangerous and damaging flooding at U.S. nuclear power plants due to upstream dam failure.

Perkins, along with at least one other employee inside NRC, also an engineer, suggested that the real motive for redacting certain information was to prevent the public from learning the full extent of these vulnerabilities, and to obscure just how much the NRC has known about the problem, and for how long.

"What I've seen," Perkins said in a phone call, "is that the NRC is really struggling to come up with logic that allows this information to be withheld."

Perkins was the lead author of the report, which was completed in July of 2011 -- roughly four months after an earthquake and subsequent tsunami flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, cut off electric power to the facility and disabled all of its backup power systems, eliminating the ability to keep the reactors cool and leading to a meltdown.

In addition to the Oconee facility, the report examined similar vulnerabilities at the Ft. Calhoun station in Nebraska, the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota and the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, among others.

According to the report, dam-failure occurring upstream from these plants "may result in flood levels at a site that render essential safety systems inoperable." All power sources (including backup batteries, generators and grid power) could be compromised by high floodwaters.

In response to the report, the NRC launched an expanded investigation, which is ongoing. It also folded the dam failure issue into the slate of post-Fukushima improvements recommended by a special task force formed in the aftermath of that disaster. But in a press release dated March 6 of this year, the agency said the report "did not identify any immediate safety concerns."

The NRC made a heavily redacted copy of the report publicly available on the NRC website the same day.

"Nuclear power plant designs include protection against serious but very rare flooding events, including flooding from dam failure scenarios," the agency release noted.

Very rare events! Nothing to worry about!

And where have we heard THAT before?

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff may be motivated to prevent the disclosure of this safety information to the public because it will embarrass the agency," Perkins wrote in his letter. "The redacted information includes discussion of, and excerpts from, NRC official agency records that show the NRC has been in possession of relevant, notable, and derogatory safety information for an extended period but failed to properly act on it. Concurrently, the NRC concealed the information from the public."

In a conversation with The Huffington Post, Perkins elaborated on the redacted material. "My estimation is that if people saw the information that we have, and if they knew for how long we've had it, some might be disappointed at how long it's taken to act, and some might be disappointed that, to date, we haven't really acted at all."

What is darkly humorous is how many rich people live up on Lake Keowee. Maybe THAT will force them to act? They are right in the line of this possible future-disaster.

At the least, their property values have just plummeted.

Will their GREED railroad the NRC into action, if nothing else? Will property-owners and real-estate developers succeed where other mere humans (and concerned engineers) have failed?

Meanwhile, [Perkins] is among several nuclear experts who remain particularly concerned about the Oconee plant in South Carolina, which sits on Lake Keowee, 11 miles downstream from the Jocassee Reservoir. Among the redacted findings in the July 2011 report -- and what has been known at the NRC for years, the engineer said -- is that the Oconee facility, which is operated by Duke Energy, would suffer almost certain core damage if the Jocassee dam were to fail. And the odds of it failing sometime over the next 20 years, the engineer said, are far greater than the odds of a freak tsunami taking out the defenses of a nuclear plant in Japan.

"The probability of Jocassee Dam catastrophically failing is hundreds of times greater than a 51 foot wall of water hitting Fukushima Daiichi," the engineer said. "And, like the tsunami in Japan, the man‐made 'tsunami' resulting from the failure of the Jocassee Dam will –- with absolute certainty –- result in the failure of three reactor plants along with their containment structures.

"Although it is not a given that Jocassee Dam will fail in the next 20 years," the engineer added, "it is a given that if it does fail, the three reactor plants will melt down and release their radionuclides into the environment."

David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said a key concern was that the NRC has failed to appreciate and tackle this risk for so long. "NRC can, or may, resolve the flooding issues," Lochbaum said. "But if it doesn't step back and review when those problems could have been exposed sooner, it won't make the programmatic fixes needed to become a more effective regulator.

I've been sleeping well lately, but tonight? Don't know if I will.