By Roger Witherspoon

Federal regulators have launched a special probe to determine if officials at the Oyster Creek nuclear power violated rules and waited too long to declare an emergency alert as rising waters threatened critical reactors systems.

Three inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began a “special inspection” Tuesday into the alert called by plant officials as waters driven by the storm rose to 7.4 feet in the plant’s intake structure.  The alert, the second level in the NRC’s four-part emergency notification system, was called shortly after the water rose past six feet above sea level at the plant site on Barnegat Bay.

The water, driven by winds from Superstorm Sandy which, at times, approached 100 miles per hour, first knocked out 36 of the plant’s 43 emergency Planning Zone sirens needed to warn the more than 100,000 residents within 10 miles of the site of any major emergency. Then just before 7 PM Monday, officials at Exelon, which owns the plant, declared an “Unusual Event,” the lowest of four levels of nuclear alert, due to high water in the  intake building controlling the plant’s cooling system.  At the same time, the regional grid shut down and the plant had to rely on its diesel generators to keep its safety systems operating.

Oyster Creek is a boiling water reactor, the same type as those at the ill-fated Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. Its spent fuel pool is on top of the reactor and both are in the same containment building. Exelon elevated the plant’s status to the second level “Alert” status as its generators took over efforts to keep the spent fuel pool cooled.

The rising water levels were of particular concern at Oyster Creek, explained NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci, because if it rose too far it could impact the plant’s service water pumps, which are used to shut down the reactor itself.

The three member team, said Screnci, “are looking at the response of the emergency preparedness at the site, and the circumstances surrounding the rising levels in the intake structure.  They are looking specifically at the timing of the alert declaration, and the company’s preparedness prior to the storm, the performance of its equipment, and their command and control during the storm. The onsite inspection should be concluded by the middle of next week, Screnci said.

    “We sent a special team because we want a better understanding of what happened and why it happened.”

The team is led by Jack Bower, the senior resident NRC inspector at the Hope Creek nuclear power plant. Working with him is an operations engineer who will examine management’s actions before and during the storm, and an emergency preparedness specialist.  The inspection was triggered by observations of the two resident inspectors at the plant, who raised questions about the handling of the emergency alerts. “The resident inspectors have been doing some follow up since the hurricane,” Screnci said, “and we decided we needed to send the inspectors there to take a closer look.”

There are specific regulations governing the declaration of emergency declarations at nuclear power plants. The lowest level, called “unusual events”, requires notification of the NRC as well as state emergency officials. Elevating the alarm to the second level, an actual “alert,” requires additional notifications and staffing of an emergency operations center. Ultimately, the plant operator and the NRC are responsible for conduct at the plant site and coordination with outside agencies. The state is responsible for all emergency actions outside the plant property. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie’s office would be responsible for making the call for any evacuations, while in New York, a home rule state, any evacuation orders would be up to the local county executives. The information flow to the NRC headquarters and state emergency officials, therefor, is critical.

In this case, Oyster Creek and 10 other nuclear power plants considered in the direct path of Sandy were already being monitored by special teams sent by the NRC the weekend before the Superstorm struck the New Jersey coast.

Salem 1 faced the most critical situation, but handled it by the book and do not need a special examination. Under NRC guidelines, Salem and Hope Creek, both on Artificial Island on the Delaware River, had to shut down if there were sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or the river reached 99 feet in depth.  The plants’ “design basis” states the sea wall would repel water up to 120 feet, a level only anticipated with a Category 4 hurricane.

Sandy pushed water levels in the Delaware River to 98 feet, and the winds created additional waves approximately 12 feet high. The high waves in the river swamped four of Salem’s six massive pumps in a building along the river’s edge which pull in the water through a 40-foot wide conduit. The loss of these pumps caused a chain reaction of events leading to a shutdown of Salem 1and a massive steam dump into the atmosphere. Officials later said the steam had little or no detectable radiation.

Screnci said that if the inspectors find that Exelon, the managers of Oyster Creek, did not respond to the situation properly, it is likely to trigger increased inspections and oversight of the plant. While the NRC can fine plant operators for violations, that is a remedy usually reserved for cases of willful disregard of safety rules, not for errors of judgment particularly if, in the end, there were adverse impacts on the public. In this case, Screnci emphasized, the public was never in danger.

“Typically, after an event like this, we do look at whether there are things we can improve,” she explained. “It’s not so much a formal lessons learned exercise. But we will look at what we did and how it worked. Do we need to have more people monitoring events in place earlier in the development of a situation like this, for example?

“We continually take a look at requirements to see if there is need for improvement.”

By Roger Witherspoon

The roaring winds, at times approaching 100 miles per hour, were relentless as Hurricane Sandy pushed the Atlantic Ocean towards the eastern seaboard.

The sheer breadth of the Superstorm, with hurricane-force winds radiating some 250 miles from Sandy’s eye, meant 34 nuclear power plants from North Carolina to Vermont would experience extreme weather. While the winds themselves posed little danger to the primary physical structures at nuclear installations, the storm was bound to send trees crashing into utility lines and transformers, causing station blackouts which, along the coasts, could well be accompanied by flood waters. In the latter cases, Sandy would provide a test of some of the safety improvements ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the wake of the triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011.

At particular risk were nuclear plants along the coastlines of New Jersey and New York, directly in the path of the strongest part of the hurricane.

Massive amounts of ocean water were pounded into storm surges sweeping up the Delaware River and other coastal tributaries along the Jersey Shore; or rammed through Long Island Sound and squeezed up the Hudson River. The combination of storm surge and wind would trigger the declaration of an “alert” at the Oyster Creek on Barnegat Bay, and a forced atmospheric steam vent at the nearby Salem 1nuclear plant along the Delaware River in New Jersey. In New York, the twin Indian Point plants rode out floods along the Hudson River, but Indian Point 3 and Nine Mile Point 2, upstate near Syracuse, were shut down by malfunctions caused by hurricane force winds.

In the view of the NRC, the plants all functioned as designed, even if the weather was unpredictable and some problems were not expected.  Eleven northeastern nuclear plants in the direct path of Sandy – including all four in New Jersey – were placed on a special alert status several days before the storm struck that featured additional federal monitors and plans to shut down if the winds or waves exceeded pre-determined storm limits.

That special watch list included Calvert Cliffs in Lusby, Md.; Peach Bottom, in Delta, Pa.; Three Mile Island 1, in Middletown, Pa.; Susquehanna, in Salem Township, Pa.; and Millstone, in Waterford, Conn. None of these were as hard hit as the plants in New Jersey and New York. Millstone 3 and Susquehanna 2 reduced power to 75 percent to accommodate strained regional power grids. But the others operated throughout the storm at 100 percent power.

New Jersey was a different case. As the Superstorm approached, plant officials tested their backup generators and topped off their diesel generator tanks in case they were cut off from the grid and had to rely on their own power to keep reactors and spent fuel pools cooled.

At high tide the Delaware River running past Artificial Island, home to PSE&G’s Salem 1&2, and Hope Creek nuclear power plants, has a normal depth of 89 feet. Salem 1 and Hope Creek were running at full power, while Salem 2 and Oyster Creek were shut for refueling and maintenance.     Joe Delmar, spokesman for PSEG Nuclear, said refueling operations were suspended Sunday at 6 PM and unnecessary workers had been sent home.

Under NRC guidelines, Salem and Hope Creek had to shut down if there were sustained winds of 74 miles per hour or the river reached 99 feet in depth.  The plants’ “design basis” states the sea wall would repel water up to 120 feet, a level only anticipated with a Category 4 hurricane.

But Delmar said the storm pushed water levels in the Delaware River Monday night to 98 feet, and “the winds created additional waves approximately 12 feet high.”

That was problematic.  Hope Creek has a massive cooling tower to cool the hot water and steam generated by its reactor. Salem, on the other hand, uses the Delaware River to form a critical third loop in a three-part, “once-through” cooling system.  The first, or primary loop, is the water superheated to 549 degrees within the reactor and piped through thousands of small tubes within the steam generators. The reactor system is pressurized to 2,235 pounds per square inch to keep the water liquid. The standard home water heater operates at 35 pounds per square inch of pressure.

The second loop is relatively clean water which flows over the tubes in the steam generator, is heated to steam, and then blows over the fans on the 40-ton electric generating turbine. The steam then flows over a heat exchanger featuring the third loop, containing cold Delaware River water. The steam is cooled, condenses back to a liquid, and is piped back to the steam generator to complete the power cycle. The warm water in the third loop is returned to the Delaware River.

But just after 4 AM Tuesday morning, while Sandy’s eye was barreling down on the Jersey Shore, the high waves in the river swamped four of the six massive pumps in a building along the river’s edge which pull in the water through a 40-foot wide conduit jutting into the river. The loss of these pumps caused a chain reaction of events:

• The loss of river water meant the steam in the secondary loop was no longer being condensed, sending hot steam back into the carefully calibrated system.
• The added work load, coupled with accumulating junk clogging Salem’s underwater intake pipe, caused the two remaining pumps to fail.
• With its cooling system compromised, operators stopped the fission process by slamming the boron control rods into the reactor.

Now, however, operators faced the problem of what to do with the heat in the reactor. The automated system opened a relief valve and thousands of gallons of superheated water from the steam generator were released in an “atmospheric steam dump.”

“It sounds like a train whistle from a steam locomotive,” explained David Lochbaum, nuclear safety expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former consultant to the NRC and Oyster Creek.  “People who live near the plant can hear it, and it looks like a steam blast. You can see it from quite a distance away.”

The steam may contain some radioactive particles which were in the reactor’s water and escaped into the secondary loop through minute cracks in the steam generator’s tubes. But the amount is small and, according to the NRC barely detectable.

“The irony is that the plant routinely vents radioactive gas into the atmosphere,” said Lochbaum, “and if Salem had stayed up and running the amount of radiation released through those pathways is almost always higher – and less dramatic – than anything in the steam vents.”

Oyster Creek faced a different problem. The wind and water knocked out 36 of the 43 Emergency Planning Zone sirens needed to warn the more than 100,000 residents within 10 miles of the site of any major emergency. Then just before 7 PM Monday, officials at Exelon, which owns the plant, declared an “Unusual Event,” the lowest of four levels of nuclear alert, due to high water in the  intake building controlling the plant’s cooling system.  At the same time, the regional grid shut down and the plant had to rely on its diesel generators to keep its safety systems operating.

Oyster Creek is a boiling water reactor, the same type as those at the ill-fated Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. Its spent fuel pool is on top of the reactor and both are in the same containment building. Exelon elevated the plant’s status to the second level “Alert” status as its generators took over efforts to keep the spent fuel pool cooled.

“It was a very quick switchover,” explained NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan. “The system sensed there was a problem with the loss of outside power lines, and switched over to the diesel generators. At the same time, it isolated the containment building and shut off venting valves.

“The problem with the rising water was that if the water got high enough the motors for the large pumps would be knocked out of service. If that occurred, they would have to go to other options, including the use of portable pumps, or connecting to the main fire suppression system using city water to keep the spent fuel pool cool.”

About 150 miles north, the Hudson River was rising rapidly.  There was virtually no rain in the region, an unusual occurrence with a hurricane.  The storm had been expected to dump a foot or more of rain on the region between Manhattan and West Point, and some 400 miles of streams feeding into the Hudson would have added to the storm surge rushing to Indian Point. As it was, a pair of Cougar Military Transport trucks headed for nearby Camp Smith stalled in four feet of river water two miles from the nuclear plants.  Yet the plant’s intake pipes remained clear and dry.

But Sandy’s winds hurled debris into the transformer yard at Indian Point 3, causing one of its main breakers to fail and cut the plant off from the grid. This triggered an immediate shutdown though its sister plant, Indian Point 2, was unaffected and the rising river rolled on by.

The following is a summary of U.S. nuclear power plant performance during Hurricane Sandy:

North Carolina:
Brunswick 1 and 2—continued operating at 100 percent power.

Virginia:
Surry 1 and 2—continued operating at 100 percent power
North Anna 1 and 2—continued operating at 100 percent power.

Maryland:
Calvert Cliffs 1 and 2—continued operating at 100 percent power.

New Jersey:
Oyster Creek—shut down for refueling outage; alert declared Oct. 29 due to high water level at water intake structure
Hope Creek 1—continued operating at 100 percent power
Salem 1—manual safe shut down from 100 percent power on Oct. 30 due to high water level at water intake structure
Salem 2—shut down for refueling outage.

Pennsylvania:
Peach Bottom 2 and 3—continued operating at 100 percent power
Three Mile Island 1—continued operating at 100 percent power
Limerick 1 and 2—safely reduced power from 100 percent to 50 percent and 22 percent respectively on Oct. 30 due to storm effects and at the request of the regional electric grid operator
Beaver Valley 1—continued operating at 100 percent power
Beaver Valley 2—shut down for refueling outage
Susquehanna 1—shut down for turbine inspection
Susquehanna 2—continued operating at 75 percent power.

Ohio:
Perry 1—safely reduced power from 100 percent to 91 percent on Oct. 30 at the request of the regional electric grid operator
Davis-Besse—continued operating at 100 percent power.

New York:
Indian Point 2—continued operating at 100 percent power
Indian Point 3—manual safe shut down from 100 percent power on Oct. 30 due to an electric grid disruption
Ginna—shut down for refueling outage
Fitzpatrick—continued operating at 100 percent power
Nine Mile Point 1—manual safe shut down from 100 percent power on Oct. 29 due to an electric grid disruption
Nine Mile Point 2—continued operating at 100 percent power.

Connecticut:
Millstone 2—shut down for refueling outage
Millstone 3—safely reduced power from 100 percent to 75 percent on Oct. 29 at the request of the electric grid operator.

Massachusetts:
Pilgrim 1—continued operating at 100 percent power.

New Hampshire:
Seabrook 1—shut down for refueling outage, but safely restarted Oct. 30 and is at 20 percent power.

Vermont:
Vermont Yankee—safely reduced power from 100 percent to 90 percent on Oct. 30 at the request of the regional electric grid operator.

Source: Nuclear Energy Institute (  www.NEI.org  )

By Roger Witherspoon

Eleven nuclear power plants in the direct path of Hurricane Sandy – including all four in New Jersey – are on special alert status with additional federal monitors and plans to shut down if the winds or waves exceed safe storm limits.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission dispatched extra monitors this past week end to augment the two full-time resident inspectors at each plant to ensure that proper procedures are followed as the storm roars through the region and its impacts are felt.

“To ensure that lines of communications are maintained, the on-site inspectors are equipped with satellite phones,” said the NRC in a statement this morning. “The NRC will continue to track Hurricane Sandy using the resources of all federal agencies and several weather forecasting services.”

The nuclear plants in the path of the storm receiving added NRC attention are Calvert Cliffs in Lusby, Md.; Salem and Hope Creek, in Hancocks Bridge, N.J.; Oyster Creek, in Lacey Township, N.J.: Peach Bottom, in Delta, Pa.; Three Mile Island 1, in Middletown, Pa.; Susquehanna, in Salem Township, Pa.; Indian Point 1&2 in Buchanan, N.Y.; and Millstone, in Waterford, Conn.

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said in an interview that “all of the plants have criteria where they have to shut down were they to see winds at a certain level or high water past a certain level. And these vary from site to site.

“At Indian Point 2 and 3, the criteria are they have to notify us if there is a hurricane warning with winds in excess of 87 knots, or 100 Miles Per Hour, within 320 miles of the facility, and shut if it is within five nautical miles of the facility.”

Sheehan said  Indian Point would have to declare an “unusual event,” the lowest  alarm level, if  the Hudson River rose 14.5 feet above normal, and an “alert” if it rose more than 15 feet.”

While both Indian Point 2 and 3 are up and running, the picture is different in New Jersey. Salem 1 and Hope Creek are full power while Salem 2 and Oyster Creek are shut for refueling and maintenance.           Joe Delmar, spokesman for PSEG Nuclear, said refueling operations were suspended Sunday at 6 PM and unnecessary workers were sent home.

The criteria for shutting down New Jersey’s plants are lower than those for Indian Point, which is on the Hudson River and sheltered in the Hudson River Valley. “We are required to shut down operations when there are sustained winds of 74 miles per hour for 15 minutes or more,” Delmar said.

“With regards to the Delaware River, we have to shut down if the river reaches 99.5 feet in depth. It is normally 89 feet at high tide, and our design basis is 120 feet, a level that would be reached during a Category 4 hurricane. The Delaware River level at high tide at 11:30 this morning was 93 feet.”

Salem and Indian Point, which use the adjacent rivers to provide billions of gallons of water daily to cool their generating system, also face issues as flood waters recede.

“You can imagine the amount of debris in the river as a result of flooding,” said the NRC’s Sheehan. “At Indian point 3 they had issues with debris that they had to watch for. There were tree trunks, leaves, and other large debris at the intake pipes.”

The plants have procedures to follow in cases of a “station blackout” in which the regional power grid is down and there is no offsite power. “Their first line of defense is their emergency diesels,” said Sheehan, “and they would have topped off all their tanks and tried them as a test to make sure they were ready to go if needed.”

In New Jersey, PSEG has an advantage in that two of the four nuclear plants are currently shut down for refueling. Hope Creek has four diesel generators, and only needs one of them operating to run its safety systems for a week. At Salem 1 & 2, each plant has three diesel generators, and there is enough fuel on hand to serve each generator for a week, said Delmar.  “We have to test diesels on a routine basis.”

By Roger Witherspoon

Robert Aleksick was emphatic.

“FAC is like roaches,” he said, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of exasperation. “Where you see one, there are bound to be more hidden away.”

Aleksick should know about these hidden pests. As president of CSI Technologies, Inc., he is one of the nation’s foremost experts on FACs, or Flow Assisted Corrosion, a condition of degradation on the inside of pipes carrying superheated, radioactive water under high pressure conditions. If undetected, FACs could lead to pipe ruptures and, in a worse case, loss of coolant to a nuclear reactor.

Whether or not technicians at the Indian Point nuclear power plants could spot where those roaches or FACs could be hiding, or predict where they might try to hide over the next 20 years was the subject of an intense dispute at the opening of months of judicial hearings last week. A three judge panel of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, meeting in Tarrytown, is wading through arguments over a dozen challenges to applications from Entergy Nuclear to renew the licenses of its twin plants, Indian Point 2 and 3, for another 20 years. Entergy purchased Indian Point 2 from Consolidated Edison and Indian Point 3 from the New York Power Authority in 2000, and their current 40-year licenses expire in 2013 and 2015, respectively. The board’s findings will be presented to the five members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who can accept or reject their ruling.

The challenges, buttressed by more than 1,400 exhibits, were filed by the New York Attorney General’s office, and the non-profit environmental groups Clearwater and Riverkeeper. New York’s challenges, or contentions, are backed up by Connecticut Attorney General Robert Snook, whose office is also represented at the legal proceeding.

Collectively, the contentions challenge different aspects of Entergy’s plans for ensuring the safe operation of the twin nuclear reactors over the next 20 years and the maintenance of the spent fuel pool for decades after the plants finally retire. Under current NRC rules, the highly radioactive fuel rods could sit at the plant site for a century after the plants shut down, whether or not Entergy, as a company, is still in existence and capable of taking care of them.

The opening arguments presented a sharp contrast between the confidence Entergy has in its approach to long term management of ageing pipes and wiring, and the skepticism the state of New York and the environmental groups have in those monitoring systems.

Aleksick, an expert witness for Entergy, dueled with Joram Hopenfeld, who testified for Riverkeeper and Clearwater that the primary system for predicting and detecting deterioration in the wall thickness in critical pipe systems was flawed. Hopenfeld a specialist in pipe corrosion, who once worked for the NRC, pointed to the results of sonic tests by Entergy showing wall thickness readings of 1.3 inches and .5 inches in a curve in a 1.5-inch thick pipe.

Hopenfeld said the data supplied by Entergy showed that “the tests Entergy is relying on are designed to show overall averages. But the actual sonic tests show there is uneven wear due to FAC and the pipe is not going to hold.”

But Aleksick said the uneven readings were due to lamination, or flaws in the metal, which caused the sonic probe to bounce back prematurely. “When you come across lamination,” Aleksick said, “it will give an erroneous reading. The example here of different thicknesses is due to lamination, not to actual wall thinning.

“I completely reject the assertion that this data set represents huge variations in the thickness and strength of the pipe wall.”

Whenever Entergy’s ultrasound probes find apparent variation, Aleksick explained, the company proceeds with a series of more extensive tests to determine for certain if the pipe wall has been corroded or if the metal has flaws that are similar to the way knots in a tree trunk would mar the symmetry of the wood.

The argument seemed to resonate with Judge Richard Wardwell, who holds a doctorate in civil engineering from ColoradoStateUniversity and has served as Maine’s Chair of the Board of Environmental Protection.

“It seems to me that this is an anomaly,” said Wardwell to Hopenfeld. “I’m thinking that what we heard from Entergy was that they took the data, looked at the anomaly, and they don’t believe that it measures wall thickness. I am struggling to see how you arrive at the different conclusion.”

Undeterred, Hopenfeld asked “supposed you were buying a new piping system for your home, Judge, and the plumbing company said they have this pipe system, but there were anomalies in the  metal pipes wall and the probes could not be relied upon to tell you how they were holding up over time. Would you buy it?”

It was a question which Wardwell, in his capacity as a law judge, could not answer. But the protracted exchange typified the complexity and minutiae facing he and his colleagues – Lawrence McDade, panel chairman and a former Department of Justice attorney specializing in hazardous substances; and Michael Kennedy, who holds a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the University of Virginia, and spent 30 years in the nuclear industry specializing in safety issues associated with light water reactors. McDade made it clear early on that the panel intended to hear all arguments, rather than allow either side to use technicalities to block arguments from their opponents.

As the hearings opened, Clearwater and Riverkeeper sought to withdraw a contention dealing with the negative impact the plants’ once-through cooling system has on the Hudson River’s aquatic environment.  Manna Jo Greene, environmental director for Clearwater, said that after three months of negotiations, they had reached an agreement with Entergy to drop their challenge if the company agreed to monitor radioactive contamination in the water and fish in Haverstraw Bay, on the opposite side of the river from the plants. Currently, the plant monitors radioactivity in the water and  fish upstream and at the plant site itself where the water leaks or is intentionally  discharged.

Indian Point is the state’s largest water user, pulling some 2.5 billion gallons of water daily from the river, nearly double the 1.3 billion gallons used by the nine million residents and visitors to New York City and Westchester County daily. The plants then run the river water through a heat exchanger to cool the steam used to turn its 40-ton, electric generating turbine. The heated water is then returned to the river. In the process, billions of fish are sucked into the plant’s 40-foot-wide intake pipes and killed. The National Marine Fisheries Service stated in an analysis that Indian Point’s massive fish kills are more to blame for declines in commercial fish stocks along the North Atlantic coastal seaboard than overfishing from factory fleets.

Those fish kills are the subject of a separate hearing before the state Department of Environmental Conservation, which has stated it will deny Indian Point a water use permit unless it changes to a closed cycle cooling system, which employs a radiator-like installation to recycle water. That system would drop the amount of water used and fish killed by 95%.

“Our board thought long and hard about this,” said Greene. “But in the end we had to look at what was the most economic thing for us to do. It costs a lot of money to fight Entergy and the state has a significant challenge here covering pretty much all of the issues.”

Riverkeeper president Paul Gallay said his organization needed to “get the biggest bang for their buck” and concurred in the decision to negotiate an agreement on this issue.

Their request, however, was not immediately accepted. Judge McDade to first talk with the town of Cortlandt and get their input. No decision would be made until Cortlandt agreed with the decision. It was a strong signal from the bench that the judicial trio believed the public has a significant stake in the outcome of these proceedings.

            The decision of Clearwater and Riverkeeper to seek a settlement, where possible, was not a total surprise. The NRC has approved the first 70 license renewal requests with no problems and no state opposition. All four of the nuclear plants in New Jersey, for example, were approved within two years because the state supported them.

Norm Cohen, head of the non-profit group, Salem Watch, said “we could not afford to challenge PSEG and Exelon,” the owners and operators of Hope and Oyster Creek, Salem 1 and 2 nuclear power plants.

“We had to limit our role to that of watchdogs.”

By contrast, the New York Attorney General, under Andrew Cuomo, set up an environmental division which has grown to some 28 members and has a budget to hire expert consultants including physicists, mathematicians, meteorologists, and even volcanologists to wade through the technical aspects of nuclear power plant operations. When Eric Schneiderman took over thee office after Cuomo became governor, he expanded the environmental division. As a result, Entergy has been fighting a protracted legal dispute to renew their licenses for more than five years.

A key part of the state’s challenge involves the Severe Accident Mitigation Assessment, a 300-page document in which nuclear plant operators look at the possible impacts stemming from a reactor meltdown and the steps they can take to minimize the damage should that accident occur.

While all nuclear plants have been required to have SAMAs as part of their license, the NRC never examined them in detail before the multiple reactor meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima reactors last year. The NRC found inadequacies in many of them.

At Indian Point, for example, the NRC found that while its reactor building was designed to withstand an earthquake of a magnitude 5.2, its fire equipment was in a concrete building that was not designed to withstand such an earthquake, nor were the water mains coming into the site from the town of Buchanan. As a result, if an earthquake caused a fire at Indian Point, the reactor building could survive, but there might not be any water to put the fire out or any usable equipment to fight a fire with.

In one major contention, the nuclear group in the NY Attorney General’s office, led by John Sipos, found that Entergy’s contention that a meltdown would cost about $403 million per square mile was flawed because:

• The company claimed through its mathematical meteorological models that winds from the east and west cancelled each other out, and winds blowing south to north were so predominant that they only had to consider the impact of radioactive fallout along the upper Hudson River. If so, that would exclude possible contamination of New York City, Connecticut as far east as Hartford; New Jersey south to NewarkAirport; and across the Delaware Water Gap into the Pennsylvania Poconos. New York contends that the winds, in fact, blow in all directions and contamination would impact urban New York City, costing trillions of dollars to clean up.
• Entergy contends that most of the heavy radioactive elements in an escaping radiation cloud would fall out within the first few miles, thus minimizing the extent and cost of the most rigorous cleanup. The Attorney General’s office states that experience from Chernobyl and Fukushima clearly show that that is not true and all of the region would be at risk.

The hearings will continue in Tarrytown this week and then will break until mid November.

By Roger Witherspoon

          Federal regulators, after six months of intensive examination, have found serious deficiencies and violations of law in the security at three of New Jersey’s four nuclear power plants.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors found the deficiencies at the Hope Creek and Salem 1 and 2 reactors operated by PSEG Nuclear following a series of inspections that began in December, 2011, and formally concluded August 27, 2012.

The NRC initially notified PSEG in a Dec. 19, 2011 letter to Thomas Joyce, the firm’s President and Chief Nuclear Officer, of multiple security performance problems at the three-plant site on Artificial Island in the Delaware Bay. That notification began a process in which PSEG was able to explain its actions and appeal the findings. The federal agency then notified the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Environmental Safety and Health of the defective security. DEP then assigned State inspectors to join their NRC counterparts evaluating the security issues at the three nuclear plants.

On Feb. 6, 2012, PSEG explained their security operation at a meeting with federal and state officials. But that meeting did not result in an exoneration of the company’s efforts to protect the plants from sabotage. In a March 20 letter to Joyce, the NRC’s Director of its Division of Security Operations, Patricia Holahan, stated that PSEG’s staff had “failed to conduct an adequate effectiveness review.”

In addition, Holahan presented a formal “Notice of Violation” of federal laws governing security at nuclear installations. The violations, she wrote, would trigger “escalated enforcement action” against the company.

Details of the problems at the nuclear installation are secret, with the public information revealing only the multiple “degraded cornerstones”. But NRC Regional Director William Dean, in a September 4 letter to Joyce, said the plants would be subject to an extensive series of inspections to determine:

• If the company actually understands the “root and contributing causes” of the various security failings.
• If the factors that contributed to the cited violations could have set the stage for other violations which may not yet have been discovered.
• If the corrective actions undertaken by PSEG are sufficient to prevent future failures.

Feeling the Blues

The NRC has a four-color coded system to  rank its plant operations, going from green to white to yellow to red, with green being the best run plant operation and red being the worst.  The agency won’t say what the ranking is for Hope Creek and Salem 1&2, but give the site a “blue” rating, which means there are multiple “degraded cornerstones.”  The blue grade is worse than green, but how much worse is not made public.  The NRC does not readily determine that a condition is seriously degraded, and problems which are potentially serious are still rated as “green” if nothing bad has actually transpired.  In 2007, for example, inspectors at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in New York caught a guard at a restricted access  area sleeping. The plant’s security still rated a “green” finding because no one attacked the plant during the guard’s nap.

The secrecy surrounding security at nuclear installations also prevents the public from knowing precisely what was wrong at Hope Creek or Salem. There are, however, three major areas which are subject to review. These include:

• Force-on-force drills, in which there is a simulated “attack” on the plant by a group of “terrorists.” These exercises have been criticized because the NRC limits the types of weapons to light armaments and the number of terrorists to five, asserting that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by four separate groups, rather than a coordinated strike by 20 men.  Many of these invaders have succeeded in reaching critical areas, even though the plant guards know in advance when the attacks are coming.
• Computer systems, which control much of the operation of the plant and its most critical systems are to be protected from hacker attacks.
• Restricted access: Only specially designated workers at a nuclear plant are allowed to go into certain critical areas, such as the control room.

The failings cited by the NRC may fall into any of those three categories, combinations of two of them, or all three. It is also not publicly revealed if the security issues were systemic and affect each of the three plants equally, or if there were different combinations of security problems at each site.

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said in a statement that “our inspectors have identified a security issue at the site that warrants additional oversight. We don’t go into details of how we arrived at the decision because that could point would-be adversaries to potential vulnerabilities.”

Sheehan said security inspections general evolve from issues uncovered during the force-on-force drills. “Plant owners generally try to have the problems addressed as quickly as possible, and it is up to them to let us know when they are ready for us to come back and examine them again.

“In this case we have done inspections and found that they were not, in fact, ready with corrective actions , and then we had to go back and do another team inspection to determine why.”

Plants generally have one year to bring their facilities into compliance, Sheehan added. That would give PSEG a March, 2013 deadline to pass new security inspections. PSEG declined to comment beyond the written public record.

By Roger Witherspoon

          The Nuclear Regulatory Commission faces a Thursday deadline to challenge a landmark, unanimous decision by a three-judge Appellate Court panel in June which ordered the agency to develop site specific assessments of the environmental impact of meltdowns in the bulging spent fuel pools before extending the licenses of some 30 nuclear power plants.

Immediately after receiving the June 8 decision the NRC asked the court for the time to petition the full 15-member US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to consider the  case.

“There is a process for getting the entire 15-judge panel to look anew at the decision en banc, and you have to file right away to get this,” explained Vermont assistant attorney general Kyle Landis, who successfully argued his state’s case. “The government gets longer to file its motions than others do.           “August 22 will either come or go without them filing anything, or they will file on or before that date.  If they file for the en banc hearing, the whole case would be looked at again by the full panel.

“Everything filed at the DC circuit gets transmitted to the whole panel of judges and then they look at it and write a decision that could be 15-0 or split in any way. Here it was a unanimous ruling and with En Banc you need just a simple majority of eight of the 15 judges. It’s a pretty rare occurrence that a circuit court grants a rehearing en banc. The reason they have three-judge panels is they are much more efficient and they can go through a lot more cases than if they have the whole court hearing them.

“But the process is there and sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they don’t.”

Whether or not the NRC decides to appeal, there is a growing question hanging over the case as to how much of the decision applies to the 71 power plants which have already received 20-year license extensions and have thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel sitting in their pools of water, potentially for hundreds of years.  The NRC’s position is that it only applies to the 33 plants currently seeking license extensions, including the Indian Point plant on the Hudson River between West Point and New York City.

But if the NRC’s interpretation is valid and the agency is allowed to narrowly construe the Court ruling, it would exempt New York’s four Nine Mile Point 1&2; James A. Fitzpatrick, and Ginna nuclear plants; Vermont’s Vermont Yankee; Connecticut’s Millstone 2 & 3; and New Jersey’s Salem 1&2 and Hope and Oyster Creek nuclear plants.  According to the industry’s Nuclear Energy Institute, spent fuel pools in New York hold 3,946 tons of irradiated fuel rods; New Jersey’s hold 2,811 tons; Vermont’s hold 683tons; and Connecticut’s’ hold 2,260 tons.  And each plant adds about 30 tons of high level radioactive waste every 18 months. ( http://bit.ly/PK8UOL    )

The Appellate Court decision vacated the 2010 incarnation of the NRC’s “waste confidence rule,” which held that since there had never been a meltdown and conflagration in an American spent fuel pool – what is known as an exothermic fire – that there was no need to evaluate the possibility that there might be one in the future. As a result, civic groups and states were barred from challenging the safety of spent fuel pools during the relicensing process.

As a result of the ruling, the NRC will have to develop site specific environmental impact assessments of the potential damage to the region caused by an exothermic fire triggered by an accident, natural disaster such as an earthquake, or terrorism.  The Appellate Court panel specifically stated the NRC cannot assume the government will eliminate the potential risk by developing a national repository for the spent fuel.

From a legal perspective, the applicability of the ruling to plants which already have 20-year extensions is complicated by the fact that while the Court vacated the 2010 Waste Confidence Rule – which  incorporated and superseded several previous editions of that regulation – there was no specific ruling on previous versions of the regulation.

And none of the states specifically sought to include its other plants in the decision. The office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman declined to discuss the implications for the state’s other nuclear power plants and said in a statement that “While the actions on long-term, on-site storage of nuclear waste, as well as other many other actions taken by the Attorney General’s Office, offer important benefits for nuclear power plant security nationwide, the Attorney General is currently focused on the pending Indian Point’s relicense proceeding, which is currently before the NRC right now.”

Similarly, Connecticut Assistant Attorney General Robert Snook said only that “we will await and review the NRC’s decision about its next steps before determining what if any further actions are appropriate.”

New Jersey did not have a firm idea as to what should be done when it filed a friend of the court brief to join the suit filed by New York, Vermont, and Connecticut.  The state still doesn’t.

“At this point it’s just wait and see how the court decision plays out,” said Larry Ragonese, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. “We are waiting to see what their response is.  Salem, Hope Creek, and Oyster Creek have all been relicensed. There is nothing for us to do until the NRC takes the next step in response to the court case.”

New Jersey does not plan to ignore the implications for the four nuclear plants within its jurisdiction, he said.  “The purpose was to force the government to come up with a plan as to what they want done with spent nuclear fuel. We want them to come up with a master plan, and based on that, we will respond and take whatever action we need to take.”

Attorneys for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) agreed the decision would be a pyrrhic victory if the case only pertains to the pending license applications. But the issue of whether a decision to invalidate a regulation also covers previous versions of that rule is a complex legal matter which, for now, is not addressed.

“I don’t think it is pyrrhic,” said Geoffrey Fettus of the NRDC. “Our focus is on the environmental analysis that we hope the agency undertakes in the near future and that analysis applies across all the plants with its own site specific permutations.

“When and if the NRC goes forward with complying with the decision and does the environmental impact assessment that it was directed to do by the court they will have to look at nuclear waste, the environmental impact, and the strong possibility there may not be a repository for a period of time or ever. It is our belief that the current method of storage for many of the plants around the country, regardless of when or how they were licensed, of leaving them in densely packed pools will be done away with.

“Will it take years to win this fight? Yes. If a clear eyed environmental analysis is done, removing the spent fuel from pools into on site, hardened storage will be a significant environmental victory. We think that hopefully will be one of the most clear and positive results of doing this analysis.”

Similarly, Sara Darczak of SACE said “We are troubled by the fact that the NRC is saying that this decision pertains only to the existing, current licensing proceedings. We are involved in several of those as a public advocacy group. And when you look at the way high level radioactive waste has been dealt with nationally for years, the public was not allowed to bring up the questions that most of the pubic are concerned about. The NRC knows there is something wrong with nuclear waste, and those people were never allowed to talk about that.

“We are doing legal research to find out possible next steps. But the policy in this nation is to build more reactors to generate more waste when we don’t know what to do with it”

By Roger Witherspoon

          In an unprecedented move, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has bowed to a court order  and imposed a temporary halt in relicensing nuclear power plants until it thoroughly examines the impact of runaway meltdowns at the plants’ spent fuel pools.

That action affects the relicensing evaluations of some 33 facilities at 19 sites, including Indian Point 2 and 3 on the Hudson River opposite Bear Mountain.  And it leaves in limbo preliminary applications for new plants, including site reviews for possible new plants at New Jersey PSEG’s Hope Creek and Salem nuclear plant sites.

But while definitely halting the granting of new licenses, the Commissioners are continuing their review process and have put on hold all new challenges by state officials and civic groups that are based on the Appellate Court ruling.  And the validity of some 70 license extension granted over the past decade under the discredited rules was not addressed and is still not clear.

“I’m not surprised that they did that,” said Geoffrey Fettus, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “They acted in response to the significant amount of contentions that had been filed against plant relicenses around the country. If the NRC is going to have any coherence to the licensing process as they go forward, they have to put things in abeyance while they decide what to do.

“We need to see how the Commission is going to proceed. But at this point, they said ‘Everybody stop! Hands up while we figure out what we are going to do.’ So stay tuned.”

The unanimous decision by the NRC’s five commissioners is their first response to a decision by the US Court of Appeals in June which backed a challenge (  http://bit.ly/OQ0V1q  ) to the agency’s rule that high level nuclear waste could be stored indefinitely  at reactor sites 60 or more years after the plants shut down.  The agency’s temporary storage regulation, developed in 1990, updated repeatedly over the years and finalized in its current form Dec. 23, 2010, is formally known as the Waste Confidence Rule. It doubled the amount of time spent nuclear fuel rods can be stored onsite from the previous limit of 30 years. And the NRC is currently considering doubling that limit again to 120 years after the plant has closed.  That would be on top of the 25 years the NRC is allowing plants to sit idle after they shut down to give the underfunded decommissioning funds a chance to accumulate enough money to cover the costs of cleaning up the nuclear site.

If the rule had been allowed to stand, the spent fuel at the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station for example, which is due to close in 10 years, could be kept onsite until at least 2070 and possibly until 2130. The Salem nuclear plants, whose operating licenses were extended 20 years and may be extended another 20, could conceivably have high level radioactive waste onsite till nearly the end of the next century. There is, of course, no way to know if the plant operators will still be in existence a century and a half from now to begin the process of cleaning up the site.

The suit was brought in February by the attorneys general of New York, Connecticut and Vermont – with New Jersey signing on about a month later – the Prairie Island Indian Community, and a coalition of 24 environmental groups led by the NRDC and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE).

At issue is one of the most dangerous aspects of nuclear power operation – the possibility of a Chernobyl-like fuel fire spewing a continuous cloud of radioactive debris into the atmosphere. The plants’ reactors contain about 100 tons of uranium, packaged in 12-foot-long fuel rods, and offload about a third of this “spent fuel” during refueling shut downs every 18 to 24 months. The spent fuel is a high level mix of radioactive material, including plutonium, uranium, cesium, and iodine.

Over the years, thousands of tons of spent fuel have been stored in 40-foot-deep pools, which have concrete walls about five to six feet thick and a sliding entrance-way, at each individual power plant. That does not make them invulnerable. An NRC study of spent fuel pool risk, released in October, 2000, (  http://bit.ly/eGn23T  ) stated that of all the currently flying commercial jet aircraft, “1 of 2 aircrafts is large enough to penetrate the 5-foot-thick reinforced concrete wall…. It is further estimated that 1 of 2 crashes damage the spent fuel pool enough to uncover the stored fuel.”

That would result in uncontrolled fission and a nuclear fuel fire, which would spread radiation and cause up to 25,000 deaths within a 500 mile radius, according to the NRC’s study. The U.S. Government was supposed to take charge of the nation’s spent fuel by 2010, but the planned repository at YuccaMountain in Nevada has been stalled indefinitely. As a result, nuclear operators have been moving their oldest spent fuel into 100-ton dry casks, which sit on football-field sized pads in the open.

In addition, most of the nation’s nuclear power plants have leaked radioactive liquid into the surrounding environment, either from the ageing spent fuel pools or the miles of underground pipes serving the pools and the reactors.  The NRC saw no reason to examine how these may age over the coming decades.

The NRC had taken the position that since there had never been a meltdown in an American spent fuel facility, there was no need to assume that there could be and no need to examine the possible impacts of a fuel fire as part of the relicensing process. Their rule also stated that the US government would find a national repository at some point in the future and there was no need to plan for a crisis.

“Their analysis has always assumed there will be a national repository and we don’t have to think about that long term picture,” said Monica Wagner, Deputy Bureau Chief of the NY Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Bureau.

Wagner, who argued the case for New York before the three-judge Appellate panel, said the ruling, that the NRC violated the National Environmental Policy Act, “wasn’t a surprise to us.

“We were basing our argument on the NRC’s own analysis of leaks that had occurred at Indian Point and other nuclear facilities. The NRC said there have been a number of leaks in the past, we found they haven’t had significant impacts on public health and therefore there won’t be significant impacts in the future. The court absolutely agreed with us. You can’t say that past leaks haven’t had impacts on public health and from that you can assume that future leaks won’t’ have impacts on public health.”

The Court flatly rejected the NRC’s reasoning, declaring “In concluding that permanent storage will be available ‘when necessary,’ the Commission did not calculate the environmental effects of failing to secure permanent storage – a possibility that cannot be ignored.

“Secondly, in determining that spent fuel can safely be stored on site at nuclear plants for 60 years after the expiration of a plant’s license, the Commission failed to properly examine future dangers and key consequences.”

The impact of the Court’s ruling on pending licenses is still to be determined. Following the Commissioners’ action, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which had been hearing challenges to the Indian Point license renewal, issued a statement putting all pending challenges related to the spent fuel pool on hold.

SACE attorney Diane Curran said in a statement that “This Commission decision halts all final licensing decisions – but not the licensing proceedings themselves – until NRC completes a thorough study of the environmental impacts of storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel.  That study should have been done years ago, but NRC just kept kicking the can down the road.

“When the Federal Appeals Court ordered NRC to stop and consider the impacts of generating spent nuclear fuel for which it has found no safe means of disposal, the agency could choose to appeal the decision by August 22nd or choose to do the serious work of analyzing the environmental impacts over the next few years.  With today’s Commission decision, we are hopeful that the agency will undertake the serious work.”

While the Appellate Court made it clear that the NRC had to develop site specific environmental assessments for any new licenses, it is not clear what impact there will be on licenses that are already granted while the now rejected rule was in effect.

Former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford, now at the Vermont Law School, said if a state were to ask the federal courts to reopen the licenses of plants such as Salem and Hope and Oyster Creek – which received new, 20-year extensions during the last two years – “it would not be a frivolous challenge. The industry will argue that until the court decision, the NRC’s Waste Confidence framework was valid. And, therefore, the actions that it took using the Waste Confidence policy were sufficient.

“On the other hand, people take the view that it is a simplistic defense and an updated form of the Waste Confidence Rule is not valid and, therefor, every action they took under that umbrella is vitiated.  I don’t know how the courts are going to sort that one out.”

In New Jersey, Environment Protection Commissioner Bob Martin was quick to comment when the decision was announced. “This is an important victory for the people of New Jersey,” Martin said in a statement ,”on an issue that has significant public health and safety implications and also  the potential to negatively impact the state’s environment.”

But the Christie Administration has been silent since then on any plans to force the NRC to conduct a long term assessment of its ageing spent fuel pools, which have already leaked.
NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said   “our view is that the licenses that have been completed are done. They are finalized. This court decision affects only the pending applications.”

By Roger Witherspoon

Operators of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant have been granted a year’s delay in their required emergency drill inSouth Jerseybecause their state emergency counterparts are still occupied with the aftermath of a summer hurricane and an early fall snowstorm.

Michael Pacilio, president of Exelon Nuclear, which operates the plant, was notified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the exercise originally scheduled for Sept. 27, 2011 could be postponed until the end of June, 2012.  By then, state andOceanCountyemergency offices should be finished cleaning up after real disasters and able to concentrate on simulated safety efforts.

But the postponement raises questions bout the legitimacy of emergency drills which are only conducted when conditions and personnel staffing are optimal.  Emergency planning in New York Cityprior to the 9/11/01 attacks, in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina, and at Fukushima Daiichi prior to the earthquake and tsunami all failed to take into account the impact of multiple emergencies either in proximity or simultaneously.

            The nuclear emergency drills test the cooperation between plant officials and state and local emergency operators and their ability to evacuate thousands of people from regions threatened by spreading radiation. Federal law requires drills involving plant and community emergency organizations every two years at each of the nation’s 104 commercial reactors. These are observed and graded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The NRC observes and grades separate drills of internal plant safety systems. Oyster Creek, which had its last monitored, public safety drill October 6, 2009, was required to hold a drill before the end of calendar 2011.

John Lamb, of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, noted in his letter to Pacilio that “Hurricane Irene passed through New Jersey on August 28, 2011, causing widespread damage and flooding in the surrounding area, and that the event required the response of the NJ State Office of Emergency Management, the Ocean County Office of Emergency Management, and the Division of State Police…

“New Jersey OEM has indicated that it is not feasible to reschedule the specific offsite functions that remain to be exercised prior to the end of calendar year 2011.”

In granting the stay, the NRC noted that Oyster Creek personnel have not been idle, and portions of the emergency plan, encompassing a 10-mile zone around the nuclear plant, have been reviewed with local emergency organizations.  Since the 2009 exercise, Lamb wrote, Oyster Creek “has conducted 16 training drills/ exercises/ demonstrations and 32 training sessions that have involved interface with State and local authorities.

“These drills and training sessions did not exercise all of the proposed rescheduled offsite functions, but they do support the licensee’s assertion that it has a continuing level of engagement with the State and local authorities.”

The 2009 exercise did not go smoothly. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which oversees the drills and grades them, gave Exelon a failing grade because during the simulated emergency, several municipalities were not notified of the release of radiation and the need to evacuate or shelter their residents. A remedial drill was held in January, 2010.

These types of drills were considered routine prior to the terrorist attacks in September, 2001. They are not, however, full scale drills: towns or neighborhoods are not evacuated the way public schools are totally emptied during their periodic fire drills. Instead, these “table top drills” use symbolic stand-ins which may not always be appropriate.

           New York City’s drills, for example, had one fireman go from his fire house to a specific location when the “emergency” sounded, and his presence represented the successful, complete relocation of several companies, their equipment and communications.

In fact, the post-9/11 study conducted for the city by McKinsey & Company, and the 2004 study conducted by the national 9/11 Commission found that when theWorldTradeCenterwas struck, fire companies acted on their own, with no coordination, and established multiple, rump, uncoordinated “command posts” downtown. There was no radio coordination between the police and fire departments – which was not an issue in the drills involving one lone policeman and one lone fireman. As a result, the police heard the order to evacuate the unstable towers but the firemen did not.

9/11-Commission member and former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, Jr., excoriated former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, and Police Chief Bernard Kerick in  a public hearing in May, 2004, stating that their drills and resulting emergency plan “it’s not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city.”

Hospitals throughout theNew Orleansarea had held many drills simulating evacuation patients in an emergency. But these called for hospitals or nursing homes to disperse their patients among surrounding facilities. When the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina and the region was inundated, there was nowhere for some of the hospitals’ and nursing home patients to go, with tragic drowning deaths resulting. None of the drills had envisioned the need for multiple evacuations.

More recently the same lack of foresight played out in Japan last spring. The six nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi had backup diesel generators in case their external power lines were down. But these had two or three days’ supply of fuel. It was assumed that extra fuel could always be delivered, and that with six nuclear plants at the site, a single stricken facility could always tap the resources of the others.

            The nuclear complex was helpless when the roads were destroyed by the tsunami and earthquake and all the power plants were cut off.  Hearings in Congress last spring on similarities between the Japanese and American plants’ preparedness revealed that it has long been considered impossible for multiple nuclear plants on the same site – like Salem1 and 2 and Hope Creek– to all have emergencies at the same time. During the past 40 years of commercial nuclear power in America there have been no drills simulating simultaneous nuclear plant meltdowns.

Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC, said the Japanese experience of multiple calamities was not lost on the regulatory agencies planners.

“The point has been raised at the Commission of the need to add more realism to the exercises,” Sheehan said. “The Commissioners acknowledge the need to look atJapanfor some lessons learned and decide if there is a need over the long term for planning changes that take those factors into account.”

Mary Goepfert, spokeswoman for the state Office of Emergency Management, saidNew Jerseyofficials are not sitting idly by and leaving testing up to federal regulators. “The NRC and FEMA require drills they review every other year,” Ms. Goepfert explained, “but inNew Jerseywe run an exercise every year and we do an evaluation to the same standards.

“With Hurricane Irene, the question was how many counties to evacuate. With Oyster Creek, the issue is north and south, or east and west – which way is the wind blowing and what communities might be in the path of radiation.”

Goepfert said the sate has its own experts in the state bureau of Nuclear engineering as well as its own weather forecasting capabilities. “We are not just dependent on information from the plant or federal officials,” she said. “We look at what is the weather and how might it change; what are the conditions of the roads and what roads might not be usable. We will look at hazardous conditions where multiple failures can happen.”

Some independent experts state that while it is important to test how well emergency agencies could operate when their resources are stretched thin, it would be a mistake to hold an Oyster Creek emergency drill at this time.

“You drill to a plan,” said Kenneth Mallette, vice president for the Northeast Region of James Lee Witt Associates. “You don’t just wing it and see what happens. The nuclear industry is taking a look atFukushimaand saying we are going to have to plan for these catastrophic events. And it comes down to staffing – the same people who do the day-to-day emergency issues at the county and local levels are doing double duty now because of actual events.

“So you would have to plan an exercise to ask what do we need when there is not optimum staffing and optimum conditions?  You need plans for when we are short handed to learn how we can react when we have a hurricane and a snowstorm and an accident at the power plant at the same time. In reality, these things could happen and you could be short handed, so how do you handle that as a state agency?”

Mallette, was chief of the emergency management bureau for the NJ Sate Police until his retirement in 2007, said there are residents of Passaic County who are still out of their homes due to flooding and infrastructure damage caused by Hurricane Irene last August. Correcting that problem is still a state priority. But even the best of plans can get surprised.

“What happens when you have a snow storm in October?” he asked. “If you look at risk analysis, nobody thought of snow in the middle of October, and we never thought of what wet snow would do when leaves were on the trees. We look at snow in the middle of winter when the leaves are gone.

“So planners are now going back and saying how do we deal with that? We in the public sector are often exercising to tell everybody how good we are – and that doesn’t do anybody any good. In this case, there is a whole process in New Jersey behind the exercise program. The planning is a living process that is always changing and never stays the same because if it does stay the same, that plan would be doomed to failure.

“Emergency plans are living documents; it is not a stagnant process. You find the gaps and try to fill them and make sure you continue to do things correctly. There is no doubt that the state is going to do that when it comes to radiological planning for their nuclear power plants.”

By Roger Witherspoon

            “…EPA’s insupportable assumption that screening technologies are available at nuclear facilities, threaten the viability of existing plants and their daily contribution to cost-effective electricity….”

Brief, Entergy Corp v US EPA

2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals

July 5, 2005

            For much of the last decade Entergy Nuclear, the owners of the twin Indian Point reactors in New York, have battled environmental regulators from the state and federal government over the continued use of enormous volumes of Hudson River water to quench its power systems. Their federal court suit, joined by a coalition of environmental organizations and New Jersey, New York, and four other states, culminated in a 2009 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding their contention that wedge wire systems were not designed for nuclear power plants and could not meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act. (  http://www.rogerwitherspoon.com/docs/entergybriefentergyvepa1-07.pdf   ).

The High Court also agreed with Entergy’s position that federal regulators could use cost benefit analysis to determine the most effective and reasonable means of ordering compliance with environmental laws, even though that sort of calculus could short change non-commercial aquatic life.

Now it’s time for a full reversal.

On Monday, Entergy began four months of hearings before New York State Administrative Law Judges in an effort to prove that wedge wire systems installed in front of its nuclear plans would nearly eliminate the annual destruction of some two million juvenile and adult fish and some 300 billion hatchlings and baby fish. If the judges agree, Entergy could avoid having to retrofit the plants with an expensive closed cycle cooling system, which functions like the recirculating radiator on an automobile, but on a massive industrial scale.  Such systems range in cost from about $400 million for a mechanical draft which resembles a four story warehouse, to a massive, 150-foot-tall cooling tower costing a projected $1.5 billion.

At stake is the continued operation of the power plants which provide about 5% of the electricity used daily in New York City and adjacent Westchester County. For without the permit from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to take water from and discharge it back into the Hudson River, the plants cannot operate regardless of whether their contested licenses are renewed by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Phillip Musegaas, program director for the environmental group Riverkeeper – which was also involved in the 2005 suit against the EPA – said “we do not believe wedge wire is a viable solution. It’s a fact that wedge wire screens have never been used at a nuclear power plant of this size, and we do not believe Entergy has made its case that wedge wire will work at Indian Point.

“And wedge wire screens do not address the thermal discharge issue (  http://bit.ly/nEvEGO ). They are not an effective substitute for closed cycle cooling.”

The thermal pollution from heat dumped into the waterways by power plants using once through cooling is tremendous, particularly at nuclear sites. The thermal discharge at PSEG’s, coal powered, Mercer Generating Station in Hamilton, NJ, for example, dumps about 1.5 billion BTUs of heat into the waterway, according to company records.  The nuclear power plants at Indian Point and Salem however, dump about 30 billion BTUS of heat hourly into their local waterways. That is the equivalent of the heat which would be generated by exploding a nuclear bomb, the size of the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima, in the waters of the Hudson River and Barnegat Bay every two hours, all day, every day. It is one reason by the environmental regulators in both states are pushing for closed cycle cooling systems.

Indian Point is confronting the same issue which resulted in the agreement between the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and Exelon Corp., owners of the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station, to shut down the facility on Dec. 31, 2019. The agreement, worked out by Gov. Chris Christie, was formally ratified by the NRC last week. Edward Miller, project manager in the NRC’s plant licensing branch, stated in a letter to Exelon President Michael Pacillio that “we will continue to verify the safe operation of the plant via the planned oversight” and factor into the review programs to end the operations.

Oyster Creek is the first of nine power plants in New Jersey which are being targeted by state environmental regulators which kill an estimated nine million fish in their cooling systems. New Jersey’s efforts to force compliance involve four plant sites operated by PSEG – ranging from the twin reactors at the Salem Nuclear Generating Station, which use 3 billion gallons of water daily, to the Sewaren natural gas plant using 540 million gallons daily; as well as plants operated by Exelon, RC Cape May Holdings, and Calpine.

In New York, environmental regulators are going after 40 power plants, (  http://www.rogerwitherspoon.com/viewer/vwnukegrphc14.html   ) including Indian Point, which kill some $20 billion juvenile and mature fish annually in waterways around the state (  http://www.rogerwitherspoon.com/viewer/vwnukegrphc15.html  ).  But the biggest impacts are created by the  gauntlet of power plants along the Long Island Sound and the lower Hudson River which kill fish by the billions as they migrate up to 200 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to spawning sites along the Hudson River.

The scale of the destruction can be seen in the NRC’s environmental assessment of the twin Indian Point nuclear plants in Buchanan, 30 miles north of Manhattanin the heart of the Hudson Rivertidal estuary. In determining that the overall impact on essential fish habitat is “small to moderate” the agency noted approvingly that  new screens installed in front of the 40-foot-wide intake pipes in 1984 had reduced the destruction of baby fish between 1984 and 1991 by 187 Billion  per year to its present rate of just 300 Billion newly hatched fish  (  http://www.rogerwitherspoon.com/docs/nrc-finalipieis-part2-12-10.pdf   ).

The National Marine Fisheries Service, responding to the NRC’s environmental analysis of Indian Point, (   http://www.rogerwitherspoon.com/docs/nmfs-eisfor1p23-10-10.pdf   )  found  that the “once through cooling systems” are vacuuming up trillions of newly hatched fish – those under a half inches in length – and destroying them in their heat exchangers. The NMFS directly challenged the finding by the NRC that the damage to the aquatic environment is  “moderate”, and asserted there is  “strong evidence” that the decline in  fish stocks along the entire northeast Atlantic seaboard is due more to the destruction of baby fish than to over fishing of adults.

“The NMFS does not reach all of the same conclusions as the NRC with respect to adverse effects that relicensing IP2 and IP3 would have on the fishery resources and their habitats,”  Peter Colosi, the agency’s assistant northeast regional administrator, wrote in an acerbic analysis of the impacts of theHudson Rivernuclear plants.

“Given the immense natural productive potential of the Hudson River Estuary,” Colosi continued, “and taking consideration the staggering numbers of organisms that are lost directly, indirectly, and cumulatively through continued operation of electric generating stations that continue to use once-through cooling techno logy in the Mid-Hudson, the NMFS suggests that the current Indian Point relicensing process is an appropriate and opportune time to apply the Clean Water Act.”

The hearings challenging New York’s attempt to force Entergy to build a closed cycle cooling system as a prerequisite to getting a discharge permit are scheduled to run through February in the agency’s Albany offices. The daily hearings will cover several controversial subject areas, including the wedge wire from Monday through Nov. 8; radioactive materials in the environment from November 14 through December 9; and, and protection of endangered species from December 12 through December 16. Hearings are tentatively scheduled to run through Feb. 24, covering these and other items as needed.

By Roger Witherspoon 

            Killing the chickens was the worst.

By Roger Witherspoon

            The Nuclear Regulatory Commission may force the nation’s nuclear power plants to reevaluate their earthquake detection and safety systems and the manner in which they calculate their resistance to earthquakes as a result of unexpected damage to American and foreign reactor complexes caused by recent earthquakes.

The agency has been studying the need to upgrade earthquake protections and evaluations since 2005, in partial recognition of the inadequacy of nuclear plant designs based on the fledgling science of seismology in the 1950s and early 1960s. But the extensive damage to the six-reactor  Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan, and unexpected damage to the twin North Anna nuclear power plants in Virginia caused by the August 23 earthquake has given new impetus to the NRC’s ongoing work. Though the damage to the North Anna Units 1 & 2, about 40 southeast of Richmond,  are considered minor, the plants remain shut pending a special inspection ordered by Victor McCree, director of Region II, which encompasses southern nuclear operations and the construction of any new reactors anywhere in the country.

The decision to send a formal Augmented Inspection Team followed the notification by Dominion Power, which owns and operates the North Anna plants that the ground motion of the Virginia earthquake, measured at 5.8 in magnitude, “may have exceeded the ground motion for which it was designed.”

All of the nation’s nuclear power plants, which were designed in the 1950s and 1960s, were supposed to be able to handle the acceleration of the ground motion and shaking associated with the largest historically recorded earthquake within a 50 mile radius of the site. For North Anna, a ground motion of .12 of normal gravity is the “design basis” incorporated into the plant’s license. That was based on an earthquake of a magnitude 4.8, and the plant was designed to withstand the gravitational tug resulting from an earthquake of 5.1 in magnitude.

McCree said in a statement that “the AIT provides us with the resources needed to completely understand all of the effects at North Anna and gather important information for the NRC’s continuing evaluation of earthquake risk at all U.S. nuclear plants.”

While the major safety and structural systems at North Anna are apparently undamaged, the transformer providing off site power failed, causing an immediate “station blackout” and shutdown. The plant’s diesel generators kept the reactors and spent fuel pools cool until off site power was restored.

“Not only are the operating reactors getting special attention,” said NRC spokesman Roger Hannah, “but we are also looking at the spent fuel pools and the dry cask storage area, where 25 of the 27 casks moved slightly during the earthquake. They weigh 100 tons or so when fully loaded, and it would take significant movement of the earth for them to fall over. But they moved from a half inch to 4.5 inches on their pad.”

It had been thought that the massive concrete and steel dry casks would be impervious to any eastern earthquakes.  In this case, said Hannah, none of the casks appear to have been breached.

A Shaky Infrastructure

            But on Thursday, the regulatory agency signaled its intention to issue a “generic letter” to all 104 nuclear power plants requesting  a new evaluation of the manner in which earthquakes were analyzed and incorporated into their designs, and what steps, if any, may be needed to strengthen the plants and their support systems. A special inspection of all the nation’s nuclear plants after the  meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plants this spring discovered that  while most plants should be able to withstand known levels of  regional earthquakes, their support systems were not protected. In many cases, should an earthquake trigger a fire, the buildings on plant sites housing firefighting equipment, and the water mains from the municipal water systems were not designed to meet any earthquake standards and could be wrecked in a severe earthquake.

   In addition, all nuclear plants have miles of underground pipes and conduits – many of these encased in concrete and inaccessible to inspections. Virtually all of the ageing plants have leaked radioactive water into the surrounding environment, primarily through these underground systems, or deteriorated spent fuel pools. New York’s Indian Point plants have continuously leaked into what amounts to a radioactive lake under the plants, about 25 miles north of New York City, which is steadily seeping into the Hudson River.

In New Jersey, the twin Salem nuclear plants in Lower Alloways Creek Township have leaked radioactive water into catch basins flowing into the Delaware River, and the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, in Lacey Township, is still cleaning up a radioactive leak in 2002 that contaminated Barnegat Bay.

The major problem with the earthquake-proof designs of current operating reactors is that the basis for their calculations was wrong.

“All of these numbers were derived in the late 60s,” said Lyn Sykes,  Higgins Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Science at the Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. “At that time, they didn’t have recordings of earthquakes from the eastern and central part of the US, so they used western earthquakes as models.

“The difference is that for a given sized earthquake, like the last one at 5.8, earthquakes in the east are felt out to a much larger distance.  In California, with softer ground, an earthquake is not felt out to a large distance and damage doesn’t occur out to a large distance. And that does call into question the reliability of their standards.”

Last week’s earthquake, Sykes said, was larger than the design basis for Salem 1&2, Hope and Oyster Creek nuclear plants in New Jersey, and Indian Point 2 & 3 in New York. “For the basis of their designs,” said Sykes, “they used the 1884 earthquake off Sandy Hook near the mouth of New York Harbor, near Coney Island – which gave the quake its name. That quake was about 5.25 in magnitude.”

In that case, he said, the energy associated with last week’s 5.8-magnitude earthquake would be about five times the design basis for these nuclear facilities.

As a percentage of gravitational forces, the design basis  used in the construction is 0.15 G for Indian Point; 0.184 for Oyster Creek; and 0.20 for Hope Creek and Salem 1&2. The difference in their design requirements is based on the solidity of the rocks they are built on.

Building on Jello

            Jon Armbruster a geophysicist at the Earth Institute and co-author with Sykes of an analysis of earthquakes over the last 300 years from Philadelphia to New York, “When they designed these plants, they chose an earthquake and the design basis figure represented how strongly the 1884 quake was felt in the area. There were two other quakes of that magnitude, in 1737 and 1783, and they were felt from Maine to Virginia and caused some chimneys to fall down. The 1884 quake also caused a railway embankment in Peekskill to slump into the river.

In Virginia, the largest earthquake ever recorded was a magnitude 4.8. In the New York City area we have some 300 to 400-year histories and the largest earthquakes known were of a magnitude 5 or 5.3 I don’t think they have been allowing a large enough margin of uncertainty to have planned for a magnitude 5.8.

“What we have learned is that earthquakes around here can occur at a pretty shallow depth. In California, a shallow depth is one or two miles. I’ve been to places around here where earthquakes are not more than 100 meters from the surface. In 1994 there was a magnitude 4.5 earthquake near Redding, Pa., and as closely as we could measure, it was centered 100 yards below the surface. “

            When these five regional nuclear power plants were designed, Armbruster added, it was not known that earthquakes could be generated at shallow depths and designers utilized what little data was available from California and other western earthquakes in their planning.  “The difference between a California quake and one here was not clearly known back then. Now it is known and quantified that the shaking around here is quite different.

“The nuclear plants in southern New Jersey are not built on actual solid rock, though it is on pretty strong material. To an extent, that reduces the shaking. Each reactor design is different and has its peculiarities of design that need to be individually analyzed in a seismic hazard study.

“It’s like building on jello. If you put the apartment building on jello and you shake the bowl, the jello quivers and the apartment building shakes a lot.  To be safe in the earth equivalent of jello you would have to build your nuclear power plant in what amounts to a concrete boat, so it could essentially float when the jello shook and be strong enough to remain standing.”

Jim Norville, a spokesman for Dominion, said the company’s engineers and the NRC inspectors are seeking greater understanding of the differences between east and west coast earthquakes and its implications for the plants critical systems.

We found no significant damage,” he said. But we want a better understanding of why the units shut down.”

So does the NRC. Spokeswoman Diane Screnci said the agency is seeking public comment on a proposed “generic Letter” to plant operators on a review of seismic hazards and design techniques. A generic letter does not carry the weight of an order. Plant managers can dismiss its recommendations by declaring that it is not applicable to their particular operation. But the letter could be turned into an order if there is significant public demand for during the comment period, which is open until October 31. The response from the North Anna inspection and the public input on the generic latter may determine if the NRC mandates retrofitted improvements on existing critical buildings and systems.

Roger Witherspoon writes Energy Matters at www.RogerWitherspoon.com

By Roger Witherspoon

All six nuclear reactors in the New York/ New Jersey metropolitan area are operating “in a manner that preserved public health and safety” and therefore will receive the minimal oversight during the coming year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission declared in its annual assessment.

In separate reviews, the NRC concluded that New Jersey’s Hope Creek, Oyster Creek, and twin Salem Generating Station plants and the two Indian Point plants on the Hudson River just south of  West Point “met all cornerstone objectives.” Those assessments put all of the region’s nuclear energy sites among the top echelon of safely operated plants among the 104 reactors in the nation’s nuclear fleet.

But the assessment comes amid growing challenges by civic groups, state, and federal agencies to the operation of some of these plants and the NRC’s reactor oversight process. In addition, the ongoing, metastasizing nuclear disaster in Japan affecting six, American-made, nuclear reactor complexes has raised doubts about the assurances of safety from the industry and regulators that such a catastrophe could not happen here.

“The NRC has already relicensed 62 of the nation’s 104 reactors,” said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists during one of the daily briefings on the implications of the meltdowns in the Fukushima nuclear complex. “And because of that, it is very difficult for the NRC to impose new standards because they have already approved more than half the plants in the United States and that inertia pretty much makes them stay the course.

“Otherwise, there is an indication that they may have been wrong in the past. The agency hates, more than anything in the world, to suggest that it might have been wrong in the past.  So they would rather continue down the wrong path than admit that they were on the wrong path in the first place.”

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in September, 2001, the NRC began a review of safety systems and security issues which might protect critical plant operations in the event of an assault or natural disaster. But the recommendations were not produced until 2003, and these were voluntary. Rather than spend the money to upgrade, the recommendations were widely ignored, and the NRC turned them in to formal rules in 2009. These improvements included requirements for spare backup diesel generators and batteries to provide power in the event of a station blackout.

But according to the NRC, 62 nuclear plant operators applied for, and received exemptions to the regulations so they did not have to spend the money – including all six regional nuclear power plants. And even if spare generators and batteries are available, the spent fuel pools are only designed to run off power from the grid – they cannot use the spares.

That is of particular concern because the spent fuel pools hold more radioactive material than the operating reactors and, if the water drains, would produce more radioactive fallout. In addition, the spent fuel pools in pressurized water reactors such as Indian Point are in warehouse-type structures rather than concrete containment buildings.

The Pinocchio Effect

When informed at a press conference that officials from Entergy are claiming that the backup systems at Indian Point would prevent their spent fuel pools from overheating Lochbaum retorted: “Have you ever seen the movie Pinocchio? Because that’s a bald-faced lie. They should know better than to say that because it happened at Indian Point in August, 1999.  They had a problem that caused them to be disconnected from the electrical grid. The batteries lasted for seven hours, and then they were depleted.

“Since lightning already struck at Indian Point, it seems a little bit foolhardy for people to claim it will never happen again. And the NRC fined them $210,000 for bad maintenance. I doubt that they could have forgotten such a bad event in their history so quickly.”

In the wake of the Japanese drama, assurances that the plant’s operation and the NRC’s Reactor Oversight Process are effective have been questioned – especially in New Jersey where the twin, General Electric,  boiling water reactors at Salem are identical to those melting down in the Fukushima nuclear complex. In New Jersey, questions have been raised from the State House to the court house.

Governor Christie appointed a Nuclear Review Task Force last week to assess the operations and emergency plans for the four reactors based in the state.  The Task Force is comprised of the heads of the State Police, State Office of Homeland Security, State Board of Public Utilities, and Department of Environmental Protection. They will be assisted by the plant operators, but will have no input from nuclear critics or watchdog groups.

Norm Cohen, head of the civic UNPLUG Salem group, said “There appears to have been no effort or thought in bringing in experts from outside of the state to provide an unbiased review of safety issues at our four aging and vulnerable nuclear plants. We also suggest that the panel hold public hearings at each nuclear site. If not, then this panel will just be a waste of taxpayer dollars.”

Larry Ragonese, spokesman for New Jersey’s environmental agency, said the exclusion of critics in the task force did not mean that its work would be biased in favor of the nuclear industry.

“Of course the operators from PSEG and Exelon are going to have to participate,” Ragonese said. “It’s their plant. We don’t have carte blanche to go into their buildings. But we will have our emergency experts and the nuclear engineers on our staff involved.

“We are not going in there just to hear them tell us everything is fine. If you are foolish enough or pompous enough to think that you can’t learn lessons from what is happening in Japan then you are at fault. We are going out there with a complete open mind. We believe we have safeguards in place in case of an emergency, but we will take one more look.”

The US Court of Appeals in Philadelphia would like another look as well. The Court was hearing a suit filed by the New Jersey Environmental Federation challenging the NRC’s decision to grant a 20 year license renewal to the Oyster Creek Generating Station.

Federation Chair Janet Tauro said “We have been battling them for five years over the relicensing. It is a GE, boiling water reactor such as you see at Fukushima, and the dry well, the containment that surrounds the reactor, is severely corroded. We were troubled that that corrosion did not raise a red flag with the NRC. Exelon failed to prove that the dry well could last another 20 years.

“Keep in mind that there are over 700 metric tons of highly radioactive fuel rods in the spent fuel pool that sits right above it.”

They lost before the NRC, and took their case to federal court. Kevin Pflug of the Eastern Environmental Law Center, the Federation’s attorney, said the group argued that the NRC acted “capriciously” to throw out objections to the license or thoroughly examine the issue of metal fatigue in the containment surrounding the ageing reactor.

“It’s a high burden to show that they acted capriciously”’ Pflug said.  “They normally defer to regulatory agencies.”

But in a surprise move the three-judge appellate court panel, on its own initiative, issued an order March 21 that the NRC “advise the Court what impact, if any, the damages from the earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power  Station have on the propriety of granting the license renewal application for the Oyster Creek Generating Station.”

The agency has until April 4 to respond.

To the NRC, this is unnecessary. Their  assessments  of the safety of the six plants, made by the NRC’s  Division of Reactor Projects,  follows scores of individual, special inspections held during the year at each facility to check everything from the management of radioactive waste and ageing infrastructure to the ability of plant operators to analyze the root causes of mishaps and shut downs. The plants were all rated “green” in the agency’s color coded assessment process, which was put into place a decade ago and replaced the adversarial regulatory system characterized by monetary fines for different levels of infractions.

Lochbaum, who was part of a panel appointed in 1999 by the NRC to evaluate the pilot for the current Reactor Oversight Program prior to its formal adoption, released a 10-year retrospective of the program just after the troubles began in Japan. Lochbaum found that a lack of resources is hampering the effectiveness of the oversight process.

In each region of the country, he said, the NRC only had enough staff to devote full attention to one or two troubled reactor sites, while the majority stay on the “Licensee Response” list, in which there is minimal oversight.

“Limits on NRC inspection resources may play a role in deciding when plants are moved to and from the Licensee Response column,” wrote Lochbaum.  “When new problem plants emerge with problems that cannot be ignored, previously trouble-plagued plants may be suddenly cured and removed from the list of plants that require heightened NRC involvement.

“And when  trouble-plagued plants improve and move into the Licensee Response column, freed-up NRC resources may allow the NRC to turn to other plants that were previously not on the list but whose problems the NRC can now address.”

That is a juggling act, said Lochbaum, which will not always serve the public well.

By Roger Witherspoon

As the Japanese struggle to prevent a widening disaster in its nuclear fleet from adding to the natural disaster facing that country, America’s nuclear proponents are struggling to show that such a calamity could not happen here.

One Gannett newspaper trumpeted that the local, Indian Point nuclear power plant was designed to withstand earthquakes and would not suffer the same fate as the Fukushima Daiichi plants. The implication was that it could withstand an earthquake similar to the one which struck Japan – though the biggest quakes in the Northeast barely hit 4.0 on the Richter scale and most are of negligible impact.

But for journalists dealing with the subject, it is important to keep two facts in mind:

• America’s nuclear plants were designed to withstand known or anticipated natural disasters. But those plans were made using the technology of the 1950s and early 60s, when they were designed. The science of earthquakes, the advances in engineering, and the analysis of soil mechanics necessary to make modern, earthquake-proof skyscrapers did not exist back in the era of Eisenhower, bobby socks and the Atoms for Peace program. They do not, therefore, meet modern earthquake standards.
• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not require a modern analysis of the ability of its 104 power plants to withstand earthquakes. One of the many unsuccessful challenges to the relicensing of the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear power plants on Artificial Island in New Jersey contended that a new, earthquake analysis should be conducted before the plants were granted 20 to 40-year license extensions. The NRC, however, ruled that the issue was settled with the original license and did not need to be revisited.

That is not to state that modern nuclear power plants are vulnerable to the type of unfolding tragedy taking place across the Pacific.  Several years ago, at least one electrical conduit at the Indian Point nuclear plant 30 miles north of Manhattan was disrupted by an earthquake, though the shift in the earth’s crust was undetectable by the walking public. Repairs were quick and relatively minor. Nuclear power plants are not fragile structures.

But they are man-made and old. Nearly all of them have buried pipes and conduits which have leaked in recent years. To what extent some of those leaks may have been created or exacerbated by years of low level shifts in the earth is not known. But that should be considered and definitely ruled in or out before a blanket grant of earthquake immunity is conferred on the power plant above it.

The same, regularly rumbling Wappinger’s Fault is believed responsible for the tracery of cracks in the Delaware Aqueduct, the water tunnel 800 feet underground which brings up to 70 percent of the drinking water used in New York City and Westchester County from the reservoirs in the Catskill Mountain region. It should be noted that this is a man made fault, caused by the extensive surface mining of a rock quarry which, in time, altered the tension of local geological formations.

Journalists should pause before buying the line that “it can’t happen here” and quoting it uncritically, particularly considering the earthquake-prone regions of the far west and Alaska. Proponents of nuclear power are on firmer ground stating it is not likely to happen here for both geological and sociological reasons.

In the former case, the number of regions in the U.S. with major known earth quake faults and the presence of a nuclear power plant is small. But with climate change and an increase in hydrofracking, there are new, unmeasured stresses added to the earth – just ask folks in Alabama’s new earthquake zone – which might reasonably deserve a thorough, modern look before any new power plant is built there.

In the latter case, dealing with sociology and risk perception, questions are already being raised about the Japanese decision making process as crutical events unfolded at Daiichi Unit 1 and its nuclear cohorts. Crucial decisions are affected by cultural differences in the perception of risk. Would American reactor operators have ignored possible public criticism and discharged into the air large, continuous amounts of highly contaminated vapor from the reactor rather than let dangerous amounts of hydrogen gas build up?  Was it more important to the Japanese operators to try and manage the gas buildup rather than deliberately dump radioactive material into the public air? Is there a significant, practical difference between making a bad decision to protect the public, and making a bad decision to protect corporate profits?

It will take long, thoughtful, after-action analysis by experts in human factors in complex systems to answer such questions and determine how to incorporate the lessons learned into the NRC’s training program for reactor operators. The NRC is one of the best public agencies when it comes to conducting lessons learned analysis, even if its record of following its lessons is spotty.  Any long term consensus needs outside input from academic think tanks such as the Center for Human Performance and Risk Analysis at the University of Wisconsin (  http://www.chpra.wisc.edu/index.php ).

When they are done, Americans will be in a better position to know just how safe our nuclear industry really is.

By Roger Witherspoon

In an unprecedented move, the environmental agencies of New Jersey and New York have begun forcing scores of their largest water users to either retrofit their plants with modern cooling systems which won’t kill billions of fish annually or cease operating.

Environmental analysts in the two states have found that these facilities kill more than 20 billion juvenile and mature fish annually in New York and another nine billion in New Jersey.  These operations have had a negative impact on a variety of fish, including the endangered Atlantic Sturgeon which returns to the Hudson River to spawn and sea turtles in the Delaware River which were sucked into the cooling systems at the Salem Nuclear Generating Station.

Even more alarming is the finding by the National Marine Fisheries Service that the “once through cooling systems” are vacuuming up trillions of newly hatched fish – those under a half inches in length – and destroying them in their heat exchangers. The NMFS directly challenged the finding by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the damage to the aquatic environment is  “moderate”, and asserted there is  “strong evidence” that the decline in  fish stocks along the entire northeast Atlantic seaboard is due more to the destruction of baby fish than to over fishing of adults.

The scale of the destruction can be seen in the NRC’s environmental assessment of the twin Indian Point nuclear plants in Buchanan, 30 miles north of Manhattan in the heart of the Hudson River tidal estuary. In determining that the overall impact on essential fish habitat is “small to moderate” the agency noted approvingly that  new screens installed in front of the 40-foot-wide intake pipes in 1984 had reduced the destruction of baby fish between 1984 and 1991 by 187 Billion  per year to its present rate of just 300 Billion newly hatched fish.

“The NMFS does not reach all of the same conclusions as the NRC with respect to adverse effects that relicensing IP2 and IP3 would have on the fishery resources and their habitats,”  Peter Colosi, the agency’s assistant northeast regional administrator, wrote in an acerbic analysis of the impacts of the Hudson River nuclear plants.

“Given the immense natural productive potential of the Hudson River Estuary,” Colosi continued, “and taking consideration the staggering numbers of organisms that are lost directly, indirectly, and cumulatively through continued operation of electric generating stations that continue to use once-through cooling technology in the Mid-Hudson, the NMFS suggests that the current Indian Point relicensing process is an appropriate and opportune time to apply the Clean Water Act.”

But the efforts by the two state environmental agencies to enforce the discharge provisions of the Clean Water Act have drawn fierce resistance from companies opposed to spending billions of dollars to change their money-saving practice of freely using public waterways.  On Thursday, Exelon Corp, operator of the nations’ largest nuclear power fleet, made good on its longstanding threat to close the 636-Megawatt, Oyster Creek nuclear power plant rather than install a closed cycle system. In New York, Entergy Nuclear, which owns the Indian Point plants, has been spending millions of dollars on media campaigns and lobbying against what they claim is a politically motivated “fish vs. jobs” issue.  Ironically, the NRC assessment states that the five year construction project would provide some 2,300 direct jobs, making it one of the region’s largest employment projects.

The drive, by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, involves nine New Jersey plants at seven power company sites and more than 40 New York electric generating plants  – including most of the region’s nuclear power facilities – and large manufacturers such as cement makers and a 100-year-old Yonkers subsidiary of Dominoes Sugar.

New Jersey’s efforts to force compliance involve four plant sites operated by PSEG – ranging from the twin reactors at the Salem Nuclear Generating Station, which use 3 billion gallons of water daily, to the Sewaren natural gas plant using 540 million gallons daily; as well as plants operated by Exelon, RC Cape May Holdings, and Conectiv.

New York has destructive plants throughout the state, but the biggest impacts are created by the  gauntlet of power plants along the Long Island Sound and the lower Hudson River which kill fish by the trillions as the migrate up to 200 miles from the Atlantic Ocean to spawning sites along the Hudson River.

Because of the economic and political clout these types of firms possess, no other states have moved to force some 550 companies using similar “once through cooling systems” to comply with the dictates of the federal Clean Water Act. Indeed, the most destructive power plant in New York State is the coal and oil Northport Power Station in Suffolk County, along the north shore of Long Island Sound. That plant alone sucks more than 9.5 billion mature fish into its system annually, according to the state’s DEC. And though this wholesale vacuuming of migrating fish has a negative impact on the important recreational and commercial fishing operations, County Executive Steve Levy refused several requests to discuss the subject.

Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has continually ducked the issue, though their own analysis concluded that these plants collectively kill more than one trillion fish annually and disrupt their local aquatic ecosystems with their hot water discharges. On Nov. 22, the EPA settled a federal court suit brought by Riverkeeper and agreed to set regulations for the nation’s power plants and manufacturers using once through cooling by the end of March, 2011.

“You cannot take the amount of fish, small fry, larvae and eggs that Indian Point does from the estuary without having a major effect on the ecological health of the Hudson River,” said Riverkeeper Director Paul Gallay. An analysis of the river’s stocks prepared in 2008, he said, “showed nine out of 13 of the most significant species of fish in the Hudson River are in significant decline. That details some of the potential ways Indian Point being contributes to this overwhelming decline in the health and numbers of these species.”

Wedge Wire Wars

During the Bush Administration, the EPA sought to allow polluters such as the Salem Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey’s Delaware Bay and the Indian Point Energy Center on the Hudson River to continue killing billions of fish annually as long as they applied “mitigating” measures.

Those provisions were challenged in a federal suit in 2004 by a coalition of states, including New York and New Jersey; and environmental groups, including Hackensack, Hudson River and Delaware Riverkeeper, New York/New Jersey Baykeeper, and Scenic Hudson; and nuclear industry groups including Entergy Corp. and PSEG Nuclear.

But two federal courts –  U.S. Circuit Court before then-Judge Sonia Sotomayor in 2004, and the 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006 –  held that there was no substitute for complying with the Clean Water Act.  The EPA, then headed by Stephen Johnson, declined to come up with new regulations and the Obama EPA – now headed by former NJ DEP Commissioner Lisa Jackson – has continually pushed back projected dates for issuing new draft regulations. Officials now say draft rules may be released by the end of the year.

Entergy’s current publicity campaign contends that closed cycle cooling systems are unnecessary and the problem with fish kills can be eliminated by installing more tight-mesh wedge wire screens. While that is the company’s public position, they have actually gone to court to successfully prove that wedge wire screens are not designed for high-flow systems like nuclear power plants and should never be considered for nuclear plant use.

Entergy contended in a suit against the EPA filed in 2005 in the Second U.S Circuit Court of Appeals that wedge wire screens were designed for systems in still waters with flows of less than 100 million gallons daily – not the two to three billion gallons used daily by nuclear plants. At that time, Entergy argued that the EPA’s proposed rule allowing the use of wedge wire “rests in all respects on sales talk…discussions between EPA’s contractor and sales representatives from two companies that manufacture these screens.

“No law allows a key regulatory assumption to be based on a sales pitch by a randomly selected self-interested vendor.”

The environmental agencies of both states have rejected the use of wedge wire screens as ineffective.

“We didn’t really consider wedge wire,” said Susan Rosenwinkel, the project manager and principal environmental engineer for New Jersey’s DEP. “Our position is in order for the science to work wedge wire needs a freshwater environment, and a draw of less than 100 million gallons per day, and the intake velocity rate must be less than 0.5 feet per second.  The velocity of water coming into the nuclear plants is about 1 foot per second and they use 2 billion gallons of water a day.”

The Need to Chill

Cooling systems are vital to power generation, particularly those of nuclear plants. In a nuclear plant operation  there are a series of three heat exchanging loops of water. The first is water superheated to more than 700 degrees Fahrenheit within the reactor and cycled through thin metal tubes in a steam generator and then back into the reactor.

The second contains relatively uncontaminated water which flows over the metal tubes containing the reactor water and, through this contact, is heated to about 500 degrees Fahrenheit. It is kept liquid under pressure and then flows through pipes towards the giant turbines. There, the pressurized hot water is released and flashes to steam which blows over the 40-ton turbine blades and makes it spin. The spinning turbine runs the generator which makes electricity.

After the steam passes the turbine, it flows over a third loop of pipes containing cold water from the river, and that contact causes the steam to condense back to a liquid. It can then be pumped back to the steam generator to repeat the process. The water in the third loop which was used to cool the steam is then dumped back into the river – but 30 degrees hotter than before. This thermal pollution forms a barrier which alters the aquatic balance, changes the habitat for fish, plants, and parasites, and causes fatal heat shock in billions of passing fish.

The heat dumped into the waterway is tremendous, particularly at nuclear sites. The thermal discharge at PSEG’s, coal powered, Mercer Generating Station in Hamilton, for example, dumps about 1.5 billion BTUs of heat into the waterway, according to company records.  The nuclear power plants at Salem, however, dump about 30 billion BTUS of heat hourly into waterway. That is the equivalent of the heat which would be generated by exploding a nuclear bomb, the size of the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima, in the waters of Delaware Bay every two hours, all day, every day.

It is for that reason that the states have required plants to go to closed cycle cooling systems.

“We don’t mandate a particular technology,” said Nancy Wittenberg, assistant commissioner for New Jersey’s climate and environmental management programs. “We just mandate a measure of production. Hope Creek nuclear plant has a cooling tower, while the two Salem nuclear plants do not.

“Whether they build a cooling tower or use another closed cycle system is their decision, as long as it meets our objectives.

There are a variety of systems, ranging from mechanical draft – which resembles a three story radiator and is used at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant – to the massive cooling towers used at the Hope Creek plants. New York’s DEP specifically recommends the mechanical draft type of system to retrofit on existing plants. Entergy’s public contention that the DEC is ordering the installation of cooling towers at Indian Point is false.

Chuck Nieder, a biologist and head of the DEC Steam Electric Unit and author of the state’s assessment, noted that while cooling towers are the most effective and would eliminate 98% to 100% of the fish mortality, the mechanical draft systems may be more cost effective for existing plants and would still reduce the mortality to an acceptable 95 percent level and are successfully used at the Nine Mile Point nuclear station.

In addition Nieder said an analysis of fiscal data provided by Entergy showed that cooling towers – the most expensive option – would cost $1.5 billion to construct and operate over the 20 year life cycle, but that amounts to only 5.9% of Entergy’s projected profit of $24.5 billion and is not unreasonable.

Riverkeeper attorney Reed Super said “cooling towers are more expensive than the mechanical draft6 and take a lot more land. If they were mandated state wide they would reduce fish kills by 100 percent, whereas the mechanical draft would eliminate only 95%

“There comes a point of diminishing returns, where you are spending a lot of money for that last 5%. The DEC is right to recommend that for brand new facilities, but just as correct to recommend mechanical draft for retrofitting existing ones.”

In New Jersey, the DEP analysis found that The Salem nuclear plants are killing more than 3 billion fish annually. For the past 20 years, the company has developed and maintained an extensive salt water marsh restoration site designed to foster spawning of and safe development of Delaware Bay aquatic life. But that program has been deemed ineffective by the state DEP and challenged on other grounds by the New Jersey Environmental Federation.

“The wetlands were taken over by invasive phragmites,” said Federation vice chair Jane Nogaki. “Restoring wetlands, while admirable, will not bring back the annual loss of fish that occurs year after year. We don’t think you can take three billion fish a year out of the system and not have an impact on the health of the estuary.

“And in the process of restoring wetlands, PSEG has introduced over 22,000 pounds of the herbicide glyphosate into the estuary in an attempt to control the phragmites. They have been performing annual herbicide applications in Lower Alloways Creek wetlands for 15 years, and that is certainly not a sustainable effort.”

Dueling Federal Agencies

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is at odds with both state agencies. Their environmental assessment of Essential Fish Habitat for the Indian Point, Oyster Creek, and Salem nuclear plants found that the impacts were “moderate” and there were no environmental impediments to continuing the once-through operations for another 20 years.

“There is a cozy relationship between the NRC and the nuclear industry,” said New York Congressman Eliot Engel. “They always belittle very serious difficulties.”

According to the NRC, the difference between their assessment and that of the state environmental agencies and the National Marine Fisheries Service is that they are not really evaluating the same systems and impacts.

“When you talk about essential fish habitat we are not really talking about the animals,” said NRC biologist Dennis Logan. “You are talking about the habitat the fish live in. It is a separate and distinct question from looking at the fish populations themselves. Some species are adversely affected and some are not affected at all.

“Essential fish habitat looks at the changes in the habitat. The fish stock that goes through, that came in as fish and died or were removed from the system by going through the power plant and are no longer available as food or recreation are another matter. It is not a direct impact on the habitat.”

And Drew Stuyvenberg, the NRC’s environmental project manager and coordinator of assessments in the division of license renewal, said “a lot of those fish are anchovies, and there are a lot of anchovies in the Hudson River and they produce a lot of eggs. The standard we look at is whether the impacts are so great that the power plant could not remain operating as a choice for decision makers. The test is, are those impacts outside the impacts of other alternatives to licensing?”

But Colosi of the National Marine Fisheries Service was critical of the NRC’s approach which, he said, looked at a “variety of predominantly physical impacts that the NRC dismisses based upon prior experience at other nuclear plants.”

He contended that Stuyvenberg’s assessment that altered current patterns around the massive intake and discharge pipes “have not been found to be a problem at operating nuclear power plants” is wrong.

“Given the large volumes of water consumed at Indian Point each day and the relatively narrow configuration of the Hudson River, it seems plausible that under full operation, the plant could induce noticeable changes in the current regime or induce changes in the local erosion and accretion rates that have unintended adverse effects such as losses of submerged aquatic vegetation, chronic disturbances that discourage settlement of tiny prey items, and similar effects.

“Our regulations compel us to assume the worst case scenario, that the effluent is creating a barrier to migrating fishes and other unacceptable environmental conditions.”

By Roger Witherspoon

Entergy Corporation’s low key announcement might well have been posted on Craig’s List:

For Sale: Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. Used, unpredictable radioactive leaks, occasional fires, poorly run, financially indebted, locally unpopular, politically shunned and currently not working. $180 Million – Or Best Offer.

“Selling an old nuclear plant is like trying to build a new one,” said economist Mark Cooper of the University of Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and the Environment. “No one in their right mind would buy it or try to build it today.  Most of the projects that have been proposed in this country have been delayed or abandoned.  The simple fact is that the economics of nuclear power today are terrible and the market for these things is just not there.

“Why Entergy thinks they can sell it is hard to see. Putting it up for sale is a sign of desperation. That’s the last thing you do before you give up and walk away.”

Walking away is not an option Entergy Corp. will comment on – yet. Nor will they declare that option off the table. “For now we are just exploring the potential sale of the plant,” said Entergy spokesman Alex Schott. “It is one option that we feel is in the best interests of the shareholders and the 650 employees that work there.”

The company does not have a lot to explore. The plant is turned off while Entergy officials try and plug a leak of radioactive fluid from 40-year-old pipes serving the reactor.

“This latest incident at Vermont Yankee definitely hurt,” said Justin McCann, senior industry analyst in Standard & Poor’s Equity Division. “They announced they are looking to sell and two days later this radioactive leak had to happen and force a shut down. At the same time, they had an explosion at Indian Point.

“Any company interested would have to do their own inspections, of course, to see what needs to be done to run the plant profitably. But the bargaining will now all be on one side.  Entergy doesn’t have any leverage. Vermont Yankee has become a major headache to the company, and their bargaining power will be curtailed significantly.”

The collapse of Entergy’s $180 million, 2002 cash investment in the nuclear power plant providing 30% of Vermont’s electricity, and its larger, mortgaged, purchase of the troubled twin reactors at Indian Point on the Hudson River in 2001, signal a remarkable reversal of fortunes for a well respected power company and the once high-flying prospects of the nation’s nuclear power.  The billion dollar corporation’s rating by Moody’s Investor Service has dropped to Baa3 – just one step above what is professionally termed “speculative grade” but is generally known as “junk” status.

Moody’s noted in September when it lowered the company’s rating that Entergy has borrowed $3 billion of its $3.5 billion line of bank credit for its nuclear operations and continuing problems at  Vermont and Indian Point raised questions about the plants’ future ability to finance repairs or replace and maintain aging equipment and systems.

“In addition, lower (natural gas) prices in the Northeast make it highly unlikely that the business will continue to generate as much cash flow”  when current contracts expire in 2012, and will decline after that Moody’s stated.  Entergy, like the rest of the nuclear industry, bet its future on an exorbitant, continually rising, natural gas price which did not materialize due to the recession, energy efficiencies, and the increasing availability of huge natural gas supplies from previously locked shale sediments. Hydraulic fracturing may threaten future water supplies, but it has already begun draining the nuclear bank.

Entergy’s two troubled nuclear plant sites – Vermont Yankee and Indian Point – have graphically shown the strengths and weaknesses of the nuclear industry and the extremely high hurdles involved in launching a new commercial nuclear era.

On the positive side, these plants are extraordinary money makers, with Indian Point’s plants each earning upwards of $2 million daily. Nuclear plants nationally had a checkered operating past under the monopoly utilities like PSEG in New Jersey and Con Edison in New York, where Indian Point was offline two thirds of the time. But deregulation brought in professional fleet operators like Chicago-based Exelon, which partnered with PSEG in New Jersey to run Hope Creek and Salem; and Entergy, which bought Indian Point 2 and 3 and turned them in to steady, baseline generators producing electricity and making money 95 percent of the time.

That wasn’t easy. Entergy pumped some $500 million into Indian Point to replace decrepit, unreliable, and unsafe equipment and to retrain nearly the entire operating staff. Within two years, Entergy improved Indian Point’s standing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from that of the worst run plant complex in the nation to one of its best.

At that time, deep pockets and corporate good will meant a lot. The purchase of Indian Point 2 was held up for nine months due to legal challenges by the Westchester Citizens Awareness Network – the sister unit of CAN, Vermont Yankee’s grassroots nemesis. WestCAN contended that Entergy Nuclear Northeast, (ENN),  the Limited Liability Corporation running the power plants, did not have the financial wherewithal to cover damages to the region should anything go wrong.

That position was finally rejected by a Nuclear Regulatory Commission Administrative Law Judge who held it was “inconceivable” that Entergy Corp would ever walk away from liabilities incurred at Indian Point even though it was legally shielded by a string of 21 LLCs under the ENN umbrella set up just for that purpose. Entergy officially took over Indian Point September 10, 2001.

It was a 24-hour, Pyrrhic victory.

The following morning, a United Airlines 767 flew over the Indian Point plants en route to crashing into the World Trade Center 25 miles south in Manhattan. Collateral damage was the destruction of the industry’s myth that nuclear containment buildings were designed to withstand the crash of a 747. The NRC acknowledged that jumbo jets did not exist when these plants were designed in the 1950s and early 1960s, and they were, in fact, vulnerable to suicide attacks.

In 2003 former Homeland Security Commissioner James Lee Witt was hired by New York State to examine the emergency evacuation plans for the region around Indian Point. He concluded they could not possibly work and detailed flaws which had been systematically covered up by Entergy. That prompted the surrounding counties and the State to refuse to sign off on the plans and further tarnished the company’s image. Three of the four surrounding county legislatures and scores of school districts within 10 miles of Indian Point went on record urging the NRC not to relicense the plants.

Then, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina blew away another pillar of nuclear stability.  Entergy Corp declared its damaged Entergy New Orleans LLC subsidiary bankrupt, and demanded the taxpayers pay some $600 million for repairs. President Bush rejected the request, saying it was obscene for the company to demand taxpayer funding while distributing dividends of more than $1 billion to its shareholders.

In the end, however, the company received some $400 million in public funds towards the restoration of its damaged power plant. But that shattered the myth of corporate responsibility so carefully constructed during the Indian Point court hearings just four years earlier. It would be noted by Public Service Commissions around the nation.

“Entergy came in as a trustworthy company and systematically destroyed that trust over the decade,” said WestCAN organizer Margot Schepart. “Katrina proved that there was no such thing as corporate responsibility. We were right when we had said the profits would go south to the corporate headquarters, but if there was a problem, we were on our own and no money would come this way.”

But Entergy was confident. In 2006 they filed applications with the NRC to extend Vermont Yankee’s license 20 years past its 2012 expiration date. The following year they applied for extensions for Indian Point’s reactors, which are due to expire in 2013 and 2015. It was then that the bottom began to fall out of the nuclear bubble.

Plumbing Problems

The aging infrastructure designed a half century earlier began showing signs of wear at nuclear sites around the country. Water contaminated with radioactive byproducts of reactor operations – including heavy elements like plutonium, iodine and cesium – were leaking out of the nation’s 104 nuclear plants, including Indian Point and Vermont Yankee. The nation’s worst radioactive leaks into the local environment occurred at Exelon’s Braidwood plant, 30 miles south of Chicago.

“Exelon leaked over six million gallons over two years,” said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety director for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Braidwood had two leaks of about three million gallons each, and 18 smaller leaks of about 300,000 gallons.

“All of those leaks came from pipe carrying radioactively contaminated water into the river. The assumption was that it would mix with the river water and by the time it got into people’s drinking water supplies it would be diluted enough that it would not be a hazard. But instead of going into the river, it leaked into the water table and got into people.”

It came as a surprise to most people that nuclear power plants, touted as “clean and safe” energy, regularly dump contaminated water and steam into the ground and air by design. It was unfathomable that neither the NRC, with its highly regarded corps of on-the-scene resident inspectors, nor the operators of the highly technical plant, nor its vaunted, redundant, electronic safety systems missed six million gallons of radioactive fluid dumped by accident.

Adding to the consternation of the public was the refusal of the NRC to impose financial penalties on the company for unplanned contamination, no matter how severe, even though it violated their operating license and federal regulations.

The State of New Jersey, however, did order Exelon to clean up its mess when groundwater under Exelon’s Salem nuclear plants was discovered. But there were no financial or administrative sanctions from federal regulators. And all the nation’s 104 nuclear plants have had leaks at some point.

In 2008, it was disclosed that thousands of gallons of tritium, a radioactive form of water, had been leaking out of Indian Point, forming a lake under the plant site with its contaminated tributaries meandering into the Hudson River.  It was impossible for either Entergy or the NRC to state definitively how long the leaks had gone on, how much had leaked out into the river and water table, or even how many leaks there were. The NRC found indications, however, that the site had been leaking for eight years.

That was a final straw for then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who set up a special task force to challenge the relicense application for the Indian Point plants. It did not take long for Cuomo’s group to find Entergy’s relicensing application was riddled with misstatements.

A key section of the nearly 800-page document, the Severe Accident Mitigation Assessment (SAMA), purportedly showed that the only danger from a radioactive accident at the plant lay to the north, and the cost would be $403 million per square mile.

But Cuomo’s analysis of the statistical data revealed Entergy had decided that since there were more days when the wind blew north than when it blew towards the south, the south did not count – as if it had been bested in a celestial tug of war. And since there were equal days when the winds blew east or west, Entergy decided they cancelled each other out, as if they never existed.

That logic meant in a catastrophic accident, no radiation could go south to New York City; southwest, covering northern New Jersey down to Newark; east as far as Hartford, Conn; or west past the Delaware Water Gap into the Pennsylvania Poconos.  In Entergy’s scenario, most of the 21 million residents within 50 miles of the plant had nothing to worry about. That defied logic and the experience of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl or, more recently, the ash clouds from the Icelandic volcano which spread all over Europe and forced the grounding of the continent’s air fleets.

New York with its 1,000-page challenge became the only state to put its weight against a nuclear relicensing plan. And that raised more doubts on Wall Street about the financial viability of nuclear power.

Entergy’s Difficult Debt Deal

Entergy hedged its bets. In August, 2009, it asked the Public Service Boards of New York and Vermont to approve a spinoff of its six northeast nuclear plants into a separate subsidiary called Enexus – which would start life with about $3 billion in debt.

“Typically,” said New York PSC spokesman James Denn, “nuclear power sells at rates less than natural gas prices, and natural gas sets the price. Nuclear power can sell under it and that’s how Entergy makes its money.”

The two state agencies separately and unanimously concluded in September that the debt was too high and the competitive, wholesale energy market too low for Enexus to be a viable company.

“There are a lot of questions as to where this company is going,” said Michael Haggerty, vice president of Moody’s Power and Utility Group. “Other companies have been reducing their outstanding capital liabilities, but Entergy did not. They announced over the weekend a share buyback program for $750 million and a dividend increase and they are sending more cash to their shareholders.

“But they have uncertainty now that the spinoff has been turned down.  They banked everything on this spinoff taking care of a large amount of debt. So what’s their Plan B?”

That question loomed large in both states. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation ordered Entergy to install new, closed cycle cooling systems at Indian Point and stop using billions of gallons of Hudson River water to cool its equipment. The retrofit could cost between $400 million and $1.5 billion, depending on the type of system used. And the plants would have no income during the two to four years of construction. It remains an open question whether Entergy, with its financial belt tightening, will have access to sufficient capital to handle the project and any unplanned events.

Vermont’s Impossible Leaks

Then, in November, 2009, a monitoring well at Vermont Yankee picked up contaminated tritium moving through the water table.

Entergy could not find the leak until February, 2010. That proved embarrassing. Entergy officials had assured the Vermont legislature, under oath, that there were no underground pipes which carried radioactive liquids and, therefore, there were no aging systems which could threaten the region’s water. The declarations were false.

Vermont has a unique arrangement in Entergy.  As a condition of the purchase in 2002, Entergy agreed to seek the approval of the state legislature in addition to clearance from the NRC for both the initial operating license, and any license extension. Entergy asked the legislature for another chance.

“Entergy said they would have an independent investigation of their underground pipes and wiring,” said former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford, now at the Vermont Law School. “It turned out the study was by a DC law firm that was representing Entergy in the Indian Point relicensing proceeding.

“They were asking Vermont lawmakers to believe that a firm that was earning millions of dollars in fees representing Entergy before the NRC could do a hard-hitting investigation of Entergy’s operation of Vermont Yankee. Entergy has created a hole for itself by undermining its position in Vermont.”

The sale offer should not have come as a total surprise. In August, The New England Independent Services Office, which regulates the regional power grid, held its fourth annual futures auction. The auction, which was started in 2008 and is unique to the New England ISO, locks in power commitments – though not the price – for specified future years.

“We have enough capacity in New England to meet demand and ensure our reliability standards and reserve margins through 2019,” said ISO spokes woman Ellen Foley.

But there was a surprise during the two-day August auction, intended to lock in power from June, 2013 through May, 2014. Entergy contacted the ISO at the end of the first day and asked to withdraw and make no future commitments.

“They submitted a bid to withdraw from the capacity auction during the auction itself,” Foley said. That triggered an analysis on the part of the ISO to determine if we could let them delist. We declined the request because of reliability concerns around the area of Vermont.

“The studies showed that without Vermont Yankee, there is potential which includes thermal overloads on transmission lines and voltage instability. It could compromise equipment and cause outages.”

Vermont Yankee is a regional transmission hub, with electricity from several sources passing through its high voltage lines. Rerouting that power would be difficult in the short term. But since the ISO can’t make Entergy produce electricity if it shuts down entirely, the agency is making long term plans for a possible future without the nuclear plant in it.

In the meantime, Entergy is left committed to maintaining a transmission network it may not use, produce power from a plant which may or may not have a license to operate, and may not be able to afford producing electricity even if it gets permission to do so. That would be an extremely expensive way to boil water.

By Roger Witherspoon

Federal officials are investigating Entergy Nuclear Corps’ management of its massive steam generators following the latest in a series of mechanical failures which forced six plant shut downs in the last two years.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors are specifically examining the cause of the Sept. 3 malfunction in a steam generator serving the reactor in Indian Point 2, which triggered an automatic “trip” or shut down.  But NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said Tuesday “We are always looking for trends and commonalities across the site. If the evidence points to a problem that is more systemic than merely the latest event, then that is something we want to focus on.

“We could look at this as a cross-cutting issue and ask does it affect other areas of plant operations? If they have reactor cooling pump problems at both plants, does it say something about the maintenance at the plant as a whole?”

At this point, said Sheehan, the NRC inspectors are treating this latest shut down as a stand alone incident at Indian Point 2 rather than a problem in overall management at both nuclear units 2 and 3.

But David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the history of steam generator problems at Indian Point should lead the NRC to taking a broader view at the outset.

“This is a technical industry,” said Lochbaum, a former NRC instructor, “and people in the industry like to weigh things objectively. But when you look at how effective the training or maintenance is, it is harder to measure. The NRC is struggling to come up with objective measures of quality operation instead of a gut feeling that they are not doing it right.”

The plant, which produces about 1,000 Megawatts of electricity sold primarily to Consolidated Edison, the regional power distributor, remains shut while Entergy officials try to determine why the pumping system serving the steam generators failed and allowed the water levels to rise to dangerous levels.

“Entergy needs a ‘Been there, done that’ T-shirt,” said Lochbaum. “They’ve repeated this drill over and over.”

The steam generators in Indian Point 2 shut down due to erratic water levels April 21, 2008 and April 3 2009, while Indian Point 3 shut down May 15, 28, and 31 2009. The latest incident involved a malfunctioning feedwater pumps. The NRC tracks the number and types of forced shut downs under the heading of “Unplanned Scrams per 7,000 Critical Hours”  (   http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/IP2/ip2_pi.html#IE01 ) and can change the safety rating of the plant if there are three or more within that time frame. If the problems turn out to be systemic, the NRC could assign a lower rating to the entire two-unit site rather than just to Indian Point 2.

The problem with unstable water levels in the steam generator is that it can trigger significant damage throughout the plant. The steam generators are heat transfer systems which  form the bridge between the reactors and the 40-ton electric generating turbines. Pressurized, highly contaminated water, heated to about 700 degrees travels from the nuclear reactor to the steam generator, where it goes through several thousand U-shaped tubes and circles back to the reactor. A second water loop, with little radioactivity, runs this clean water over the tubes, where it is heated to about 500 degrees Fahrenheit but kept liquid under pressures of about 1,200 pounds per square inch. For comparison, the pressure in a home heating system is about 32 PSI.

Superheated water in the secondary loop travels to the generating turbine, where it is released from the pressure system. It then flashes into steam, expanding by a factor of about 700, and rushed past the blades of the turbine. A water bath on the other side of the turbine – drawn from the Hudson River at Indian Point and the Delaware River at New Jersey’s Salem plants – cools the steam back to water and it is sent back to the steam generator for reheating.

The problem comes when the huge pumps circulating the water malfunction and, as a result, there are drops of water mixed with the steam hitting the turbine blades, which spin at 1,800 Revolutions Per Minute. “These water droplets hit the fan blades,” explained Lochbaum, “and it can come apart sending out metal missiles as it shreds. That happened at the Salem plants in the early 1990s, and tore the turbine apart and the company paid a high price for it.

More recently, it happened at the D.C. Cook plant in Michigan in 2008, and the shreds tore through the oil lines used for lubrication and the hydrogen gas lines used to cool the generator and that triggered a pretty serious fire. You try to avoid that outcome.”

By Roger Witherspoon

A series of wide ranging, federal inspections of the twin Salem nuclear power plants has found extensive decay and cracks as long as six feet in the concrete containment buildings, corrosion of the buildings’ steel liners by decades of leaks from radioactive and acidic water, and “aggressive” groundwater penetration throughout the power complex.

In addition, inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that PSEG Nuclear, operators of the Salem nuclear complex, skipped required inspections of the ageing containment buildings. That prompted the agency to send out a generic “information notice” to all nuclear operators around the country to adhere to the inspection schedules and be on the lookout for deepening cracks in the containment walls.

The findings of the plants’ deteriorating physical condition are contained in a series of reports by NRC inspection teams analyzing PSEG’s ability to maintain the structural integrity of the nearly 40 year old nuclear complex for an additional 20 years. The reports include demands for explanations from Thomas Joyce, president of PSEG Nuclear, for a variety of PSEG maintenance examinations and practices and responses from the nuclear operating company.

In fact, one of the company’s erroneous practices prompted the NRC to send out a notice to all the nation’s nuclear operators to make sure they were in compliance.  In an August 4 Information Notice, the NRC reminded plant operators that, by law, the condition of the concrete containment buildings housing the reactors are to be thoroughly inspected every five years. Inspectors had discovered that Salem’s operators “have been performing the containment concrete condition surface examination every 10 years.”

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said an audit of PSEG practices found that instead of inspecting each containment building every five years, they were alternating inspections “and taking credit for the interval for both units.  They were misreading guidance from the American Concrete Institute as well as what the regulations said.”

The operating license for the plants is due to expire and PSEG must convince the NRC that if permitted to operate for an additional 20 years, there will be minimal degradation over the ensuing decades and the ageing plants can be safely operated.

But many of the findings by NRC engineers show conditions which, the agency says, violate regulations for long term inspections and maintenance of  these critical structures, which are designed to house the reactor systems and protect the public in case of a nuclear emergency. In some cases, PSEG officials stated they were not concerned about leaks, rust, and possible infrastructure degradation and had no plans monitor the situation or stop the leaking.

For example, NRC analysts found “several” underground walls in both plants during a February inspection “that have evidence of past or present groundwater penetration.”

But when asked if PSEG planned any inspections of hard to reach, reinforced concrete areas to determine if the steel skeleton had been compromised by years of exposure to salt water  “The applicant responded that they did not.” The company felt that since there were no signs that the water had gone all the way through the four- foot-thick walls, there was no need for any additional checking. But the NRC differed, stating:

“Since the applicant does not have plans for inspections of inaccessible areas, the groundwater is aggressive, there have been several incidences of groundwater penetration into the structures, and the interior of the walls may not indicate the condition of the exterior walls, it is unclear to the staff that this is an adequate approach to managing aging of… concrete structures subjected to aggressive groundwater.”

In addition, in some cases incoming water had picked up radioactive contaminants in the ground outside the Salem 1 Auxiliary building and carried it into the building, 64 feet below ground.  Rather than trace the source of the contamination or the path used by the area groundwater to get into the building, PSEG merely roped off the contaminated area.

The NRC found saltwater leakage in the containment building was observed through both planned expansion joints and “expansion and shrinkage cracks in the concrete.” An analysis of the water found salt levels of 15,000 parts per million, 30 times the threshold limit for reinforced concrete of 500 parts per million.

Highly corrosive borated water, leaking from the reactor’s coolant system, “was running down the containment liner plate,” a ¾-inch steel lining in both Salem 1 and 2. In Salem 1, the NRC found, “borated water has been leaking in one area of containment for the last 30 years” at a rate of about 100 gallons a day. The result has been corrosion of the liner designed to prevent highly contaminated reactor fluid from escaping into the outside environment.

In a response, PSEG stated that examination of the lining found that in no section had the steel lost more than 10 percent of its thickness to the acidic water leaks and, therefore, still met the standards required by the company’s operating license.

That’s just outrageous,” said Tracy Carluccio, deputy director of the environmental group Delaware Riverkeeper. “There are several mind-blowing, egregious problems here that were pointed out to PSEG. The responses that PSEG gives are shocking in terms of their inadequacy.”

The concentration of salt in the water found to be infiltrating the plant, Carluccio said, “is saltier than ocean water. But when asked if they had plans for an inspection they said ‘No’. That’s outrageous. So is the absence of a commitment to fix a leakage that has been going on for 30 years. The fact that it could be operated in such a slipshod manner is shocking.”

The wear and tear on the exterior of the concrete structures has been severe and far more extensive than permitted by the operating licenses for the nuclear plants. The containment buildings are massive structures which are intended to withstand the enormous pressure buildup resulting from a rupture of the reactor itself and the sudden vaporizing of hundreds of thousands of gallons of radioactive steam. They are not foolproof, however and the NRC estimates they have a 15 percent chance of failing under the pressure load.

The containment buildings at Salem, which were designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s, are nearly 192 feet tall, with walls and the characteristic domes 3.5 feet thick. The concrete is built over a lattice of steel rebar 2.25-inches in diameter. But cracks have exposed at least some of the buildings’ steel skeletons to salt water. As a result, each of the buildings is covered with a tracery of cracks and, according to the NRC, has been maintained by PSEG using a standard that is “significantly different and less stringent than the acceptance criteria”  specified by agency regulations.

The north wall at Salem Unit 2 was found to have one crack “six feet long and 16 inches wide” as well as cracks at various joints “up to 3 feet long and four inches wide.” NRC regulations, however, state that cracks larger than 8 inches in diameter and 0.04 inches in width “are considered unacceptable and in need of further technical evaluation.”

“It is an issue we have to address,” said PSEG spokesman Joe Delmar. “We are going to monitor it more closely and if we do notice additional cracks we would need to take preventive measures.

“The cracks haven’t posed any issues to the overall health of the structure.”