'Unusual event' declared at Hanford (WA) nuclear plant

[LAGC]

RICHLAND, Wash. — A small amount of hydrogen gas trapped in a pipe at a Washington nuclear power plant ignited in a brief, six-inch flame Thursday when workers cut into the pipe, a utility spokesman said.

No one was injured and no equipment was damaged in the "puff," which Energy Northwest spokesman Mike Paoli said lasted less than a second. Still, the Columbia Generating Station declared an "unusual event" and temporarily evacuated the immediate area.

Officials notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The pipe is located in the plant's main turbine building, which is a non-nuclear area, Paoli said.

"There's no association whatsoever with the reactor building or radiation," he said.

Read more: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2011/04/07/1597357/unusual-event-declared-at-hanford.html

Why do I have a feeling that every little anomaly that happens in a domestic nuclear plant is going to make headlines like this and get extra scrutiny for the foreseeable future? Media hype much?

[willing dwarf]

1. Hype? Maybe BUT

when you pause and consider the many times that major episodes have been underplayed, one needs to pay attention to these little anomalies. I remember as a teen when they said there was a little anomaly at Three Mile Island, and three days later my sister and her friends had been sent home, evacuated from their college which was about 7 miles away.

[kristopher]

2. You mean like this one? Did you hear about this when they discovered it?

Bet you didn't. A football sized hole eaten all the way through the 6" steel top of of the reactor chamber, with only 3/8 in of liner left. It is worth reading the UCS paper at the end about the way the NRC has become a de facto arm of the industry they are supposed to be regulating.



http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/vessel-head-degradation/images.html

Davis Besse: Incident history

Over the years of its operation, the plant has experienced several incidents, none of which have resulted in exposure to dangerous levels of radiation.


On September 24, 1977, the reactor, running at only 9% power, shut down because of a disruption in the feedwater system.<4> This caused the relief valve for the pressurizer to stick open. As of 2005, the NRC considers this to be the fourth highest ranked safety incident.<5>

Loss of feedwater event
On June 9, 1985, the main feedwater pumps, used to supply water to the reactor steam generators, shut down. A control room operator then attempted to start the auxiliary (emergency) feedwater pumps. These pumps both tripped on overspeed conditions because of operator error. This incident was originally classified an "unusual event" (the lowest classification the NRC uses) but it was later determined that it should have been classified a "site area emergency".<6>

Tornado
On June 24, 1998 the station was struck by an F2 tornado.<7> The plant's switchyard was damaged and access to external power was disabled. The plant's reactor automatically shut down at 8:43 pm and an alert (the next to lowest of four levels of severity) was declared at 9:18 pm. The plant's emergency diesel generators powered critical facility safety systems until external power could be restored.<8><9>


Erosion of the 6-inch-thick (150 mm) carbon steel reactor head, caused by a persistent leak of borated water.



Reactor head hole

In March 2002, plant staff discovered that the boric acid that serves as the reactor coolant had leaked from cracked control rod drive mechanisms directly above the reactor and eaten through more than six inches<10> of the carbon steel reactor pressure vessel head over an area roughly the size of a football (see photo). This significant reactor head wastage left only 3/8 inch of stainless steel cladding holding back the high-pressure (~2500 psi) reactor coolant. A breach would have resulted in a loss-of-coolant accident, in which superheated, superpressurized reactor coolant could have jetted into the reactor's containment building and resulted in emergency safety procedures to protect from core damage or meltdown. Because of the location of the reactor head damage, such a jet of reactor coolant may have damaged adjacent control rod drive mechanisms, hampering or preventing reactor shut-down. As part of the system reviews following the accident, significant safety issues were identified with other critical plant components, including the following: (1) the containment sump that allows the reactor coolant to be reclaimed and reinjected into the reactor; (2) the high pressure injection pumps that would reinject such reclaimed reactor coolant; (3) the emergency diesel generator system; (4) the containment air coolers that would remove heat from the containment building; (5) reactor coolant isolation valves; and (6) the plant's electrical distribution system.<11> Under certain scenarios, a reactor rupture would have resulted in core meltdown and/or breach of containment and release of radioactive material. The resulting corrective operational and system reviews and engineering changes took two years. Repairs and upgrades cost $600 million, and the Davis-Besse reactor was restarted in March 2004.<12> The U.S. Justice Department investigated and penalized the owner of the plant over safety and reporting violations related to the incident. The NRC determined that this incident was the fifth most dangerous nuclear incident in the United States since 1979.<3>

Criminal prosecutions
On January 20, 2006, the owner of Davis-Besse, FirstEnergy Corporation of Akron, Ohio, acknowledged a series of safety violations by former workers, and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. The deferred prosecution agreement relates to the March 2002 incident (see above). The deferment granted by the NRC were based on letters from Davis-Besse engineers stating that previous inspections were adequate. However, those inspections were not as thorough as the company suggested, and as proved by the material deficiency discovered later. In any case, because FirstEnergy cooperated with investigators on the matter, they were able to avoid more serious penalties. Therefore, the company agreed to pay fines of $23.7 million, with an additional $4.3 million to be contributed to various groups, including the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Habitat for Humanity, and the University of Toledo as well as to pay some costs related to the federal investigation.
Two former employees and one former contractor were indicted for statements made in multiple documents and one videotape, over several years, for hiding evidence that the reactor pressure vessel was being corroded by boric acid. The maximum penalty for the three is 25 years in prison. The indictment mentions that other employees also provided false information to inspectors, but does not name them.<13><14>

2008 discovery tritium leak
The NRC and Ohio EPA were notified of a tritium leak accidentally discovered during an unrelated fire inspection on October 22, 2008. Preliminary indications suggest radioactive water did not infiltrate groundwater outside plant boundaries<15>

2009 unintentional discharge of firearm
In November 2009, a plant security officer was using the restroom and his firearm discharged while in the holster. The officer sustained a non life threatening wound to his calf. No cause was found for the discharge.<16>

2010 Replacement reactor head problems
After the 2002 incident, Davis-Besse purchased a used replacement head from a mothballed reactor in Midland, Michigan. Davis-Besse operators replaced the original cracked reactor head before restarting in 2004. On March 12, 2010, during a scheduled refueling outage, ultrasonic examinations performed on the control rod drive mechanism nozzles penetrating the reactor vessel closure head identified that two of the nozzles inspected did not meet acceptance criteria. FirstEnergy investigators subsequently found new cracks in 24 of 69 nozzles, including one serious enough to leak boric acid. Root cause analysis is currently underway by the Department of Energy, First Energy, and the NRC to determine the cause of the premature failures.<17> <18> Crack indications required repair prior to returning the vessel head to service. Control rod drive nozzles were repaired using techniques proven at other nuclear facilities. The plant resumed operation in 2010. The existing reactor vessel head is scheduled for replacement in 2011.<19>


Future

The facility's original nuclear operating license expires on April 22, 2017. On August 11, 2006 FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company (FENOC) submitted a letter of intent (Adams Accession No. ML062290261).<20> The submission date for the application is August 10, 2010. This initiates a long process that results in an application approval or revocation. Public hearings<21> are a vital part of any application review and information on this process can be found on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) website at NRC.gov. <4>. The site map contains many valuable links <22>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis-Besse_Nuclear_Power_Station#cite_note-21


This page was last modified on 16 March 2011 at 22:20.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

That is a sketch of the facts. Below, the is the 28 page policy analysys by the Union of Concerned Scientists puts them into a meaningful framework built around the relationship between the industry and its regulators.

Davis-Besse: One Year Later
Nearly one year ago, on March 6, 2002, workers repairing a cracked control rod drive mechanism (CRDM) nozzle at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio discovered a football-sized cavity in the reactor vessel head.1 Their finding is linked to two other discoveries 15 years earlier. On March 13, 1987, workers at Turkey Point Unit 4 in Florida discovered that a small leak of borated water had corroded the reactor vessel head. Their revelation prompted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to require all owners of pressurized water reactors,2including Davis-Besse, to take specific measures to protect plant equipment from boric acid corrosion. On March 24, 1987, the NRC learned that control room operators at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania had been discovered sleeping while on duty. That revelation prompted the NRC to issue an order on March 31st requiring Peach Bottom Unit 3 to be immediately shut down.3

The three findings spanning 15 years are intertwined. Turkey Point demonstrated that a small amount of boric acid leaking onto the reactor vessel head corrodes carbon steel at a high rate. Had the FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company, the owner of Davis-Besse, remembered Turkey Point’s lesson, the serious damage at Davis-Besse would have been averted. Peach Bottom demonstrated that a pervasive safety culture problem creates unacceptable conditions for operating a nuclear power plant. Had NRC remembered either Turkey Point’s or Peach Bottom’s lesson, they would have issued the order they drafted to shut down Davis-Besse. It would have been the first shut down order issued by the agency since the Peach Bottom order. But both FirstEnergy and the NRC forgot the past and relived the wrong event from March 1987 by having yet another reactor vessel head damaged by boric acid corrosion.

Many individuals, from both within and outside the NRC, have accused the agency’s move towards risk- informed decision-making as the reason for its failure to issue the order to shut down Davis-Besse. On the contrary, the NRC’s handling of circumferential cracking of control rod drive mechanism (CRDM) nozzles as reported by the Oconee nuclear plant in February 2001 was a successful demonstration of proper application of risk-informed decision-making with the sole and significant exception of its mistake in not issuing the shut down order for Davis-Besse. But even that mistake, as bad as it was, does not impugn the risk-informed decision-making process for the simple reason that the NRC deviated from that process. Had the NRC adhered to its risk-informed decision-making process, it would have issued the shut down order for Davis-Besse and capped off a stellar example of how this process can and should be used.

In February 2001, the NRC learned of a new aging mechanism, the circumferential cracking of stainless steel CRDM nozzles based on inspection results from Oconee. The NRC properly reacted to this finding by revisiting the nuclear industry’s inspection regime for CRDM nozzles. It determined that the existing inspection regime did not provide adequate assurance that circumferential cracks would be identified and repaired. The NRC did not require all plant owners to immediately address this inspection shortfall, which would have imposed an unnecessary regulatory burden on those plants with low susceptibility for the problem. Nor did the NRC allow all plant owners to address the shortfall at their next regularly scheduled refueling outage, which would have imposed an unnecessary challenge to safety margins at those plants with high susceptibility. Instead, the NRC applied risk-informed decision-making by issuing Bulletin 2001-01 in August 2001 to all owners of pressurized water reactors. This Bulletin required the high susceptible reactors to resolve the inspection shortfall by December 2001, the medium susceptible reactors to resolve the inspection shortfall at their next regularly scheduled outage, and merely collected information from the low susceptible reactors.

Only two reactors with high susceptibility for circumferential cracking of CRDM nozzles did not conform to the inspection requirements...

At this point, the NRC abandoned its risk-informed decision-making process.....

http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/davis-besse_retrospective_030303db.pdf

[Nihil]

3. You know, your two line comment is still valid *without* the 8 screens of spam that follow.

Skinner should really start charging you by the Gb for all of the
duplicate pastes you keep filling his disks with.

[kristopher]

4. Glad you liked it.

[Dead_Parrot]

6. A link would have sufficed. nt

[kristopher]

7. I disagree.

There is more valid content in that post than the last 200 posts of nuclear enthusiasts combined.

[Nihil]

9. Bullshit.

> There is more valid content in that post than the last 200 posts of nuclear
> enthusiasts combined.

Not only is that complete bollocks in its own right but it misses the point
completely. My comment in the post that you replied to (without understanding)
is that most of *your* "last 200 posts" have included some or all of the crap
that you put in the previous one - namely one or two lines of useful stuff
and several pages of cut & paste spam.

My suggestion was that the 1 or 2 lines are (almost always) worth reading
but by adding the rest, you lose that impact through your desire/habit of
pure disruption.

[kristopher]

12. Your continuing attempts to chill speech are noted.

You maliciously attempted to malign my motives earlier today, and now because YOU have previously seen information you assert that there is absolutely no justification for it ever being posted again. That an outlook that I can't share, I'm sorry. There are new readers here every hour of every day - I do not plan my posts based on your habits or preferences.

But we BOTH know the real issue don't we.

You HATE being put before the public legitimate, irrefutable information that reflects negatively on the use of nuclear fission to boil water. And yet you simultaneously have no trouble with pronuclear lies being repeated ad nauseum.

Talk about arrogance.

[Nihil]

14. Like I said before: Bullshit ...

... from a habitual spammer does not count as "informing" anyone.


> You HATE being put before the public legitimate, irrefutable information
> that reflects negatively on the use of nuclear fission to boil water.

Nope. If you'd bother to read my recent posts you will have seen the error
of your ingrained assumptions on that subject.


> And yet you simultaneously have no trouble with pronuclear lies being
> repeated ad nauseum.

Also untrue (not that it would have penetrated your cut & paste write-only
approach to the E/E forum).


> You maliciously attempted to malign my motives earlier today, ...

"Pot, this is kettle: you are black. Over"


> ... and now because YOU have previously seen information you assert
> that there is absolutely no justification for it ever being posted again.

I didn't say that (as you know full well).

I said that your contribution does not have to drag along the same screenfuls
of paste buffer in order to make a point.

Posting it every now and then wouldn't be too bad.
Posting it several times a day is just disruption - spamming with the sole
intent of shouting down any dissent.


> That an outlook that I can't share, I'm sorry.

We've all noticed that. Consideration for other posters has never been
your strong point.


> There are new readers here every hour of every day

Hyperbole (even when including the trolls & sock-puppets).


> I do not plan my posts based on your habits or preferences.

Not only is that unsurprising, it is uninteresting. I would very
surprised if any poster here "plans" their posts based on the habits
or preferences of any other poster on the forum.


> But we BOTH know the real issue don't we.

Yes ... but the rules preclude me from stating it.

[willing dwarf]

8. You make my point for me!

Your statements should be directed at the original poster since s/he was the one who called it hype. I am appalled at how these so called "glitches," "anomalies" and "incidents" are so underplayed.

[kristopher]

11. That's right, and it wasn't an accident

I was trying to support your point with a concrete example. That was why I responded to you instead of the OP.

[AtheistCrusader]

10. I remember when this hit the news.

I thought the margin of actual metal remaining was less than that, but yeah, I remember it.

[kristopher]

13. Less than 3/8ths of an inch of metal bulging outward?

Thank FSM that it wasn't less.

[abqmufc]

5. Considering the issues of Hanford have been ignored for decades, I'm glad to see the attention.