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Friday, October 19, 2012

By Jennifer Hiller
San Antonio Express-News

The South Texas Project nuclear power plant in Bay City. SA

The South Texas Project, which provides about a third of San Antonio’s electric power, is on a list of nuclear plants with a high risk of flooding-related failures.

A leaked July 2011 Nuclear Regulatory Commission report labeled “not for public release” deals with flood risk to plants across the country if dams break upstream.

The NRC posted a redacted version of the report to its website in March. But the environmental group Greenpeace obtained an un-redacted version and shared it with The Huffington Post, which first wrote about the full report Friday.

In response, a report Friday from the Union of Concerned Scientists says that the NRC document shows that, “34 reactors — one-third of the U.S. nuclear fleet — may face flooding hazards greater than they are designed to withstand, as a result of the failure of upstream dams. … The NRC has known about some of these problems for 15 years and has not effectively addressed them.”

CPS Energy, San Antonio’s city-owned utility, is an owner of the South Texas Project, along with Austin Energy and NRG Energy Inc.

The report comes in the wake of last year’s disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. In that case, an earthquake and tsunami led to a series of equipment failures and meltdowns, a massive evacuation and environmental damage.

The other U.S. plants deemed to be at flood risk were in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia and Washington state.

“Failure of one or more dams upstream from a nuclear power plant may result in flood levels at a site that render essential safety systems inoperable,” the NRC report says. “For example, high floodwaters may fail all available power sources (e.g., offsite, emergency diesel, auxiliary), hinder operations, and damage other infrastructure resulting in station blackout and higher than acceptable risk.”

CPS officials declined to comment on the report and referred the matter to Buddy Eller, spokesman at STP.

Eller said that a flooding evaluation was done when the plant was constructed and found no issues.

But in the wake of Fukushima and because of STP’s above-ground reservoir, it is doing a flooding re-evaluation that will look at upstream dams. That report will go to the NRC early next year.

STP also is doing a seismic evaluation.

He said the industry and NRC have been looking at flooding and seismic risk in the wake of Fukushima.

“I think all the U.S. facilities are working with NRC to enhance the safety features of all the U.S. facilities,” Eller said.

CPS owns a 40 percent stake in the Bay City plant, which is about 11 miles inland from Matagorda Bay. NRC Energy of Texas owns 44 percent, while Austin Energy owns 16 percent.

STP units 1 and 2 generate 1,088 megawatts of power for CPS Energy customers.

STP Unit 1 went online in 1988 and Unit 2 in 1989, making them the sixth- and fourth-youngest units in the U.S.

jhiller(at)express-news.net

October 12, 2012
Associated Press

TOKYO (AP) — The utility behind Japan’s nuclear disaster acknowledged for the first time Friday that it could have avoided the crisis.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. said in a statement that it had known safety improvements were needed before last year’s tsunami triggered three meltdowns, but it had feared the political, economic and legal consequences of implementing them.

"When looking back on the accident, the problem was that preparations were not made in advance," TEPCO’s internal reform task force, led by company President Naomi Hirose, said in the statement. "Could necessary measures have been taken with previous tsunami evaluations? It was possible to take action" by adopting more extensive safety measures, the task force said.

The task force said TEPCO had feared efforts to better protect nuclear facilities from severe accidents such as tsunamis would trigger anti-nuclear sentiment, interfere with operations or increase litigation risks. TEPCO could have mitigated the impact of the accident if it had diversified power and cooling systems by paying closer attention to international standards and recommendations, the statement said. TEPCO also should have trained employees with practical crisis management skills rather than conduct obligatory drills as a formality, it said.

The admissions mark a major reversal for the utility, which had defended its preparedness and crisis management since the March 2011 tsunami. The disaster knocked out power to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, leading to the meltdowns, which forced massive evacuations and will take decades to clean up.

The statement was released after TEPCO held its first internal reform committee meeting, led by former U.S. nuclear regulatory chief Dale Klein. His five-member committee oversees the task force’s reform plans.

"It’s very important for TEPCO to recognize the needs to reform and the committee is very anxious to facilitate the reform necessary for TEPCO to become a world-class company," Klein told a news conference. "The committee’s goal is to ensure that TEPCO develops practices and procedures so an accident like this will never happen again."

The reform plans aim to use the lessons learned at TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in northern Japan. The cash-strapped utility wants to restart that plant, but TEPCO officials denied the reform plans are aimed at improving public image to gain support for the plant’s resumption.

"The reforms are intended to improve our safety culture, and we have no intention to link it to a possibility of resuming the (Kashiwazaki-Kariwa) plant," said Takafumi Anegawa, the TEPCO official in charge of nuclear asset management. "We don’t have any preconditions for our reforms."

The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant has been substantially stabilized but is still running on makeshift equipment as workers continue their work to decommission the four damaged reactors, which could take several decades.

Additional safety measures have been installed at nuclear power plants nationwide since the accident under the government’s instructions, including enhancing seawalls, adding backup power and cooling water sources, and developing better crisis management training. But plant operators will be required to take further steps as a new nuclear regulatory authority launched in September steps up safety requirements.

Investigative reports compiled by the government and the parliament panels said collusion between the company and government regulators allowed lax supervision and allowed TEPCO to continue lagging behind in safety steps.

Despite records indicating a major tsunami had once hit off Japan’s northern coast, TEPCO took the most optimistic view of the risk and insisted that its 5.7-meter-high seawall was good enough. The tsunami that struck Fukushima Dai-ichi was more than twice that height.

The company had said in its own accident probe report in June that the tsunami could not be anticipated and that the company did the best it could to bring the critically damaged plant under control, although there were shortfalls that they had to review. TEPCO bitterly criticized what it said was excessive interference from the government and the prime minister’s office.

TEPCO’s Anegawa said the task force plans to compile by the end of the year recommendations "that would have saved us from the accident if we turn the clock back."

For Immediate Release
June 4, 2012
http://markey.house.gov/

Contact: Giselle Barry 202-225-2836

Renews call for independent investigation into charges of retaliation, safety concerns

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Edward J. Markey (D- Mass.) today released a new unsolicited letter and other accounts indicating a long-standing problem with the safety culture at some NRC regional offices that allegedly has resulted in retaliation for the disclosure of safety concerns. He also revealed the troubling disclosure that NRC staff whistleblowers who have contacted his office lack confidence in NRC’s Inspector General (IG) to assist in the investigation and resolution of their claims. Rep. Markey described the new claims, which include whistleblowers employed in more than one of NRC’s Regional offices, and called for an independent investigation into NRC’s safety culture in a letter sent today to the NRC.

Rep. Markey’s letter outlines a series of troubling new allegations that have come to light in the wake of the Congressman’s inquiry last month regarding allegations that the current Deputy Division Director of the Division of Reactor Projects in NRC’s Texas-based Region IV office has actively retaliated against individuals who bring safety concerns to his attention. These latest allegations made by whistleblowers include disturbing accounts of interference with and alteration of safety findings at the Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Station, San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and Fermi Nuclear Power Plant, and mistreatment of technical staff by Region IV management with verbal berating, workplace humiliation, and lowered performance ratings after years of outstanding reviews. A recent resignation of a member of NRC’s Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards due reportedly to inappropriate nuclear industry influence over that body, and a 3-2 NRC vote to overrule Chairman Jaczko’s proposal to include the troubled Fort Calhoun Station on the agenda of a Commission meeting also raise concerns.

Additionally, the individuals who contacted Rep. Markey’s office all indicated a lack of trust in the NRC Inspector General (IG) to conduct fair and thorough investigations of allegations due to a perceived bias on the part of the IG towards NRC’s management views.

"These latest allegations paint a disturbing picture of systemic powerlessness and stigma for NRC staff who simply want to tell the truth about safety concerns at America’s nuclear power plants," said Rep. Markey, senior member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "When NRC staffers step forward to blow the whistle on actions by the agency that fail to live up to its nuclear safety responsibilities, we need to take their concerns seriously and make sure they are not subjected to harassment to retaliation for doing their duty. The best way to determine if these allegations are true and how best to address them is to begin an independent, credible investigation of NRC’s safety culture, including its Advisory Committee."

A copy of the letter to the NRC can be found HERE.

Specific new developments and allegations documented in Rep. Markey’s letter include:

• Commissioners Ostendorff, Svinicki and Apostolakis rejected to include events at Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Station in Nebraska on the agenda for NRC’s June 1, 2012 Agency Action Review Meeting, despite the facility’s assignment in 2011 of the highest significance "red" safety finding. Part of the purpose of this meeting is to review the agency’s actions related to the nuclear power plants with significant performance problems.
• When Region IV staff recommended in a written report that NRC assemble an "Augmented Inspection Team" (the second most aggressive means of investigating safety problems) to inspect the 2011 fire at the Fort Calhoun Station, Region IV management altered the report to instead recommend a less-intense, paperwork-focused "Special Inspection Team" without the concurrence of the NRC staff who had recommended the more aggressive approach.
• In 2009-2010, Region IV management allegedly attempted to improperly influence a safety issue when an NRC staff member recommended the issuance of a "yellow" safety finding at the Fort Calhoun Station due to inadequate flood protection measures, arguing that "flood findings can’t be yellow" and assigned a new NRC analyst to perform an in depth independent review of the analysis.
• Staff was allegedly retaliated against after raising a safety concern about the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station that was subsequently validated. The safety concern was first validated by NRC in 2006, but the licensee allegedly failed to correct the problem and took steps to retaliate against the employee. Even after the staff person elevated the concern to the Region IV office in 2010 and in 2011 the NRC revalidated the safety concern, neither the NRC nor NRC IG have taken steps to remedy the claims of retaliation.
• An inspector from NRC’s Region III office reported a similar concern in which safety inspection findings identified during an engineering inspection performed at the Fermi Nuclear Power Plant in 2010 were allegedly subsequently removed from the inspection report by Region III middle management, followed by retaliation against the individual.

July 16, 2012

New York Times

TOKYO — In Japan’s largest antinuclear rally since the disaster at Fukushima, tens of thousands of protesters gathered at a park in central Tokyo on Monday to urge the government to halt its restarting of the nation’s reactors.

A protester shouted slogans during a large antinuclear rally in Tokyo.
Organizers said 170,000 people filled a Tokyo square to sing songs, beat drums and cheer on a series of high-profile speakers who called for more Japanese to make their voices heard. The police put the number at 75,000, still making it the biggest gathering of antinuclear protesters since the Fukushima accident last year.

"To stay silent in the wake of Fukushima is inhuman," the Oscar-winning musician Ryuichi Sakamoto told the crowd, which braved soaring temperatures to gather at Yoyogi Park.

Polls suggest that public opinion is still divided over the future of nuclear power in Japan. But a unilateral decision last month by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to start putting the country’s reactors back into use has angered many Japanese and galvanized the antinuclear camp.

Read more at the New York Times website….

07  September 2012

World Nuclear News

Approval of four new reactors could be delayed as the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission reconsiders its confidence in long term waste management arrangements over the next 24 months.

The NRC has to develop an environmental impact statement on the storing of used nuclear fuel at power plant sites for extended periods, which will form part of a new ‘waste confidence rule’ fundamental to power plant licensing. The previous rule was invalidated in June by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which said the NRC should have considered the possiblity that a permanent waste disposal facility might never actually be built, as well as more factors relating to potential water leaks or fires at storage pools.

The NRC will “proceed directly” on the task, it said, noting that staff could draw on a history of similar work. Nevertheless, the NRC said it might take 24 months to develop the statement. In the meantime the lack of a robust position afforded by a waste confidence rule means that the NRC cannot issue final licenses to new nuclear power plants. This may mean postponed approval for construction and operating licenses for two reactors at Levy in Florida and another two at Lee in South Carolina, which were both expected in late 2013.

In theory the licensing hiatus also applies to final NRC decisions on licence extensions, of which applications are under consideration regarding 13 reactors. While final decisions schedules may be affected pending new waste confidence, the continued operation of the reactors should not. NRC rules say that a reactor may continue operating if its owner submitted a sufficient application to the NRC with at least five years of the original licence remaining.

Waste confidence
For the NRC to grant a new licence to a nuclear facility it must have confidence that there will be suitable storage and disposal facilities for the wastes produced by the plant during its operation. This comes down to the generic waste confidence rule which in part relies on an environmental impact assessment.

This became a live issue to US nuclear power sector in 2009 when President Barack Obama scrapped the Yucca Mountain disposal project with the help of the men he appointed to lead the NRC and the Department of Energy, Gregory Jaczko and Stephen Chu respectively. With no long term disposal plan, the NRC had to revise its waste confidence rule in 2010, deciding that storage at nuclear power plants sites would be acceptable for up to 60 years after the end of power generation. This was quickly challenged by campaigners, leading to the court decision in June.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News