Vermont Yankee on the banks of the Connecticut River
VERNON — The legal world holds its breath awaiting Federal Judge J. Garvan Murtha’s ruling on the Entergy v. Vermont case. Meanwhile, questions about problems at the Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee power station continue.
The Vermont State Nuclear Advisory Panel recently held a hearing about safety issues at the plant. Officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission answered questions about a Dec. 6 incident in which two backup generators that operate a plant cooling system were shut off. They also presented information about a report on Mark 1 General Electric reactors in light of the March nuclear plant disaster in Japan. In addition, Vermont Yankee plant employees informed the panel that the Construction Office Building well, which was found in 2010 to be contaminated by a tritium leak at the plant, will not be retested.
A mislabeled generator
Earlier this month, a plant operator mistakenly turned off a backup generator at the same time another emergency generator was down for service.
The two generators were down for about two minutes, according to a report from the Associated Press, and the plant continued to operate.
The incident sparked questions at the panel hearing.
Elizabeth Miller, VSNAP Chair and Department of Public Service Commissioner, wanted to know what timeline resident inspectors follow when there is a breach of safety protocols at the plant.
Scott Rutenkroger, the new NRC Senior Resident Inspector who was previously stationed at James A. FitzPatrick nuclear power in Scriba, N.Y., outlined his daily work rounds for the panel.
The timeline for this screening “varies a lot,” Rutenkroger said. He explained that inspectors study problems and then review the NRC’s regulations or standards.
Rutenkroger said the NRC also wants to see what the licensee, Entergy, produces in its root cause analysis.
Once the inspectors understand the event in total, they document the issue in their quarterly inspection report, Rutenkroger said. The next such report is due in January, he told Miller.
VSNAP member Jim Matteau asked whether Rutenkroger ever saw “something troubling” or if there were any “unpleasant days” during his routine at VY that required a work plan change.
Rutenkroger said he didn’t know “how to grade that question.”
Lessons from Fukushima
Chris Miller, director of the division of reactor safety for the NRC’s Region 1, which has jurisdiction over Vermont Yankee, gave a presentation on the commission’s actions in response to the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan.
Several of the reactors discharged radiation after an earthquake and tsunami hit the country in March.
Chris Miller said after the accident in Fukushima, the commission assigned a task force to evaluate the 104 nuclear reactors in the United States.
The commission has prioritized the task force’s recommendations into phases, with some items pegged for immediate action. Other responses fall into near-term and long-term categories, he said.
Chris Miller’s presentation listed the “recommendations the NRC intends to pursue without delay,” including reevaluating seismic and flooding hazards and modifying the sustained black out rule, which outlines expectations for plants operating during power outages.
The loss of backup generation directly accounted for the disaster in Japan.
The new sustained black out rule would require plants to run on backup power for a minimum of eight hours to 72 hours. Current regulations call for a minimum of four hours.
Another recommendation includes installing hardened vent designs in boiling water reactors with Mark I and Mark II containments. The Fukushima and VY reactors share the same boiling water reactor containment design.
Recommendations with longer timelines include seeking “stakeholder [industry] input in determining action on each recommendation,” developing new regulatory requirements, expanding the radius of the emergency planning zone beyond the present 10 miles, and addressing issues with dry cask storage.
Chris Miller said the commission expects that enacting the recommendations will take five years.
Also, he said, the commission’s rule-making process historically has taken three years because of inclusion of public feedback. The commission will probably limit public input on the Fukushima recommendations to speed up the process, Miller said.
“Within days of a shoe bomber failing to blow up an airplane, we were all taking off our shoes,” said state Sen. Mark MacDonald, a VSNAP member, referring to the Transportation Security Administration’s procedure of X-raying shoes after a failed terrorist plot in 2001.
“What’s going on at VY now that’s different than before the Fukushima accident?” he asked.
Rutenkroger said inspectors had identified post-Fukushima issues at VY and documented them in a May inspection report.
Sampling the COB well?
Vermont Yankee State Liaison Engineer Bernard Buteau told the panel that Entergy has no plans to take any more samples of a former drinking well on the plant site, known as the Construction Office Building well, that was found to be contaminated with tritium in 2010. Buteau said that further sampling will create a path for the radionuclide to contaminate drinking water.
In November 2009, tritium was found leaking from the plant. Engineers isolated the source — leaking underground pipes encased in a concrete tunnel — in January 2010.
Vermont Yankee “proactively” closed the Construction Office Building well, which was used as a drinking water source for employees at the plant, in February 2010, said Buteau.
Samplings of the COB well later that year tested positive for tritium.
Tests measured 1,040 picocuries per liter in a “fracture zone” in the well about 200 to 220 feet down, Entergy spokesperson Larry Smith told The Commons in an October 2010 interview.
“It’s [the tritium] in the aquifer,” Smith said at the time.
According to Buteau, VY ceased sampling the well in January 2011. The COB well’s shaft descends into the bedrock, he said, so sampling it could cause tritium to enter the aquifer below.
Gov. Peter Shumlin has called multiple times for Entergy to resume testing the COB well.
Buteau also said that the company had contracted with an environmental firm to develop a hydrology model of how water moves through the soils under the plant.
The model determined that water flows west to east toward the Connecticut River and upward from the bedrock toward the soil’s surface, he said.
Entergy has drilled 32 monitoring wells at VY to test for tritium moving through the groundwater. The company tests an additional seven local drinking wells in Vermont and New Hampshire, said Buteau.
These drinking water wells have never tested positive for tritium, he said.
“There’s no [tritium] ingestion path for the public as confirmed by the NRC in inspection reports,” said Buteau. “It’s not prudent, nor do we need to sample the COB.”
The company will leave the COB well alone in an attempt to safeguard the public, said Buteau.
VSNAP member Laurence Becker, who represented Agency of Natural Resources head Deb Markowitz, said the discovery of tritium didn’t “jibe” with the hydrology model. He said the company should resume testing.
Becker added that representatives at the Environmental Protection Agency’s lab in Washington D.C. believed that the vacuum method previously used to sample the COB well, which also risked injecting tritium into the aquifer, was unnecessary.
Holding accountable
Most of the 20 members of the public spoke out against the nuclear plant during the public comment portion of the meeting.
Clay Turnbull of the New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution (NEC) presented the panel with a press release and copies of a staff report from U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass.
Turnbull said the report, “Regulatory Meltdown: How Four Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners Conspired to Delay and Weaken Nuclear Reactor Safety in the Wake of Fukushima,” confirmed the NEC’s concerns that the commission regularly attempts to weaken the regulations governing nuclear plants and engages in “foot dragging” on Fukushima-related reforms.
Turnbull also described the report as outlining how four commissioners had failed to “enlist” NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko to their “wait-and-see and behind closed doors approach.”
Attempts by Jaczko’s colleagues to remove the chairman have been the focus of recent congressional testimony.
In the NEC press release, the 40-year-old anti-nuclear group called on VSNAP members to recommend that Shumlin, Attorney General William Sorrell, the Department of Public Service, and the state’s Congressional Delegation “strongly support NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko before President Obama and the U.S. Congress and in support of prompt, decisive, and ongoing action and regulatory reform responding to Fukushima’s lessons.”
“There is reason to believe that hydrogen, which fed the appalling explosions at Fukushima, may have been created, at least in part, from localized boiling of spent fuel coolant,” said NEC Technical Advisor Raymond Shadis.
“Vermont Yankee’s spent fuel pool contains more high-level nuclear waste fuel than all four of the Fukushima reactors combined,” said Shadis.
He added that the NRC “has calculated potential latent fatalities of a spent fuel fire at VY to be up to 25,000, out to a range of 500 miles; despite successful early evacuation of the 10-mile evacuation zone.”
Shadis said that two Fukushima hazard-reduction measures included moving spent nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools to dry cask storage and replacement of all non-submersible safety-related electrical cables from underground conduits or cable vaults.
“The NRC won’t do these jobs unless held accountable by citizens and the state,” said Turnbull.
Editor’s note: Because of an error, the end of this story was not originally posted. The full text was restored on Dec. 30.
Permalink |
2 comments:
“at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex… Several of the reactors discharged radiation after an earthquake and tsunami hit the country in March.” ALL reactors that have achieved criticality discharge radiation 24x7x365. I think the author meant “discharged radionuclides”, but that’s also true of all operating reactors. Only the amount discharged, which was huge, varies.
The NRC’s director of reactor safety for Region 1 reportedly listed the “recommendations the NRC intends to pursue without delay”. It’s been nine months since the meltdowns at VT Yankee’s sister-reactors; I wonder what the NRC thinks ‘delay’ means? Another 9 months? Nine years?
Permalink |
“Tests measured 1,040 picocuries per liter in a “fracture zone” in the [Construction Office Building] well about 200 to 220 feet down, Entergy spokesperson Larry Smith told The Commons in an October 2010 interview.” (per above)
Yet in December of 2010 …
“There is no risk to the health and safety of the public or to Vermont Yankee workers. Recent overburden well measurements at GZ-12D and GZ-22D confirm west to east groundwater flow in both the shallow and deep overburden regions. In addition, an upward flow direction is observed from the shallow bedrock to the overburden. (That is to say that the bedrock water pressure is elevated. Therefore, the bedrock aquifer is protected as well as public wells to the west.)” http://vtdigger.org/2010/12/03/vermont-yankee-opens-new-monitoring-wells-one-has-tritium-concentration-of-500000-pcil/
So in October Entergy was finding tritium 200 to 220 feet down in fractured bedrock, yet two months later they were saying there was no threat to bedrock wells.
Wanna buy my bridge? How about a journalistic followup?
Permalink |
Delay and obfuscate is what the NRC is very good at doing. Insisting that the industry spend money to make their plants safer in the wake of Fukushima is something they are not very good at doing.
Sen. MacDonald nailed it with his analogy. The industry is slow to react, because of the investment necessary to upgrade their plants and make them safer.
As witnessed recently with the in-fighting going on within the NRC, the majority of the members are beholden to the industry; not the American people. The NRC should be dissolved and a new regulatory oversight commission more accountable to the public should be formed.
Permalink |
And from today’s Australian press http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/tepco-says-it-no-longer-owns-fukushima-fallout/story
TEPCO says it ‘no longer owns’ Fukushima fallout
BY: RICK WALLACE, TOKYO CORRESPONDENT From: The Australian \
IN terms of sheer chutzpah, Tokyo Electric Power Co’s claim that it no longer owns the radioactive isotopes that spewed out of its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March takes some beating.
In defending a lawsuit from a Fukushima Prefecture golf club, lawyers said the radioactive cesium that had blighted the Sunfield Nihonmatsu golf course’s fairways and greens was the club’s problem. The utility has taken a similarly hard line defending claims from ryokan (inn) and onsen (spa) owners.
TEPCO’s lawyers used the arcane legal principle of res nullius to argue the emissions that escaped after the tsunami and earthquake triggered a meltdown were no longer its responsibility. “Radioactive materials (such as cesium) that scattered and fell from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant belong to individual landowners, not TEPCO,” the utility told Tokyo District Court.
The chief operating officer of the prestigious golf course, Tsutomo Yamane, told The Australian that he and his staff were stunned: “I couldn’t believe my ears. I told my employees, ‘TEPCO is saying the radiation doesn’t belong to them’, and they said ‘I beg your pardon’.”
The court rejected TEPCO’s argument, but ruled it was the responsibility of local, prefectural and national governments to clean it up.
The case – and the club’s bid for $160 million in clean-up costs – has proceeded to the High Court amid fears the ruling could result in some local governments being bankrupted.
Mr Yamane said that, before the disaster, Sunfield Nihonmatsu, about 45km west of the stricken plant, was regarded as one of the region’s finest courses and was enjoyed by about 30,000 players a year.
He said the course was showered with fallout from the accident and sections of it were now reporting readings of almost double the criteria for evacuation of 20 millisieverts a year imposed by the Japanese government for regions around the plant.
“The highest radiation amount we measured on the course was 51 microsieverts per hour (in a drain). We are getting more and more concerned about the amount of cesium on the ground,” Mr Yamane said.
“Up to the end of September there was still staff working to maintain the course, but on advice from the prefectural government we had to ask them to leave.”
The club launched the lawsuit after being fobbed off by TEPCO’s compensation department. Mr Yamane said TEPCO was already using the District Court judgment as a legal battering ram to fend off lawsuits from other affected golf courses in Fukushima Prefecture.
“I wonder what’s up with today’s Japan,” Mr Yamane said. “TEPCO used to keep saying nuclear power was safe and kept building plants in Japan.
“If that was true, the kind of problem we are seeing now should never have occurred.”
Permalink |
re: hardened vents: If NRC is really just now talking about installing hardened vents in Mark 1 and2 reactors, why did they tell us back in March that Fukushima could never happen here because our Mark 1′s have hardened vents? Hmmm, which one is lying, Thing 1 or Thing 2? (P.S. Fukushima reactors all had hardened vents too, only they don’t work when there is no electricity to power them. Power blackout. No electricity. Only 8 hours of back-up power. What are these idiots thinking?!?
re: Tritium leak and Construction Office Building drinking water well contamination: In recent articles (Brattleboro Reformer and others) about the tritium contamination reaching the Connecticut River, ENVY spokesman Larry Smith remarks that contamination of the river was “expected” and “all according to their models” and never utters a word of apology or remorse for the contamination of the groundwater, the aquifer, and a National Heritage River. Despite physical evidence that the water in their deep drinking water well was contaminated with tritium, they continued to deny that drinking water wells were contaminated. They merely changed the designation of the well, after the fact, to non-potable. Then they refused to test it again, citing hydro-geo “models” done by their own contractors that claim contamination of the well and deep aquifer “can’t happen.” It is clear that this arrogant corporation believes it can contaminate the environment of VT and its neighboring, downwind and downstream states at will. They say they expect the contamination to continue seeping into the CT River for decades.
This is the behavior we have come to expect from Entergy, and it is condoned by the NRC. Lying to the media and public officials, citing bogus models and studies that deny physical evidence, changing definitions or designations after the fact, blaming the public for their delays, permitting first, covering up later, refusing to monitor, sample, or inspect components known to be corroding and failing by pretending their “root cause analysis” pointed in another direction, hiding behind inadequate regulations designed to protect the industry, not the public—all protected and justified by the NRC—is all it takes to keep on contaminating.
Clean water, clean air, State’s rights to protect their citizens? Not in a world where corporations are “people,” special people who can lie under oath with impunity.