Nuclear Safety: Department of Energy Should Strengthen Its Enforcement Program. T-RCED-99-228. 9 pp. June 29, 1999.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/rc99228t.pdf

-- Anonymous, July 09, 1999

Answers

As somebody else recently posted, "Got KI?"

-- Anonymous, July 09, 1999

To Bonnie or Rick:

I live about 60 miles "as the crow flies" from Glen Rose, Texas where Comanche Peak 1 and Comanche Peak 2 nuclear plants are located. They have been listed on the NRC report as being "ready" in October and November respectively. When these plants were being built we heard hair-raising stories about sloppy construction, drinking on the job by construction employees and drug use. These plants were built by Brown and Root and I think I remember that they were in trouble over the construction of some other plants. Should I just panic now and get it over and what precautions should I take. I have two young grandchildren that live just down the road from me and they are my major concern. Thanks for your advice.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 1999

To Nadine - yes panic early and avoid the rush.

Then after that is over [its never really over... just comes and goes in waves with each new report]... start making plans. Lots has been< a href"http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-one- category.tcl?topic=Electric%20Utilities%20and%20Y2K&category=Nuclear% 20Facilities">nuclear threads.... do some research and develope "contingency plans" (multiple.. plan A.. plan B).

Plan for the worst... hope for the best.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 1999

Well THAT was a mess. Sorry.

Here's a link (I hope) to the threads on this forum about nuclear plants. Good place to start some research, then make your contingency plans.

Plan for the worst... hope for the best.

"Fingers crossed, cheeks tight, toes curled, we look forward to that "E ticket" ride into the new Millennium." - - John Anderson, Y2K News Radio.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 1999

If you're worried enough, a company called RealGoods

http://www.realgoods.com

sells radiation detectors (about $350.00 or so, I think). If they work as well as advertised, they would NOT have detected anything amiss at Three Mile Island; OTOH, TMI did not in fact have any worrisome release of radioactivity. Speaking for myself, I would say that as long as a RealGoods detector showed nothing above background (there will *always* be something for it to detect; natural radiation is everywhere), you probably have nothing to worry about.

If such a detector *doubled* its reading, I personally would waste no time gathering my clan and evacuating, preferably in a car with the windows rolled up and the air vents off. At that level of radiation YOU ARE IN NO DANGER. But you won't know *why* the radiation has increased, and it might be because of something your body could absorb and hold onto. External radiation you can walk away from, or shield against. Internal -- now, that's a commitment.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 1999

Nadine,

Re - Comanche Peaks power plants. I cannot vouch for the stories you heard during construction, but I do have something to contribute.

In 1981 I was working for Bechtel, building a natural gas plant in Indonesia and we hired several Brown-Root engineers who had quit the South Texas Nuclear plant project. They had some harrowing stories to tell of what went on. A year later Brown-Root was fired from that job and it was taken over by Bechtel. I worked on it and worked with some of the Bechtel engineers. They were pulling out their hair trying to fix the screw ups and fixed as many as they could, but I know they didn't get all of them. Many were "buried" because they couldn't be found, the records were so poor. Much of the work had to be redone. The South Texas project was finally finished in 1988, years and years late.

So I don't know about Comanche Peaks, but I do know about South Texas, I worked with the structural engineers, not the electrical engineers on that job. As to whether you should panic or not, I don't know. I live down wind east of both plants and am concerned. But I do take comfort from the 18 inch thick reinforced concrete, containment walls, except where I heard they put the beer cans and bottles.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 1999

I was in Richland WA. in the early eighties. Nuke plants were being built on the Hanford site.

I too heard first hand accounts of drug use and drinking on the job by the people building them.

Not comforting.

It may sound off the Y2K topic but it relates to the quality of workmanship in the plant, ethics of the people building it, reliability of the plant and our level of confidence in the industry.

Tough stuff to reconcile with.

steve

-- Anonymous, July 10, 1999

Nadine, I'm going to go against the trend in this thread and tell you not to panic. The items the Comanche plants have left to be fixed (plant training simulators and a condensate purification control system) would not stop the plant from shutting down safely if that becomes necessary. I personally believe the NRC when it states that shutdown systems are not affected by digital problems, and I think the evidence supports the ability to accomplish the necessary cool down even with loss of offsite power.

There are increased risks, as others have already pointed out, concerning potential disruptions in control and monitoring systems, with the attendant possibility for human errors in judgement. I consider, however, that there is a balancing factor and one thing that Y2K has going for it. Unlike a "strike out of the blue" failure, when personnel in any industry might be in a complacent, non-watchful frame of mind and may then be overtaken by panic or confusion, the 2000 rollover is a known event in a specific time frame. If ever there is a point when alertness throughout our infrastructure will be at its peak, Y2K is it. In my opinion, the odds are very good that if problems erupt in nuclear facilities, any U.S. nuclear plant _will_ shut down safely. Ironically, Y2K issues have brought about a resurgence of focus on nuclear plants which I believe has served to increase the concentration on safety factors. I have been much more concerned about the potential for accidents in the "calm" years of the past (and perhaps this will reassert itself in future) when a measure of complacency was easy to come by and there was little public focus on the nuclear industry. This assessment of mine is a U.S. centric one only, by the way. It also doesn't address any potential problems brought about by losing generation if a nuke plant does have to shut down. For what it's worth, that's my take on the issue. For optimum risk negation, do I think the nukes should be shut down or be on low generation standby prior to Y2K and brought online in a controlled fashion right after? Yes. But I also don't think that's going to happen.

Since risk assessment is an individual thing, if you or anyone else does decide to pick up and move, I'll offer some information to help. If I remember correctly from the cold war days of my youth, the _only_ place in the U.S. considered far enough away from any nuclear plant to afford safety in the event of an accident was somewhere around Montana. You can see the area I'm talking about on the North American map of nuclear reactors at:

http://www.insc.anl.gov/pwrmaps/map/north_america.html

Look for the center of the oval formed by the Portland, Denver, Minneapolis and the Regina, Canada nuke facilities.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 1999

bonnie,

i disagree... but maybe you can help me work through this one statement that keeps popping up. i feel that i need some clarification regarding part of your following sentence... there is something that i am just not getting.

bonnie] The items the Comanche plants have left to be fixed (plant training simulators and a condensate purification control system) would not stop the plant from shutting down safely if that becomes necessary.

what does this mean?

"would not stop the plant from shutting down safely if that becomes necessary."

this seems to be the consensus of opinion... but i don't understand.

a]what would cause, prompt, initiate the necessity of taking a plant 'safely' off line?

b]how do they take it offline... what constitutes taking a nuke down? turning off the steam turbine and the electric generator?... what exactly is involved in taking a nuke offline?

and after it is taken offline what is there left to deal with in order to keep it from melting down?

remember, i live in the northeast quadrant... the part of the map that appears to be suffering from a terminal case of the measles.

map

and, as an aside, i am in the middle of approximately *seven* nuclear facilities and only *one* is even y2k ready... forget about compliant.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 1999

Hi Marianne. There are oodles of reasons which can necessitate "scramming" a nuke, either manually or as an automatic trip. It may be contrary to the public conception, but it happens all the time. Some months there are a dozen or more reactor scrams in various nuclear facilities, for as many different reasons.

This might be akin to a sink or swim submersion, but the best way I know for anyone to get a handle on understanding why and how a nuke plant is taken offline is to read the NRC Daily Incident Reports over a long period of time. These reports, and the past months and year's archived reports can be accessed at:

http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/DAILY/drlist.htm

There have already been some reactor scrams this month, along with Technical Specification outages. If you read several months' worth of these incident reports, you will either 1. be scared to pieces and move to Montana, or 2. realize that the industry actually does deal successfully with shutdowns, offsite power outages, leaks, human errors, parts defects, earthquakes, and a slew of other problems, on a regular basis, hundreds of times a year.

Do I think it's impossible for a nuclear accident to ever happen again? Nope. Short of shutting down every single nuclear generating plant, we all live with that risk every single day, whether it's the turn of the century or not. The sh&% happens scenario has been perennially present since the first nuke unit went online, and will remain a potentiality until we decide to do without nuclear generation. Did the industry learn from what happened at TMI? Yes. Did TMI cause a slew of extra regulatory and safety actions to be instituted in the industry over the last 25 years? Also yes. Are industry people now, and at the rollover going to be at a far higher level of alertness than the TMI operators were in the complacency of "normal" times? Again, I think the answer is yes.

We're probably going to have to disagree (in a friendly manner, I hope) on this issue, but taking all the info I've seen so far into account, my concern level remains much greater for many other Y2K risk factors than it does for a Y2K-caused release of radiation in the U.S. Each person will have to consider their own tolerance on this issue. At this point in time, however, the only viable option to remove the individual risk of being near a potential radiation release is to move to the Montana area or to a non-nuclear country outside the U.S. I think it's quite clear now that the NRC is going to keep the nukes online, regardless of any public opinion to the contrary.

-- Anonymous, July 10, 1999

Bonnie said: "Unlike a "strike out of the blue" failure, when personnel in any industry might be in a complacent, non-watchful frame of mind and may then be overtaken by panic or confusion, the 2000 rollover is a known event in a specific time frame."

But that's sort of the whole point about Y2K. It shouldn't have been a big surprise that one [two digit] year follows another and then you get to '00 and the computer won't compute. Companies, industries, and gov't agencies had a choice at many points along the road to start remediation, but choose to delay just a little while longer.. trivial problem.. we'll get to that later if we need to.

Until a few months ago we were being told there was NO Y2K issue at nuclear plants because all the controls were analog. And now we find out that a third of them won't even be "ready" with their "mission critical" items until as late as Dec. 16th? And we don't hear ANYTHING about compliance. Just that there are no issues that would prevent the "safe shutdown" of the plant. As if that was all we had to be concerned with. If so, then please explain this:

"The Brookhaven National Laboratory, in report released in August 1997 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, estimated an accident at a plant like Calvert Cliffs after being shut down for 3 = years could produce 29 fatalities within a year, 33,200 additional cancer deaths after one year, and cost $186 billion." Link

What kind of "accident" could cause those casuality numbers 3 1/2 YEARS after SAFT SHUTDOWN?

And would those numbers be higher 3 1/2 months after safe shutdown, or 3 1/2 weeks, or 3 1/2 days or 3 1/2 minutes - after safe shutdown?

-- Anonymous, July 11, 1999

TMI did not in fact have any worrisome release of radioactivity. -- L Cassells (mellyrn@nist.gov), July 09, 1999.

This is incorrect.

TMI released millions of curies (one curie equals 37 billion atomic disintegrations per second, most background doses are measured in billionths of curies), but no one, not even the utility, knows exactly how much radiation was released when the core temperature rose above five thousand degrees (f).

People died from three mile island, but since cancers and other diseases are delayed in their effect, the true numbers will remain impossible to precisely calculate. The perfect crime.

Geiger counters are sold through www.medcom.com not real goods (real goods sells solar equipment to power your geiger counter, though)

Mark Robinowitz www.igc.org/icc370/y2k.htm

-- Anonymous, July 13, 1999