Y2K - 22 US Nuclear Power Plants Unprepared

Environment News Service (ENS) http://ens.lycos.com/ens

8-7-99

WASHINGTON, DC (ENS) - Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chairman Greta Joy Dicus said Wednesday that 22 U.S. nuclear power plants are not yet ready for Y2K. Dicus was testifying before the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem.

Compliance completion dates range from late October for 16 plants to mid-December for three plants.

Dicus said that six nuclear plants will remain unprepared after November 1.

The two D.C. Cook plants in Berrien County, Michigan will not be Y2K ready until after November 1, and would remain shut down during the Y2K transition, Dicus said. The plants are currently in the midst of an extended shutdown, and have Y2K readiness deadlines of December 15.

Four other plants with November or later deadlines will require outages to complete Y2K activities. Those plants are the Brunswick Unit 1 near Wilmington, North Carolina; Comanche Peak Unit 1 in Sommervell County, Texas; Salem Unit 1 in Salem County, New Jersey; and Farley Unit 2 near Dothan, Alabama, which has a December 16 deadline.

Brunswick Unit I, owned and operated by Carolina Power & Light Co., is 20 miles south of Wilmington, North Carolina at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. (Photos courtesy NRC) "These outages have been scheduled, and each of the licensees have experience on sister units in completing the most significant Y2K remediation activities," Dicus said.

"Nuclear power plants shouldn't play Russian roulette when it comes to Y2K - when they wait until the last minute and then hope for the best," said Senator Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat and vice-chairman of the Senate Y2K Committee.

Taking this chance "may not allow enough time to address unforseen problems," said the committee's chair, Senator Robert Bennett, a Republican from Utah.

Currently, 30 of the 103 operating U.S. power plants are unprepared for Y2K, Dicus said, but the NRC expects most to be compliant by its upcoming September 30 evaluation.

The Y2K technology problem, also called the Y2K or Millennium bug, prevents computers from reading the year 2000 correctly and can potentially cause wide ranging system failures.

At a July 27 conference in Washington, Dicus said, "Regarding our highest priority - the uninterrupted performance of plant safety systems - all nuclear power plants report that their efforts are complete, and that no remaining Y2K-related problems exist that could directly affect the performance of safety systems or the capability for safe shutdown."

At that conference, Mary Olsen of the Washington, DC based Nuclear Information Resources Service (NIRS) said, "Clearly there is a difference between Y2K-ready and Y2K-compliant." Both Olsen and David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, believe that the NRC audit plan is "thoroughly useless." Lochbaum said, "It doesn't define the minimum acceptance standard for Y2K readiness and evaluate plants by these standards."

D.C. Cook Unit 1, owned and operated by Indiana/Michigan Power Co. on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, will be shut down during the Y2K transition. In its status report, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), a separate agency, defined Y2K-ready as "suitable for continued use into the Year 2000" but not necessarily containing "fully correct date manipulations." According to NERC, mission-critical components' primary functions must be reliable to be granted Y2K-ready status. The problem in the eyes of some critics lies in the non-safety-related systems.

This is a safety versus non-safety issue, said NIRS's Paul Gunter. The NRC is assuring that all safety-related, mission-critical equipment is reliable, but the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents started from non-safety-related equipment, he said.

In south Texas, nuclear power employees found that four percent of equipment tagged "non-safety" by the NRC was important to safety and another nine percent was risk significant, Gunter said. "There is very little room for failure."

These concerns will be tested during a September 8-9 industry wide drill when electric utilities will rehearse administrative, operating, communications and contingency response plans.

Dicus told the Senate Special Committee that she believes all nuclear plants "will be able to operate...safely during the transition from 1999 to 2000, and we do not anticipate the need for the NRC to direct any plant-specific action."

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 09, 1999

Answers

Huh? Say what???

"mid-December for three plants"

Got geiger-counters?

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 09, 1999.

Gee....and these plants have reguraly scheduled shut-downs for refueling when? Nice try though. When you want info on nukes, always go to an anti-nuke group.

-- you go Andy (nice@try.com), August 09, 1999.

Nice try,

I take it you don't live next door to one then? :)

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), August 09, 1999.