New Update: Millstone reactor restarts after emergency shut-down

NEW UPDATE: Millstone reactor shut-down, then re-started; more violations at Millstone; Millstone & Pilgrim power plants in hot water; see how a nuclear “accident” would affect you; mistaken identity; Fukushima “oops”

By Will Collette

UPDATE, August 15: Millstone's Unit #3 re-started this morning after a four and a half day shut-down. The Unit automatically shut down last Friday due to an electrical fault that cut the amount of cooling water going to the reactor. Without cooling water, very bad things can happen. The operator pointedly noted the shut-down was NOT an emergency, since the safety back-up worked to shut down the reactor.

UPDATE: The Associated Press reports this morning that the Millstone power plant's Unit 3 reactor was shut down on Friday night and stayed shut through Monday. The Unit automatically shut down when a malfunction disrupted the flow of cooling water to the reactor. Last summer, it was Unit 2 that was shut down when its cooling water's temperature exceeded NRC standards 

NRC cites Millstone for three more violations

Call me a cynic, but when regulators issue notices of violations to a potentially dangerous company, I am rarely reassured. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission cited our local nuke, the Millstone power station just 20 miles upwind from us just outside of New London on August 8.

The violations related to broken radiation monitoring equipment and Millstone's failure to notify the NRC about the problem. The NRC described these violations as having "very low safety significance." Perhaps the NRC's nonchalance about these violations has to do with such failures being commonplace, but I take little comfort in that. To me, any violation at a nuclear power plant is serious because the consequences are so dire.

 Hot Water and the Rules

Last summer, the Millstone nuclear power plant just 20 miles upwind from Charlestown, had to shut down for two weeks in August because the ocean water it used to cool reactor Unit #2 was too hot. Global warming. If the water is too hot to cool the reactor, very bad things could happen.

Millstone’s response to the shut-down was to announce that it planned to petition the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a change in the rules so it could use hotter ocean water (a 5 degree increase from 75 to 80 degrees). On July 30, the NRC notified Millstone’s owner, Virginia-based Dominion Energy, that its application for the rule change was complete and now the NRC would proceed to review their request.

Since this process will take more than a year, odds are Millstone will face another shut-down this summer when the waters in Long Island Sound exceed the limit. Coastal waters in general are heating up, reaching the highest temperatures in 150 years.

The Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Plymouth, MA (where Charlestown’s Town Administrator Mark Stankiewicz had his last job) has already had to power down on July 17-18 when water it draws from Cape Cod Bay exceeded 75 degrees. Pilgrim spokesperson Carol Wightman told the Boston Globe that Pilgrim is concerned about the rest of the summer.

Pondering the big “what if?”

Charlestown has been obsessed for months about the possible effects of having two large wind turbines sited in our midst. Personally, I’m more concerned about what might happen if there’s a problem at the Millstone nuke, given its colorful history.

Further, as a Boomer growing up, we lived with the specter of nuclear attack and that, of course, haunted our generation. I often thought of the likely targets for a nuclear attack and what that might do to me.

Now we live in the age of terrorism, which actually is a lot older than the period since 9/11. As I wrote recently, New London was actually being seriously considered as a nuclear target in 1978 by a band of idiots who plotted to highjack a nuclear submarine.

There’s a macabre new on-line tool that can help you indulge your nuclear fears or fantasies called Nukemap. You can zero in and pick your target (I used my house), select your choice of nuclear weapon, click on “Detonate” and see what would happen. 

You can pick various special effects that allow you to see the likely casualty count, blast, heat and shock damage and the path of the nuclear cloud based on prevailing wind direction. If you pick New London based on its military value, the 1978 nuclear plot and the Millstone power plant, you can see how far the cloud of radioactivity would go.

Fun for the whole family.

Other ways things could go wrong

These guys do not like each other

Even though the US and Russia have reduced the size of their nuclear arsenals, and generally, the threat of nuclear war is far less than it was during the Cold War, it has not gone away. Two facts dominate: first, there are still more than enough nuclear weapons in circulation to destroy the Earth many times over. Second, some of the countries that hold nuclear weapons scare the shit out of me.

Take India, for example. India and Pakistan have been in a state of constant hostilities since they were partitioned after the British left the subcontinent. Both countries have nuclear weapons pointed at each other. Both have enough nukes to destroy each other and themselves, and then some.

Both have shaky controls over those weapons, in the case of India, allowing field commanders the ability to launch without receiving orders from the central government. Both sides have religious zealots who believe their deity would welcome the extermination of the other side. Such deep-rooted religious hatreds can override any reasonable sense of self-interest or even self-preservation.

On July 25, the BBC reported that for six months, Indian troops on the border frontier were on high alert over what they believed to be invading drones coming either from its long-time enemy Pakistan, but more likely coming from its other international foe, China.

The Indian Army reported 329 sightings of these unidentified and presumably hostile objects. However, after research done by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, it turned out that what the Army had been seeing were the planets Jupiter and Venus.

During the Cold War, there were numerous close calls when natural phenomena (e.g. meteors) or innocent man-made objects (e.g. weather balloons) were mistaken for in-coming ICBMS and pushed either Soviet or US nuclear forces to the brink of launching a civilization-killing nuclear war. Now we have nuclear-armed India raising the alarm over planetary sightings.

Welcome to the 21^st Century.

Surprise, Surprise

After months of denial, Tokyo Electric Power admitted that radioactive water was indeed leaking into the sea from its crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant which was devastated by Japan’s horrific earthquake and tsunami. 

The plant lost power to draw cooling water from the ocean (see story, above, regarding the Millstone and Pilgrim nuclear power plants) to cool its reactors and radioactive waste pools. The waste pools exploded and at least one reactor core melted down.

But TEPCO has been using the standard industry line that “there’s no cause for alarm” ever since it happened. Admitting the obvious was a big step for them, though hardly exculpatory. 

And their statement was far from totally candid: TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono told reporters "We are very sorry for causing concerns. We have made efforts not to cause any leak to the outside, but we might have failed to do so,"

Reuters reports that TEPCO's tepid admission is sparking outrage. According to Shinji Kinjo, head of the government's Nuclear Regulatory Authority, TEPCO's "sense of crisis is weak. This is why you can't just leave it up to TEPCO alone...Right now, we have an emergency."