By Will ColletteTwenty miles to the west of Charlestown sits the Millstone nuclear power plant’s two operating reactors (and one dormant reactor). The facility is owned by Virginia-based Dominion Resources. According to the Associated Press, the facility underwent its second SCRAM (emergency shutdown) in the past 90 days.
This shut-down went from Saturday to Monday and affected the older of the two operating reactors, Unit 2, when a piece of equipment, a condenser vacuum that moves steam through the turbine, failed.
Last August, the SCRAM was on Unit 3 when another equipment failure caused an unsafe drop in the amount of cooling seawater going to Unit 3 to cool the reactor core.
If you’re a fan of nuclear power, you can rejoice and say “See – the system worked! The failsafe triggered and the chance of a meltdown was averted.” If you’re not a fan of nuclear power, like me, you can wonder how long our luck will hold out.
Plus, when things go badly at a nuclear power plant, 20 miles is too short a distance, as the world learned when the Fukushima nuclear plant melted down after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami. Fifty miles is more like it, which was the extent of the danger/evacuation zone around Fukushima.
Adding to causes for concern: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just issued Millstone with yet another safety violation for failure to fix problems with the water intake valve feeding cool seawater into Unit 3.
This problem was first identified in 2007 and chalked up to a flaw in the plant’s original design. Millstone’s publicity relations flak Ken Holt told the New London Day that it’s a complex problem to figure out how to fix the problem. But six years…really?
Millstone’s plan is to have the repair and modifications ready to install the next time Millstone takes Unit 3 off-line for refueling. That’s scheduled for October 2014. According to Holt, “It’s in the schedule now, and it’s not going to move.”
The NRC ranked the violation as “green,” meaning “very low safety significance” apparently because the reactor can SCRAM if the valve fails, as it did last August.
On the same inspection report, the NRC also cited Millstone for faulty assessment of maintenance on a turbine-driven auxiliary feedwater pump. And they added in three other “low safety significance” violations that were reported to the NRC by Millstone workers.
That’s a total of five violations.
The margin for error at nuclear power plants is very low. The consequences of an accident are severe. We count on automatic systems to compensate for human error. And we trust that everything will work the way it’s supposed to.
Any system problem that affects keeping the temperature levels in the reactors within safe levels warrants strict enforcement by the NRC and prompt action by the operator. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s not what I see happening at Millstone.