NRC says Pilgrim needs no futher regulations
Courtesy/State House News Service
Pilgrim Nuclear Station in Plymouth.
Federal inspectors identified nearly a dozen areas where Pilgrim Nuclear Station could improve its performance, but after spending the winter reviewing safety, organizational and other issues at the Plymouth plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded no additional regulatory actions are needed.
Citing safety considerations, regulators in late 2015 placed Pilgrim in Column 4 status - a downgrade from its previous categorization and one step from the commission's unacceptable ranking. In December and January, the NRC conducted lengthy inspections at Pilgrim to assess the potential for additional serious performance decline.
"Based on the results of this inspection, the NRC concludes that Pilgrim's programs and processes support nuclear safety," the NRC reported Wednesday, releasing its 230-page inspection report. "Therefore, as of this time, no additional regulatory actions beyond those prescribed for plants in Column 4 are required to ensure that the plant remains safe."
Activists and some elected officials have long been calling for Pilgrim to be shut down immediately, citing documented safety issues. Gov. Charlie Baker has largely deferred to federal regulators, saying the safety of nuclear plants falls under their jurisdiction.
Pilgrim, which was licensed in 1972, is scheduled to close for good on May 31, 2019, according to its owner, the Louisiana-based Entergy.
Media outlets last year obtained an NRC email documenting safety concerns inspectors found at the plant in December, including "poor maintenance, poor engineering practices, and equipment reliability problems" at Pilgrim, which can produce 680 megawatts of power using its boiling water reactor.
Gov. Baker, Attorney General Maura Healey, the state's Congressional delegation and several state lawmakers wrote to the NRC in January, saying the views expressed in the Dec. 6 email "have raised serious questions about Entergy's ability to continue to operate the plant safely."
The anti-Pilgrim group Pilgrim Coalition summed up its assessment of the NRC report in a Wednesday tweet: "Pilgrim won't be downgraded despite problems."
Inspectors did identify areas in Pilgrim's recovery plan that they said "warrant revision to ensure that performance improvement will be sustained." They flagged four "green" findings - those with low safety significance - in operations and engineering, and issued seven program-related findings.
The NRC said Entergy will submit a revised recovery plan based on the inspection results and face future inspections to ensure compliance.
"If at any time NRC determines that performance has declined to an unacceptable level, the NRC will take additional regulatory action up to and including the issuance of a shutdown order," the federal agency said in its latest assessment.
In particular, inspectors drew attention to what they are calling a "greater than green" violation concerning the design and installation of a drive for the plant's emergency diesel generator radiator blower fan that was the source of an oil leak that rendered the generator inoperable for an unacceptable period.
"The NRC is aware of ongoing efforts by Entergy to further refine key assumptions used in support of its risk analysis for this issue, and the NRC will consider any additional relevant information resulting from these efforts in the final disposition of the issue," the agency wrote. "The NRC currently expects that the results of the inspection for this issue will be finalized later this summer."
The "very lowest safety significance" findings include Entergy failing to implement adequate corrective actions to prevent a recurrence of a September 2016 feedwater regulating valve failure, Entergy's failure to adequately address "ineffective leadership that was overly tolerant of longstanding and repetitive corrective action program implementation weaknesses," and failure to take timely action to correct gasket leakage on a heat exchanger.
"Targeted improvement plans for site leadership -- intended to address the root cause of the siteÕss degraded nuclear safety culture -- were not an adequate corrective action," the commission also concluded. "Several targeted performance improvement plans did not include specific actions to address the behavioral problems that led to PilgrimÕs degraded nuclear safety culture . . . "
Diane Turco, an activist who has long sought Pilgrim's closure, was disappointed by the report and urged the state to sue the NRC "for failure to regulate."
"This report exposes the fact that the NRC will not protect the public but Entergy's bottom line," she wrote in an email. "It is reckless endangerment when the NRC allows a nuclear reactor to operate under these degrading conditions with ongoing federal safety violations for a third consecutive year."
Pilgrim in early April began to refuel for the last time. According to a station spokesman, Entergy planned to invest $54 million during the refueling outage and bring in more than 800 temporary workers to assist the plant's 620 full-time workers.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments