Entergy accused of poor maintenance at Palisades nuke plant

The CRAC-2 study was like a guess at a worst case of a worst case. The actual odds of anything like the above casualties is one in 20 million reactor years. Human beings have only existed as a species for 2 million years!

Palisades has taken major steps to rectify the sump strainer clogging issue, including replacing materials inside containment that might exacerbate clogging and redesigning the sump straining system itself. (That was completed almost two years ago, by the way.) Further alterations to the sump strainer are being studied (at Entergy’s expense) and will be implemented if they prove to provide an additional benefit. It should be noted that the sump strainer clogging issue is not unique to Palisades, but was identified as an industry-wide weakness. It is being studied and solutions being sought and implemented by the entire industry. Hardly what I would classify as an example of Entergy neglecting maintenance.

And the sump strainer issue is entirely theoretical in nature: No nuclear plant has ever actually recirculated containment sump water through the reactor for post-accident cooling (the scenario of concern). So we have no emperical data whatsoever. The entire concern is based on computer modeling and engineering analysis. Which raises an interesting point: You’re basically trying to knock down the nuclear industry with the same sort of analysis that you reject when it proves how safe nuclear plants actually are. So do you believe such analyses, or don’t you? Or do you only believe them when they offer a hammer you can use to strike at the nuclear industry? (Not exactly the most rational approach, if you ask me.)

Embrittlement issues with the reactor head and vessel are monitored each refueling outage with a combination of intrusive and non-intrusive testing of these components and of samples of the materials of which these components were manufactured that are intentionally exposed to neutron embrittlement. These embrittlement concerns were initially based on wildly-conservative guesses by materials experts, and were formed relatively early in the nuclear industry’s life; They were therefore based on very little actual data. As more data roll in from the industry, the embrittlement predictions are continuously modified. If there was an embrittlement concern at Palisades, the plant would not be operating. And again, these concerns are based entirely on engineering analyses.

And finally, steam generator replacement has everything to do with plant efficiency and revenue generation and nothing to do with public safety. If there was any public safety issue at all, Palisades would be shut down until they were replaced.

Your belief that nuclear plants are permitted to operate dangerously is borne from a gross misunderstanding of the “dangers” that they pose. If you think that Vermont Yankee leaks a lot of radioactivity, you should take a Geiger Counter to the ash field of your closest coal plant. And if you want to do a little data mining, you’ll find that nuclear plants, while not perfect, are much safer than their non-nuclear counterparts when it comes to things like industrial safety accidents — including transformer fires (which don’t really threaten nuclear safety anyway, by the way). This is because of the much higher level of rigor that nuclear plant employees are required to exercise in the performance of their daily work tasks.

As usual, the concerns voiced by the most vocal anti-nuclear zealots are little more than uninformed and exaggerated sound bites carefully selected and presented for maximum scariness. I guess this commentary would have been more appropriately timed a week and a half or so ago — on Halloween.