NRC rejects groups' request to halt Plant Vogtle expansion

[FBaggins]

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission today rejected a request from environmental groups to delay the addition of two new reactors at Plant Vogtle.

The nine groups contend NRC breached federal law in February by issuing a combined operating license for the $14 billion expansion without fully considering safety lessons learned since the Fukushima incident in Japan. They are asking a federal court to order NRC to prepare a new environmental impact statement for the Georgia project.

NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the commission unanimously affirmed a memorandum and order today denying the groups’ motion to halt construction until the courts rule on the request for more environmental studies.

http://chronicle.augusta.com/latest-news/2012-04-16/nrc-rejects-groups-request-halt-plant-vogtle-expansion

Grasping at even nonexistent straws.

[PamW]

1. AGREED!!

Grasping at even nonexistent straws.
========================

If you look at the recommendations from the NRC's Fukushima Task Force; their recommendations are more in the vein of modifications to NRC's policies and processes, rather than modifications to power plants.

After all; look at what failed at Fukushima. The Fukushima plant lost the diesel fuel tank for the back-up diesel generators because the fuel tank was sitting above ground at dockside for easy refueling. The USA already requires that the fuel tank for the back-up generators be buried in the ground like the fuel tanks at your local gas station.

The diesel generators themselves at Fukushima failed because they and their switchgear were flooded. At Fukushima, the generators and their switchgear were located in a non-watertight basement. In the USA, NRC regulations require the diesel generators to be in watertight vaults or somewhere where they can't get flooded.

When TEPCO flew in portable diesel generators, they couldn't connect to the plant because they didn't have the right connectors.

In the USA, the NRC requires that the utility have portable generators ready to fly in, and that they actually drill and run through the process on a regular basis to stay in practice. If they didn't have the right connectors, they'd find that out on the first practice run.

At Fukushima, the hydrogen explosion were caused by the build-up of hydrogen in the secondary containment when hydrogen was produced by the oxidation of the zirconium fuel cladding when the cladding reached high temperatures. In the USA, even the Mark I containment building are required to have a hardened vent to prevent the buildup of hydrogen in the secondary containment.

It appears that of all the things that failed at Fukushima, the NRC has already anticipated all those failures, and has regulations in place to prevent the same failures from happening at US nuclear power plants.

PamW

[kristopher]

2. "the NRC has already anticipated all those failures"

The Japanese told their population the same claptrap after Chernobyl. The idea that nuclear plants are accident proof is false.

Beyond our imagination: Fukushima and the problem of assessing risk
BY M. V. RAMANA | 19 APRIL 2011

Article Highlights
- Severe accidents at nuclear reactors have occurred much more frequently than what risk-assessment models predicted.
- The probabilistic risk assessment method does a poor job of anticipating accidents in which a single event, such as a tsunami, causes failures in multiple safety systems.
- Catastrophic nuclear accidents are inevitable, because designers and risk modelers cannot envision all possible ways in which complex systems can fail.

The multiple and ongoing accidents at the Fukushima reactors come as a reminder of the hazards associated with nuclear power. As with the earlier severe accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, it will take a long time before the full extent of what happened at Fukushima becomes clear. Even now, though, Fukushima sheds light on the troublesome and important question of whether nuclear reactors can ever be operated safely....

http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/beyond-our-imagination-fukushima-and-the-problem-of-assessing-risk



See also: http://www.democraticunderground.com/112711618#post19

[FBaggins]

3. What the Japanese told their population after Chernobyl...

...was 100% correct.

They never said that plants were accident-proof. What they said was that the differences between the russian design and those used in the West meant that what happened in Chernobyl couldn't happen like that elsewhere...

...and they were right. As has been proven to you over and over.

[kristopher]

4. "Chernobyl can never happen here"

When spoken to a worried populace that does not mean that the specific cause that led to a nuclear disaster would never happen; it means that a nuclear disaster will never happen.

You are trying to take advantage of normal communicative strategies by pretending that the public misunderstood the deliberate use of an ambiguous statement by nuclear proponents.

Now, if you or the nuclear industry had presented that statement in this sort of context we could accept that the "cause" meaning was intended...

"Chernobyl can never happen here" but "Severe accidents at nuclear reactors have occurred much more frequently than what risk-assessment models predicted. The probabilistic risk assessment method does a poor job of anticipating accidents in which a single event, such as a tsunami, causes failures in multiple safety systems. "Catastrophic nuclear accidents are inevitable, because designers and risk modelers cannot envision all possible ways in which complex systems can fail."

I don't recall EVER hearing anything like that.

We don't need nuclear.