Nuclear news

Emergency declared due to fire at U.S. nuclear plant — ‘Unusual Event’ lasted over 90 minutes

ENE News,

13 May, 2013

Title: Event Notification Report

Source: NRC

Date: May 13, 2013

h/t PhilipUpNorth

[...] 50.72(a) (1) (i) – EMERGENCY DECLARED [...]

UNUSUAL EVENT DUE TO FIRE ON AUXILIARY TRANSFORMER INSIDE PROTECTED THE AREA

At 1743 CDT on 05/12/13, Grand Gulf Nuclear Station declared an Unusual Event due to a fire lasting greater than 15 minutes in an auxiliary transformer inside the Protected Area (PA). The transformer was isolated. The plant continues to operate at 100% power. The license remains in a Unusual Event pending further investigation.

The licensee notified the NRC Resident Inspector and State and Local Authorities.

Notified DHS SWO, FEMA, and DHS NICC.

* * * UPDATE FROM ROBERT BRINKMAN TO JOHN SHOEMAKER AT 2112 EDT ON 5/12/13 * * *

The Licensee terminated the Unusual Event at 1921 CDT on 5/12/13 based on electrically isolating the auxiliary transformer and termination of smoke coming from the transformer. At no time were flames seen during this event. The transformer is located outside of the turbine building [...]

No plan in place when leak alarm sounded at Hanford

KREM.com

11 May, 2013

At Hanford, the former plutonium production facility located in Eastern Washington, not much takes place without a carefully designed plan. With 56 million gallons of the most highly contaminated nuclear waste on the planet stored in underground tanks at the site, human and environmental health depend on the precise work of Hanford employees and their strict adherence to written procedures.

Documents called Alarm Response Procedures, commonly known as ARPs, spell out what steps need to be taken when an alarm goes off to indicate an anomaly or emergency, such as a release of radioactive particulates into the environment or a leaking tank.

But KING 5 has found that on October 9, 2011, when an alarm sounded to alert the monitoring staff that -– for the first time ever -- one of 28 double-shell tanks holding the worst waste at Hanford might be leaking nuclear waste, the shift manager on duty couldn’t find the ARP that would give detailed information about what to do. The manager hand wrote in his log book that the tank’s leak detection system “is in alarm,” but he is “unable to find ARP”

The day after the alarm sounded, the private company hired by the U.S. Department of Energy to manage the underground waste tanks at Hanford -- Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) -- sent veteran instrument technician Mike Geffre out to inspect the equipment monitoring the tank, called AY-102. Geffre found the leak detection system was in proper working order -- meaning the alarm that sounded on the 9th was not false. But after confirming the alarm, Geffre had no ARP to consult to see what action should be taken.

"I thought there would be a whole protocol of investigation, looking to see what was going on, maybe putting cameras in and looking to see where the waste was coming from. I just assumed that was in place," said Geffre. "Well, there wasn't any of that in place. There was nothing. No plan. Zippo."

Rainwater theory

The company reported to federal and state regulators that its experts believed rainwater, not nuclear waste, had seeped into the space between the tank’s primary and secondary shells. WRPS managers noted that it had been raining in the Tri-Cities area for several days and suggested that the rain must have triggered a false alarm.

In addition, WRPS officials reported that radiation readings recorded by the leak detection equipment weren't out of the ordinary for this particular tank.

But the alarms recorded in October 2011 were just the first of several red flags that went up over the next 10 months that highly radioactive sludge was leaking out of a huge tank's primary wall and into a space not engineered to hold the material. It would take a full year for WRPS and the Department of Energy to confirm to the public that the tank had in fact cracked, allowing nuclear waste to ooze out.

No plan stalled action

Nuclear science and policy experts told KING 5 that the lack of an ARP -- a roadmap on how to investigate what exactly put the equipment into alarm -- was a grave error.

“If you have a procedure in place for everything except for the big critical failure, I don’t think it’s a failure of vision. I think it’s a decision. You’ve decided this is something that is not going to happen,” said Boston-based civil engineer and radiation expert Marco Kaltofen, who’s traveled to Hanford many times to conduct research.

“The problem with hazardous waste of all kinds, radioactive wastes, is that when you sit on them the problems get worse. Every day you wait, it’s more material that you have to dispose of, more stuff gets contaminated and the problem gets worse and more expensive and harder to control. That was a big mistake,” said Kaltofen.

"They've wasted money, they've wasted time. We can't afford to do those things out at Hanford. It's too urgent of a problem. All of us have too much invested in that clean up to succeed for that kind of mentality to prevail," said Tom Carpenter, executive director of the watchdog organization Hanford Challenge.

WRPS insists it had response plan

Media specialists for WRPS told KING 5 in April that that a written alarm response plan existed when the first leak warning sounded in October 2011.

"There is and has been an established Alarm Response Procedure (ARP) for the ENRAF (leak detection) system,” wrote company representatives.

But KING 5's thorough review of all WRPS Alarm Response Procedures connected to double-shell tanks found no plan.

“Well they lied to you then,” said Dick Heggen, a retired Washington State Department of Ecology employee who served as a state compliance officer at Hanford.

“They failed miserably, and at this point the Department of Ecology and the Department of Energy need to get on their case and make sure they have one (an ARP) as soon as possible. I would say in a week or less. If they don’t, when another one comes around or if this one gets bigger what are they going to do?” said Heggen.

After KING 5 briefed WRPS officials on Thursday that a report on the lack of an ARP would be broadcast the following day, WRPS External Affairs Manager Jerry Holloway wrote to KING 5 to say he needed to make a clarification to the company’s original statement:

“Procedures for responding to ENRAF annulus alarms were in place as part of two separate tank farm operating procedures in October 2011. An additional Alarm Response Procedure (ARP) was not necessary because AY/AZ farm ENRAFs alarm to the Tank Monitor and Control System (TMACS) surveillance system which is monitored 24 hours a day and includes alarm response procedures. A second procedure also covered follow up response to ENRAF alarms."

KING 5 confirmed with employees who work closely with the leak detection systems at Hanford that the company’s statement to KING 5 is not accurate. Instead, only in June 2012 -- eight months after the first leak alarm -- were two additions made to the company’s manuals about the leak detection alarm. And to date, an ARP describing actions to be taken when leaked waste material is detected in a double-shell tank's annulus space still has not been written.

“This could have been totally avoided if they would have listened to me about two years ago,” said WRPS technician Mike Geffre. Geffre told KING 5 he urged WRPS managers to write and put into action an ARP for this particular alarm in 2010.

“I told them we were not prepared in case one day one of our double shell tanks really did have a leak. We calibrate this equipment all of the time. Sometimes it goes into alarm because the plummet (detection equipment) has drifted out of position. But what if it was the real thing? You can’t assume it’s always going to be a false reading. I mentioned it more than once and thought it had been taken care of. I was wrong,” said Geffre.

Quick action to address a leak in AY-102 was important given the nature of the high-level waste the tank contains, according to Bob Alvarez, a former nuclear policy adviser to President Clinton. Tank AY-102 contains massive amounts of the nuclear by-product Strontium-90 –- more than any other tank at Hanford. Strontium-90 sinks to the bottom of waste tanks and generates heat so hot it boils the material around it.

“It’s been known for over 50 years at Hanford that high heat loads at the bottom of tanks cause them to leak and crack. This is not unknown,” said Alvarez.

The contents of AY-102 will eat through the secondary tank liner -– the final barrier between the toxic sludge and the environment -- faster than any other material at the site.

“There’s an enormous amount of decay heat in that tank. It’s like having a grill the size of a basketball court lit up with gas going on constantly,” said Alvarez.

WRPS holds the contract to manage all 177 underground nuclear waste tanks at Hanford. Twenty-eight of them, including Tank AY-102, are double-shell tanks that are considered the most robust and reliable tanks for keeping nuclear waste safe until technology is developed to permanently dispose of the materials. Now that one double-shell tank is confirmed to be a leaker, experts consulted by KING 5 said being prepared with an ARP is more important than ever.

"If you're alarming that, testing that, and you don't have a plan for when you find something? Why are we out there in the first place? Everybody go home. Forget the whole thing," said Kaltofen. “You have to know what to do in advance of finding a leak. If you don’t do that, how are you going to handle the rest of Hanford?”

St. Louis Is Burning

An underground landfill fire near tons of nuclear waste raises serious health and safety concerns – so why isn't the government doing more to help?

Rolling Stone

10 May, 2013

There's a fire burning in Bridgeton, Missouri. It's invisible to area residents, buried deep beneath the ground in a North St. Louis County landfill. But the smoldering waste is an unavoidable presence in town, giving off a putrid odor that clouds the air miles away – an overwhelming stench described by one area woman as "rotten eggs mixed with skunk and fertilizer." Residents report smelling it at K-12 school buses, a TGI Fridays and even the operating room of a local hospital. "It smells like dead bodies," observes another local.

On a Saturday morning in March, one mile south of the landfill, several Bridgeton residents have gathered at a small home in a blue-collar subdivision called Spanish Village. Concerned citizens Karen Nickel and Dawn Chapman are here to answer questions posed by four of their neighbors. "How will I ever sell my house?" "Am I going to end up with cancer 20 years down the road?" "Is there even a solution?"

In February, the landfill's owner, Republic Services, sent glossy fliers to residents within stink radius claiming the noxious odor posed no safety risk. But official reports say otherwise. Temperature probes reveal the fire has already surpassed normal heat levels. Reports from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) indicate dangerously high levels of benzene and hydrogen sulfide in the air. In March, Missouri's Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) – which has jurisdiction over Bridgeton Landfill – quietly posted an Internet notice cautioning citizens with chronic respiratory diseases to limit time outdoors. A month after Republic distributed its potentially misleading flier, the state attorney general sued the company on eight counts of environmental violations, including pollution and public nuisance. And this week, as part of a settlement set to be announced Tuesday, Republic sent another round of fliers offering to move local families to hotels during a period of increased odor related to remediation efforts.

Nickel and Chapman are stay-at-home moms; Chapman has three special-needs kids. Neither of them wants to spend her time worrying about a damn landfill fire. But until someone higher up the power chain intervenes, they have sworn to call municipal offices, file Sunshine requests and post notices to the community's Facebook group, no matter how unsettling the facts they uncover. Scariest of all: The Bridgeton landfill fire is burning close to at least 8,700 tons of nuclear weapons wastes.

"To have somebody call you at 11 P.M., and they're in tears, concerned for their family, that's heartbreaking," Chapman tells Rolling Stone. "We're doing this because we don't have a choice. If we don't come together as a community and fight, no one's going to do it for us."

America's Nuclear Nightmare

West Lake Landfill is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site that's home to some of the oldest radioactive wastes in the world. A six-foot chain-link fence surrounds the perimeter, plastered with bright yellow hazard signs that warn of the dangers within. On one corner stands a rusty gas pump. About 1,200 feet south of the radioactive EPA site, the fire at Bridgeton Landfill spreads out like hot barbeque coals. No one knows for sure what happens when an underground inferno meets a pool of atomic waste, but residents aren't eager to find out.

At a March 15th press conference, Peter Anderson – an economist who has studied landfills for over 20 years – raised the worst-case scenario of a "dirty bomb," meaning a non-detonated, mass release of floating radioactive particles in metro St. Louis. "Now, to be clear, a dirty bomb is not nuclear fission, it's not an atomic bomb, it's not a weapon of mass destruction," Anderson assured meeting attendants in Bridgeton's Machinists Union Hall. "But the dispersal of that radioactive material in air that could reach – depending upon weather conditions – as far as 10 miles from the site could make it impossible to have economic activity continue."

In a response offered to Rolling Stone, Republic Services says, "Mr. Anderson made his statement without any proof or evidence, and he ignored the fact that ongoing evaluation by MDNR, EPA and local authorities have confirmed that the increased heat at the Bridgeton Landfill has not impacted West Lake and does not pose a threat to the materials at West Lake." Republic Services also denies that it is dealing with a "fire" – the company prefers the euphemism "subsurface smoldering event." Under orders from the state, Republic is drilling holes to contain this "smoldering event." Republic estimates it's already spent over $20 million – about 0.25 percent of its 2012 revenues – on such mitigation efforts, "not because we have to, but because it is the right thing to do."

When Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster sued Republic Services on March 27th, outlining a host of alleged odor pollution and public health violations at Bridgeton Landfill, he described the risk of the fire contacting the nearby radwaste as a mere "remote hypothetical." But many residents are far from reassured.

The story of West Lake's radioactive waste goes back to April 1942, when a St. Louis company called Mallinckrodt Chemical Works began purifying tens of thousands of tons of uranium for the University of Chicago as part of the Manhattan Project. Mallinckrodt's workers did not receive adequate safety protections and had little knowledge of what they were dealing with – oversights that would lead to disproportionately high cancer death rates among workers, as documented in books, dissertations and journalistic accounts, including a groundbreaking seven-part series from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1989. Over the next 25 years, the company's uranium processing also created huge amounts of radioactive waste, much of which was secretly dumped at sites throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area, including West Lake.

Today, West Lake's radioactive waste – all 143,000 cubic yards of it – sits on the outskirts of a former quarry with practically none of the standard safety features found in most municipal landfills. No clay liner blocks toxic leachate – or "garbage juice" – from seeping into area groundwater. No cap keeps toxic gas from dispersing into the air. This unprotected waste sits on a floodplain 1.5 miles away from the Missouri River. Eight miles downstream is a drinking water reservoir that serves 300,000 St. Louisans. Worst of all: The materials dumped in this populous metropolitan area will continue to pose a hazard for hundreds of thousands of years.

The EPA's Region 7 is based in Lenexa, Kansas, about 250 miles west of St. Louis. The agency operates from a glass-paned office building that once housed the international headquarters of Applebee's. In an empty conference room on the ground floor, Dan Gravatt, the EPA manager tasked with handling West Lake, looks every bit the government scientist in his blue work shirt, khaki pants and thin-framed glasses.

In 2008, the EPA decided to cap the radiotoxic material dumped at West Lake and leave it there. Capping the site meant piling five feet of dirt and rocks on top and implementing long-term monitoring for contamination. Facing widespread public pressure, including a letter from St. Louis mayor Francis Slay, the EPA postponed its decision pending further studies.

Gravatt has a smooth, rehearsed response to almost any question about the West Lake landfill – a skill he put to use at a community meeting on January 17th, when more than 300 concerned citizens gathered to hear the results of those EPA studies. One person in attendance was Kay Drey, an 80-year-old civil rights and anti-nuclear activist who's been advocating for the removal of wastes from the St. Louis area for more than three decades. "I was very disappointed," Drey tells RS. "The evidence is clear. This is radioactively hot stuff and it shouldn't be in the floodplain by the Missouri river. And if they can't admit to that – well, it's incomprehensible."

Back at his office, Gravatt insists that West Lake's radioactive wastes only pose health risks for people who come in direct contact with the site, adding that the nuclear dump "doesn't pose any current exposure pathways to area residents as it stands now."

But Robert Criss, a geochemist at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied the issue closely, says the EPA is grossly underplaying a host of risks surrounding West Lake – flooding, earthquakes, liquefaction, groundwater leaching – that could pave the way for a public health crisis. That's not to mention the recent development of an underground fire nearby. Says Criss, "There is no geological site I can think of that is more absurd to place such waste."

Digging through old Nuclear Regulatory Commission studies, he recently stumbled upon what he describes as an error with major implications. For the last three decades, various government documents have referred to the waste at the landfill as "leached barium sulfate," a nearly insoluble compound generated from uranium processing. But Criss says that the NRC's own data shows the material dumped at West Lake contains far too little barium and sulfate to compose barium sulfate – by factors of 100 and 1000, respectively. "If I had this long to study something, I would be pretty embarrassed if this is what I came up with," says Criss. "It is inconceivable for these people to promote remedies when they don't even know what they're dealing with."

In a statement to Rolling Stone, the EPA disputed Criss' findings, but declined to offer further explanation, instead deferring to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Upon request for a chemical analysis proving the waste is barium sulfate, the NRC sent RS the same 1982 report that Criss disputes.

So what happens now? The EPA officially lists four potentially responsible parties for the West Lake Superfund site. One is the U.S. Department of Energy. A second is Cotter Corporation, a company whose contractors secretly dumped nuclear waste at West Lake in the Seventies, as uncovered soon after by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The others are Bridgeton Landfill LLC and Rock Road Industries LLC – both subsidiaries of Republic Services, which currently runs the landfill. Under Superfund law, these four parties must ultimately foot the bill for any remedial actions ordered by the EPA; at the same time, it is these same four parties that contract and pay for all EPA studies leading up to a decision. This might seem like a conflict of interest, but Gravatt insists it's all on the up and up: "We tell them what to do." It must be a coincidence, then, that the EPA's capping plan cost the potentially responsible parties only $41 million, compared to up to $415 million required to actually excavate the waste.

Missouri State Representative Keith English has another idea to fix the mess at West Lake. In February, English and 12 co-sponsors filed a resolution with the state assembly to transfer control of the site from the EPA to the Army Corps of Engineers' Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Actions Program (FUSRAP) – a proven success that has already cleared more than one million cubic yards of atomic waste from other sites in the St. Louis area, shipping the radioactive contaminants to safe disposal cells in Utah and Idaho. A nearly identical resolution filed by State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal in Missouri's other legislative body garnered three co-sponsors. "The educated people that deal with this type of waste can see that there's an issue with just putting a cap on top," says English.

Unfortunately, anything that passes through Missouri's statehouses would only represent a symbolic victory. Since West Lake remains under federal jurisdiction, only an act of Congress could transfer the site to the Army Corps. For this reason, many are looking to Missouri's U.S. Senate delegation – Democrat Claire McCaskill and Republican Roy Blunt – to lead on this issue. "I hope that our resolutions pass and get to Senator Blunt and Senator McCaskill's office," English says. "Because they've been sweeping it under the rug for the past several years."

The Missouri Coalition for the Environment, which has advocated for the removal of West Lake wastes for more than a decade, in part blames Missouri's ties to the nuclear energy industry for the senators' lack of action. Both McCaskill and Blunt, as well as Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, have pushed for bringing more nuclear reactors to the state. Any more attention to a hazardous radioactive dump might get in the way of that messaging. "They won't touch this with a 10-foot pole," says the Coalition's safe energy director, Ed Smith. "It doesn't fit their narrative of clean nuclear power and 'jobs, jobs, jobs.'"

Blunt has yet to make any public statement on the issue, and his office has not responded to requests for comment. McCaskill, meanwhile, supported the 2008 cap-and-leave plan for the West Lake radwaste; on March 12th of this year, she sent a response to several concerned citizens, assuring them, "I will continue to monitor these situations and ensure that any proposal put forward to address them provides a safe, cost-effective solution for Missourians."

McCaskill's reference to a "cost-effective solution" didn't sit well with the activists in Bridgeton. "I don't give a flying fuck how much it costs," says Chapman. "This is about my children."

Bridgeton's underground fire was news to Ramona Herbert, who moved to Spanish Village with her family last November. She and her husband, Joshua, came here from St. Louis' inner city, hoping for a safer place to raise their kids. When the Herberts signed a five-year lease for their new home, no one disclosed to them that hot nuclear dumps sit a mile north from their children's bedrooms. No one told the Herberts that an ongoing landfill fire burns just down the street from their local Bob Evans restaurant. After two months in her new home, Ramona Herbert noticed an EPA flier on her door announcing a community meeting, but it meant little to her.

"My landlord said to me that we have a little sewage problem," she recalls. "So I'm thinking the sewage system isn't working right." But the stench only got worse, and she started having trouble sleeping. Parents stopped letting 14-year-old Mateo Herbert's friends shoot hoops in his neighborhood, because something in the air was making their kids' eyes water. And Joshua Herbert, who boasted a nearly spotless medical history, started suffering terrible headaches.

Ramona Herbert learned about St. Louis' nuclear waste legacy from a Rolling Stone reporter. As soon as she found out, she got in touch with Chapman, and she is now part of a growing coalition. Like hundreds of other concerned citizens in North St. Louis, she wants answers. "When were we going to be warned?" Herbert wonders, standing at the door of her new home. "When is it too late?"

Nuclear Power Falters, Engulfed by 'Cauldron' of Bad Luck

Once touted as a successor, or at least a competitor, to carbon-based power, the nuclear sector has taken a beating as the momentum behind new projects stalls and enthusiasm for domestic fossil fuel production grows.

CNBC,

13 May, 2013

Across the country, plans to build nuclear plants have hit roadblocks recently—a sharp turn for a sector that just a few years ago was looking forward to a renaissance. These developments come as energy policy becomes increasingly focused on oil and gas.

In recent weeks, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled against a proposed partnership between NRC Energy and Toshiba, citing a law that prohibits control of a U.S. plant by a foreign corporation.

Elsewhere, Duke Energy scuttled plans to construct two nuclear reactors in North Carolina, while California officials warned that two damaged reactors could be shut down permanently if the NRC doesn't take action to get the plants back online.

Even the most successful disruptors who shake up their industry don't always get it 100 percent right. Find out the surprising thing Nobel Prize winning physicist Albert Einstein said about the ability to harness nuclear energy.

The change in nuclear's fortunes is staggering, given that the U.S. is the world's largest producer of nuclear power, according to the World Nuclear Association. The country's 104 reactors account for more than 30 percent of nuclear electricity generation worldwide.

"Starting about four years ago, the industry felt it was in the middle of a renaissance" with applications for many new plants pending with the NRC, said Peter Bradford, a law professor and a former member of the commission. "They've gone from that high-water mark to a point at which … we're actually seeing the closing of a few operating plants,which was unthinkable even a few years ago."

With shale and natural gas gaining currency and the cost of building plants soaring, nuclear energy's stock is steadily being devalued. All this is playing out against the backdrop of Japan's nuclear disaster two years ago at Fukushima, which made policymakers think twice about extolling the virtues of nuclear power.

Bradford, who also served as a utility commissioner in New York and Maine, cited a "cauldron of events" for bringing the nuclear push to a standstill, including the use of cheaper and plentiful natural gas to generate electricity, as well as soaring investment costs.

"Nuclear is kind of the ocean liner of energy: Once it heads in a particular direction it's hard to turn it," Bradford said. Some observers had predicted that "many things could go wrong," he said, "but I don't think there were many of us that forecast they would all go wrong at once."

Just like its counterparts in the solar industry, nuclear power is in the throes of declining public policy support. Tax incentives and other forms of public subsidy are being withdrawn as the risks and costs associated with power plants rise.

The shift dovetails with the lowered profile of climate change legislation in Washington, according to some.

Sherry Quirk, an attorney that leads Schiff Hardin's energy practice, noted local and federal officials' shift and the lack of climate change initiatives.

"Given concerns about climate change and the thought there might be ... new laws that would effectively make coal fire a thing of the past, they launched a number of plans," Quirk said. Now, "on the basis of price and risk analysis, the constructions of a number of nuclear facilities have been called into question."

Although nuclear power is touted as one of the cleanest forms of energy, only three units are under construction, and only four to six may come online in the next decade, according to data from the WNA.

That appears to reflect an energy policy that increasingly de-emphasizes alternative energy while placing a premium on fossil fuels.

"The so-called all-of-the-above energy strategy was always nonsensical," said Bradford, even more so given that nuclear power has become too pricey. "We don't fight world hunger with caviar, and we're not going to fight climate change with outlandishly expensive energy sources."

Radioactive Reality (13 May 2013) "Mass release of radioactive particles in metro St. Louis"