For how long would the fish in Lake Erie have glowed in the dark . . .
by Judith Lewis
January 20, 2006 10:01 AM
. . . had the reactor head at Davis-Besse burst in a cloud of radioactive steam?
The U.S. Justice Department has ordered FirstEnergy, the owner of the Davis-Besse nuclear plant on Lake Erie in Ohio, to by $28 million in fines, restitution and community service projects for deliberately falsifying information to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about the plant's 2002 fuel leak. In 2001, acid was found to have eaten away at a steel cap on a reactor vessel; Toledo Blade reporter Tom Henry has described it as a "gaping cavity that almost burst open with radioactive steam, " and "the nuclear industry’s biggest safety lapse since the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania in 1979," according to NRC officials.
According to today's AP story (Forbes has it laid out nicely here), "Company and Nuclear Regulatory Commission investigations concluded that the rust hole had been growing for at least four years and that Davis-Besse's managers had ignored the evidence because they were focused on profits rather than safety at the plant."
I'm not going to defend FirstEnergy, but as the Blade reports, at least one NRC official had a hold of this photo of the rusted reactor, (known as the "red photo") in May of 2000, and allowed the reactor to continue operating through 2002 (FirstEnergy "fought off" a shutdown in 2001, the Blade says). It seems to me Davis-Besse points to a larger systemic failure than just one company messing up.
Nor is it possible to pin the whole mess on Andrew Siemaszko, the engineer scapegoated for the nearly averted disaster. Siemaszko claims in a whistleblower complaint that he was fired in 2002 for insisting on expensive overhauls the company didn't want to pay for.
Somehow, $28 million doesn't seem like enough. Money doesn't seem like enough. You might even say that events like this one serve to turn the public off an energy source that could avert climate change, and therefore FirstEnergy, the NRC and whoever else snoozed on the job should be held responsible for the carbon in the atmosphere.
Okay, that's a stretch. But the point is: The U.S. is never going to adopt nuclear energy whole hog unless the root causes of these mishaps -- and Davis-Besse is only the biggest in recent years -- are acknowledged and addressed. Safety vs. profit is not a fair fight.
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Comments
There are 7 comments posted for this article.
One reason they can put B(OH)3 in some reactors' water is the same reason people can, as some do, put it in their eyes: it's not very corrosive. But the water in the reactors is hot, up to around 600 K, versus 310 K for the eyes, and at that sort of temperature boric acid in water solution can attack some kinds of steel.
Evidently the inner surface of the Davis-Besse reactor's pressure vessel, and I guess of any pressurized water reactor, is not any of those kinds.
But its outer surface, and most of its thickness, is, and there are holes for control rods and instruments, and seepage through one of these allowed aqueous boric acid to pit the vessel from the outside in, all the way to the stainless steel liner, which eventually bulged because the main thickness was no longer supporting it against the water pressure.
If that liner hadn't been so tough, it might have sprung a leak before plant personnel, along about March 2002 if I recall correctly, discovered all the junk on the outside -- which was quite a long time later than it might have been, I understand.
Such a leak would not have been catastrophic; much attention has been paid to planning how to deal with leaks, even very large ones, not newborn corrosion pinholes. So I don't think the fish were ever in danger.
You see this reactor's almost springing a leak as evidence that profit trumped safety. But that's not really true as long as fossil fuels remain in wide use. American coal mines have had two multiple-fatality accidents in a few weeks; domestic carbon monoxide poisonings, that nuclear-fed electric heat pumps or resistance heaters might have prevented, are commonplace. Human fallibility and nuclear reactors are a much less hazardous combination than the same with fossil fuels.
It is government's profits on coal and on domestic heating fuel, profits that it intends to continue having despite the certainty that more such accidents will occur, that is the real instance of profit trumping safety.
--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
boron fire good
Posted on January 20, 2006 6:01 PM by G. R. L. Cowan
I have to correct myself: American coal mines have had, as far as I know, just one multiple-fatality accident in the past several weeks. The other accident I was thinking of began just two days ago, at the Aracoma Alma Mine in West Virginia, and so far there are two missing, no-one known to have been killed.
Posted on January 21, 2006 1:01 PM by G. R. L. Cowan
You were right the first time Graham -- they were found dead.
You say:
"You see this reactor's almost springing a leak as evidence that profit trumped safety. But that's not really true as long as fossil fuels remain in wide use."
It doesn't make it not true, it just makes it not uncommon. I didn't say First Energy put profit over safety unlike all other energy companies. I just said it it put profit over safety, which it clearly did, just as ICG did at the Sago mine. We wouldn't put up with that kind of thinking at the public swimming pool.
Posted on January 23, 2006 2:01 PM by Judith Lewis
I was trying to look at this from a government's point of view. I spoke of government profit, which may not be exactly the right way to refer to special tax revenue, but I believe that it raises accurate expectations of what government will do.
At both a coal mine and a nuclear station, operators did, to some extent, put revenue ahead of safety.
But much worse results ensued in the fossil fuel installation than in the nuclear one. This seems to be typical, and in seeking to explain why government allows fossil fuel burning to continue rather than require its early-as-practicable replacement by nuclear, I focus on the money government makes on fossil fuel energy that it cannot make on nuclear.
That is where I see (nuclear) safety being trumped by (so to speak) fossil fuel profits.
--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron fire good
Posted on January 26, 2006 7:01 PM by G. R. L. Cowan
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