NEW 12/15:
Spent a lot of time talking to the region III pr person. She says Entergy tagged it out or took the valve off line, then they started up without knowing what caused it or looking into the historic record.
Palisades nuclear plant down again, this time awaiting repairs after feed pump issues Wednesday
Thursday, December 15, 2011, 12:01 PM Updated: Thursday, December 15, 2011, 12:04 PM
The plant has been plagued by problems in recent months.
"The reactor was manually tripped at 1510 EST on 12/14/11 due to loss of both main feedpumps. Both feedpumps tripped on low suction pressure due to an apparent unplanned opening of the 'A' main feedpump recirculation valve. The cause of the main feedpump recirculation valve opening has not been determined. All full length control rods fully inserted. Auxiliary feed pump P-8A automatically started at 1511 EST on steam generator level as designed (10CFR50.72(b)(3)(iv)(A)). The turbine bypass valve is in service maintaining reactor coolant system temperature [by directing steam flow to the main condenser]. The plant is stable in mode 3 [and the reactor trip was considered uncomplicated]."
"All these past problems are effectively working their way through the beast now, all within their discovery and correcting phase. These things are never black and white at these nuclear plants. We got the continued problems like they discovered last inspection and the ones that are going to occur next inspection. This is a big problem with the NRC. They don't really actually know where we exactly stand. We got all these past but not fully corrected problems, the falsification and inaccuracies. We are not sure in what state of discovery and correction phase they are in; the ones we just discovered and the one identified but repeated ones over and over again. How then the multitudes of serious ones we have not yet discovered, but they are simmering active below the surface unseen. We really don't understand where these problems are in the temporal dimension on the big picture (chronologic, sequential, threat, in stages of completion, there is such a long latency period between emergence of the error and its fix), we know these errors and defects are all spinning around in the organization and in the ether. We have no framework to understand what is the totality of risk or threat to plant reliability right now. We have no quick, we have no visually representation of what happened, what is broken or degraded, what is going on right now, what is going on in the future...like a Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus."
"We are basically plowing along in a car in Midtown Manhattan without ever having been there before and driving by feel."
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