Pilgrim and NRC Blew Accident Reportability Requirements In Blizzard!

Updated Oct 1 2015

This is one of the clear examples where the failures of the OIG can be seen. Mr Guzman told me my meteorological problems at pilgrim were referred(May 2013)to the OIG. The OIG doesn't have a 

(2013)"Mr Guzman: So here is an official concern to the NRC by me. I am not crazy (On adams in 2013)!" 

transparent process with publicly documenting all referrals...they find it convenient to not disclose why they didn't accept or decline a referral. The open process holds the OIG accountable to the public. Who is the OIG of the OIG? 

I can make the case whistle-blower confidentiality and anonymity is nothing but a invention/tool...protection of the agency and nuclear industry.   

Does the OIG serve the greater public or just the congress? Are they just a corrupt arm of congress and political mega contribution to the politicians?

Just saying, as I laid it clearly out on this entry...if the OIG would have discussed the meteorological problem with me I would have told them Pilgrim and the NRC are overwhelmed with problems and are in a dire state of technical confusion. If the OIG was competent, they would have agreed with me. 

I was trying to save the Pilgrim Plant in 2013. 

They would have opened up a much wider investigation...they would have seen what was going on at the plant bringing us to today. They would have immediately demanded swift changes at pilgrim and the region 1. Ninety nine percent of the current problems at Pilgrim and the NRC would have been cut off at the 2013 early stage...

Nov 25, 2013: "Come on, Entergy Pilgrim is overwhelmed, as they are informing the NRC that they don’t have enough people to do the SRV LER" 

This just backs up my my long stated beliefs, as operability of Vermont Yankee was collapsing...the NRC turned off the oversight of Pilgrim. The agency felt Entergy was especially vulnerable over the closure of VY...they stopped enforcing regulations on Pilgrim trying to protect Entergy and the other big nuclear utilities.   

Guzman, Richard May 29, 2013 (1 day ago) to me Mr. Mulligan,  The purpose of this message is to acknowledge receipt of your e-mail correspondence below. As you requested, your message has been added to ADAMS and made publicly available. Your concerns have also been forwarded to the Office of Investigations and the Region I Office for consideration.  Sincerely,  Rich Guzman Sr. Project Manager NRR/DORL US NRC 301-415-1030 Richard.Guzman@nrc.gov

Reposted originally from May 2013

So the met tower asperator fan wasn't redundant and neither is the National Weather Service? 

“An element of the NRC’s Safety Philosophy that employs successive compensatory measures to prevent accidents or lessens the effects of damage if a malfunction or accident occurs at a nuclear facility. The NRC’s Safety Philosophy ensures that the public is adequately protected and that emergency plans surrounding a nuclear facility are well conceived and will work. Moreover, the philosophy ensures that safety will not be wholly dependent on any single element of the design, construction, maintenance, or operation of a nuclear facility.”

Nov 25:

Come on, Entergy Pilgrim is overwhelmed, as they are informing the NRC that they don’t have enough people to do the SRV LER...so the NRC is handling them with kid gloves.

Just saying, I called the Pilgrim NRC today. Thee resident had no idea wth the quality of the data with the national weather service. He had no record or analysis of the reliability of the NWS. Had no idea of the input of say the wind direction or speed...had no idea if the inputs or anything else had a back up power supply. He said it was the responsibility of Entergy to know that as they are paying for that service.

Well I said, what if we had a release and the Met didn’t work again.  Imagine if Pilgrim, the NRC and the national weather service bugled the evacuation data...can you imagine the public debate our nation would have over that for the next year?

The senior had no idea what caused the failure...he said their Region I or something  rad inspector came onto the site and did the inspection. He didn't do it.

He said Pilgrim would have been able to use the National Weather Service during and after Blizzard Nemo???

The inspection was really skimpy...

"...was out of service from February through March of this year because of impacts from the February bliz­zar..."

I wonder if the stop maintenance on the second Met tower and Entergy shutting it down is a cost saving measure?

I think the biggest violation is Entergy and the NRC didn't promptly notify the public?

Here below is my May 17, 2013 note that is on the NRC web site. So it's the fan motor. With the goings on with the employees cuts and the big mouth of the Union president....do they think somebody is talking to me?

May 17, 2013:

Pilgrim Cover-Up: Public Notification And Radiation Evac Plan Broke During Accident

May 28, 2013:

Mr Guzman,

So here is an official concern to the NRC by me. I am not crazy!

In LER 2013-003-00 Entergy admits the met instrumentation stopped recording data. Whatever that means? Was the spinning cups out in the weather frozen and iced over during blizzard Nemo or did the instruments fail because of the power failure? Was it just a data recording issue or did the site lose wind speed and direction indication in the control room or at the tech support center?

Cover-Up: Public Notification And RadiationEvac Plan Broke During Accident

I am calling it, they lost wind speed and direction indication in the control room and the evacuation plan was severely impaired.

Pilgrim LER 2013-003-00: "During the storm on February 8, meteorological instruments at PNPS recorded sustained wind speeds between 42 and 49 mph through 2338 hours at which time the plant information (PI) system stopped recording weather data until 1840 hours the following day. The wind direction was predominantly from the ocean toward the switchyard during the storm.

During Nemo Blizzard why didn’t Pilgrim make an event report like the Cooper station on 05/23/2013?

"At 1019 CDT, AC power was removed from the site meteorological monitoring system (MET) equipment for planned maintenance in order to remove abandoned equipment left in place since installing the new meteorological system in October 2012..."

Why was there no “major loss of assessment capability and reportable under 10CFR50.72(b)(3)(xiii)" like the Cooper station?

"Since there was no direct information of site meteorological conditions during the period of lost power, CNS considered this to be a major loss of assessment capability and reportable under 10CFR50.72(b)(3)(xiii)."

And it raises questions if this should have been reported in the emergency classification system such as a Unusual Event?

It raises issues if the Met instrumentation has failed in other power failures, blizzards and weather conditions and not reported as required?

It is beyond utter incompetence and negligence with public reporting on plant events with Entergy and the NRC...this atrociously incomplete statement: "the plant information (PI) system stopped recording weather data". Entergy should have been forced to add a few sentences like; we still had wind speed and direction indication in the control room or this is how the site would have carried out the evacuation if we had became blind to knowing wind speed and direction.

So why didn’t Entergy fully carry out their licensing reporting responsibilities during Blizzard Nemo and why is the NRC negligent with enforcing their rules?

I see the meteorological instrumentation issue wasn’t carried at all in your most recent inspection report. And the diesel smoke in the reactor building wasn’t covered in the LER. This is so shoddy documentation reporting by both of you.

Would you add this to the docket?

Sincerely,

Mike Mulligan

Hinsdale, NH

Nov 22:

Between Seabrook and Pilgrim, we sense a unannounced change of NRC policies or philosophy with shifting more to unsited violations from sited violation. I had one senior resident inspector bitching to me yesterday about this. It is a pain in the ass with sited violation for the inspector as well as the licence.

They don't care what their employees are put thought. Can you imagine the trauma of a event where they are requiring a community evacuation. Now you got a added complexity of calling the national weather service. Come on. Then as in Blizzard Nemo with widespread knocked down trees and power outages...I bet contact with the weather service was unpredictable and unreliable.

 Pilgrim plant cited for federal violation

 The meteorological towers are required under the plant’s emergency-response plan. According to the NRC report, the towers “provide data on the wind speed, wind direction, air temperature and delta air tem­perature to perform off-site dose assessment during a radio­logical emergency condition.” 

Sheehan said “both have been out of service for several peri­ods of time.” 

Entergy stopped performing preventative maintenance on one of the towers in late 2011. It then stopped functioning. The main tower, too, was out of service from March 2012 to July 2012 because of a broken aspirator fan; February through March of this year because of impacts from the February bliz­zard; and then again April 26 through 30.

Sinclair said plant operators still had access to meteorologi­cal information. “The National Weather Service was always available to provide the neces­sary data,”Sinclair said.

Nov 21:

Not many people is the USA would be able to catch this kind of error with Entergy and the NRC like I did. So I made them fess up!

The below inspection report is from the Professional Reactor Operator Society. It hasn't come out on the NRC's Adams site yet. I am holding by breath till then.

Think about it, On Aug 27, 2013 Entergy disclosed they were shutting down Vermont Yankee...

I am just perplexed with why the NRC didn't catch it when it first showed up...

The NRC should disclose in the inspection report that a outsider caught and made the NRC confront this...cause it now looks the agency caught it on their own. That's fraud! And they should use my name.

SUBJECT:PILGRIM – NRC PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION AND RESOLUTION INSPECTION REPORT -November 20, 2013

Green. A violation of 10 CFR Part 50.54(q)(2) because Entergy did not ensure that the Pilgrim Emergency Plan met the planning standards in 10 CFR 50.47(b). Specifically, on various occasions in 2012 and 2013, Pilgrim failed to maintain both meteorological towers as necessary to support emergency response. As of the date of this inspection, the 220’ meteorological tower was functional and the National Weather Service is still available as an alternate data source.

The inspectors determined that failure to maintain the 160’ and 220’ meteorological towers resulting in both towers being out of service concurrently for three separate periods in 2012 and 2013 was a performance deficiency that was within Entergy’s ability to foresee and correct. This performance deficiency is more than minor because it is associated with the facilities and equipment attribute of the Emergency Preparedness cornerstone and adversely affected the cornerstone objective of ensuring the licensee is capable of implementing adequate measures to protect the health and safety of the public in the event of a radiological emergency.

This finding has a cross- cutting aspect in the area of Problem Identification and Resolution, Corrective Action Program, because Pilgrim did not take appropriate corrective actions to address safety issues and trends in a timely manner. Specifically, the station did not take timely corrective actions to correct deficiencies associated with both meteorological towers resulting in both towers being simultaneously non-functional on multiple occasions.

Wrote this below on May 17, 2013...

Cover-Up: Public Notification and Radiation Evac Plan Broke During Accident.

The below I post on 6/22/13.

I believe that the plant trip and lost of site power was a extremely complicated 24 hours. I don't think they seen the lost of Met Tower for many hours after the trip. Maybe it was so complex they just missed calling the Met Tower inop.

And that is the rub, the public has no idea with how busy the crew was in the first 24 hours or so.

Originally published on 6/26/2013...

So why couldn't the NRC make a quick presumptive statement...we found merit with your concern or the agency found no merit. But the results will be in some future inspection...

It is a common tactic for the agency to stick it in a OIG or enforcement process where the results won't be seen for two years or so. This generally is the function of the enforcement and OIG investigation...to stick the violation into a prolonged investigation process so the violation emerges when the iron is not hot.

And that is the exact function of the OIG and enforcement... a huge delay tool that makes most violations obsolete and meaningless to a utility. I think actually this is a utility campaign contribution  process.

So the NRC and the Pilgrim are having a huge controversy with the Pilgrim Board of Selectman...the NRC says they have been abused at a recent meeting and they will never give another selectman meeting again. So the NRC is burying my complaint...hoping to get by this controversy.

....

They made a report on the JIC (Joint Information Center) to the Feds but not on the Meteorological instrumentation...so why wasn't the Met tower supplied by batteries or a back up power? Why wasn't the JIC on a back up power source?

This is how Entergy does emergency response in Guatemala?

"On Monday, February 11, 2013 at 1435 EST with Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station (PNPS) at 0% core thermal power, the Joint Information Center (JIC) was determined to be unavailable and was declared non-operational. [Power was lost] to the facility [due] to winter storm Nemo. This facility serves as the Joint Information Center for Entergy, State, and Federal organizations during an emergency response.

"Existing emergency procedures direct the responsible Emergency Plant Manager to relocate the JIC staff to the designated alternate location (Bridgewater State University) as required. It has been confirmed that the alternate location is available for use.

"The Emergency Response Organization has been informed to establish the JIC at the Moakley Center at Bridgewater State University in the event of a declared emergency classification requiring activation of this Emergency Response Facility.

"The licensee has notified the NRC Senior Resident Inspector and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

"This eight-hour notification is being made in accordance with 10 CFR 50.72(b)(3)(xiii) due to the loss of an emergency offsite response facility.

May 32: So here is my letter off the NRC web site!...they put it up!

Generally I don't get any acknowledgement with a concern as this...but I made a stink and called his boss.

Guzman, Richard	May 29 (1 day ago)
to me

Mr. Mulligan,

The purpose of this message is to acknowledge receipt of your e-mail correspondence below. As you requested, your message has been added to ADAMS and made publicly available. Your concerns have also been forwarded to the Office of Investigations and the Region I Office for consideration.

Sincerely,

Rich Guzman

Sr. Project Manager

NRR/DORL

US NRC

301-415-1030

Richard.Guzman@nrc.gov

Strange:  

May 26 (2 days ago)
Guzman, Richard
to me

I am out of the office from 5/24 to 5/28 and will return on 5/29. For urgent matters, please contact Mr. James Kim, at 301-415-4125.
….

May 26 (2 days ago)
Kim, James
to me

I am currently out of the office and I will return on May 29, 2013. For urgent matters regarding Catawba or McGuire Power Station, please contact the Backup PM, John Boska, at (301) 415-2901 or Branch Chief, Robert Pascarelli at (301) 415-6603.

Thanks,

Jim Kim

 

Power Reactor	Event Number: 49062
Facility: COOPER Region: 4 State: NE Unit: [1] [ ] [ ] RX Type: [1] GE-4 NRC Notified By: NATHAN L. BEGER HQ OPS Officer: CHARLES TEAL	Notification Date: 05/23/2013 Notification Time: 15:45 [ET] Event Date: 05/23/2013 Event Time: 10:19 [CDT] Last Update Date: 05/23/2013
Emergency Class: NON EMERGENCY 10 CFR Section: 50.72(b)(3)(xiii) - LOSS COMM/ASMT/RESPONSE	Person (Organization): NEIL OKEEFE (R4DO)

Unit	SCRAM Code	RX CRIT	Initial PWR	Initial RX Mode	Current PWR	Current RX Mode
1	N	Y	100	Power Operation	100	Power Operation

Event Text

TEMPORARY LOSS OF METEOROLOGICAL MONITORING SYSTEM DURING PLANNED MAINTENANCE "At 1019 CDT, AC power was removed from the site meteorological monitoring system (MET) equipment for planned maintenance in order to remove abandoned equipment left in place since installing the new meteorological system in October 2012. Removing AC power was not expected to have an effect since all MET information would continue to be available due to an 8-hour battery backup system installed at the meteorological tower. However, when power was removed, all onsite meteorological data was lost to the control room via the Plant Management Information System (PMIS). PMIS is the only display of local direct meteorological conditions available. Subsequently, [Cooper Nuclear Station] CNS determined the interface between MET system and PMIS was not powered from the 8 hour MET battery backup system which accounted for the lost MET indication. CNS corrected the condition and restored meteorological data to the control room via the PMIS system at 1219 CDT. "Site backup assessment capability relies on Meteorological model estimates from the National Weather Service out of Valley, Nebraska or on default values derived from historical local weather patterns. Since there was no direct information of site meteorological conditions during the period of lost power, CNS considered this to be a major loss of assessment capability and reportable under 10CFR50.72(b)(3)(xiii)." The NRC Resident Inspector has been informed.

May 17, 2013:

Pilgrim Cover-Up: Public Notification And Radiation Evac Plan Broke During Accident

May 28, 2013:

Mr Guzman,

So here is an official concern to the NRC by me. I am not crazy!

In LER 2013-003-00 Entergy admits the met instrumentation stopped recording data. Whatever that means? Was the spinning cups out in the weather frozen and iced over during blizzard Nemo or did the instruments fail because of the power failure? Was it just a data recording issue or did the site lose wind speed and direction indication in the control room or at the tech support center?

Cover-Up: Public Notification And Radiation Evac Plan Broke During Accident

I am calling it, they lost wind speed and direction indication in the control room and the evacuation plan was severely impaired.

Pilgrim LER 2013-003-00: "During the storm on February 8, meteorological instruments at PNPS recorded sustained wind speeds between 42 and 49 mph through 2338 hours at which time the plant information (PI) system stopped recording weather data until 1840 hours the following day. The wind direction was predominantly from the ocean toward the switchyard during the storm.

During Nemo Blizzard, why didn’t Pilgrim make an event report like the Cooper station on 05/23/2013?

"At 1019 CDT, AC power was removed from the site meteorological monitoring system (MET) equipment for planned maintenance in order to remove abandoned equipment left in place since installing the new meteorological system in October 2012..."

Why was there no “major loss of assessment capability and reportable under 10CFR50.72(b)(3)(xiii)" like the Cooper station?

"Since there was no direct information of site meteorological conditions during the period of lost power, CNS considered this to be a major loss of assessment capability and reportable under 10CFR50.72(b)(3)(xiii)."

And it raises questions if this should have been reported in the emergency classification system such as a Unusual Event?

It raises issues if the Met instrumentation has failed in other power failures, blizzards and weather conditions and not reported as required?

It is beyond utter incompetence and negligence with public reporting on plant events with Entergy and the NRC...this atrociously incomplete statement: "the plant information (PI) system stopped recording weather data". Entergy should have been forced to add a few sentences like; we still had wind speed and direction indication in the control room or this is how the site would have carried out the evacuation if we had became blind to knowing wind speed and direction.

So why didn’t Entergy fully carry out their licensing reporting responsibilities during Blizzard Nemo and why is the NRC negligent with enforcing their rules?

I see the meteorological instrumentation issue wasn’t carried at all in your most recent inspection report. And the diesel smoke in the reactor building wasn’t covered in the LER. This is so shoddy documentation reporting by both of you.

Would you add this to the docket?

Sincerely,

Mike Mulligan

Hinsdale, NH