Saturday, August 30, 2014

The Local Cult of Teenager Death: Brattleboro Ford and the Local Newspaper

Sept 12: She fell 60 feet and the unprotected bridge is known for rock climbing?
A woman who went over a bridge off Route 101 was taken to the hospital with serious injuries, according to Keene police and firefighters.
Keene Fire Capt. Robert Diluzio Jr. said firefighters and police responded to a call at 7:05 Thursday evening for a woman who had fallen off the Stone Arch Bridge.
Sorry, Drew is not associated with Brattleboro Ford.

The lot of them are nothing but addicted thrill seeking punks!!! 
Did Drew, Brattleboro Ford or the Reformer get permission from the owners of the bridge? Did he go around to the local police and rescue authorities to get their sign off on the jump. 
Honestly, can you imagine the "Reformer" passing this by their lawyers? They would be in stitches laughing breathlessly on the floor for an hour.
Me: Edward, It is not perfect grammar or English but it gets the message across…ask the right questions. "The Local Cult of Teenager Death: Brattleboro Ford and the Local Newspaper" 
http://steamshovel2002@yahoo.com



Drew Christiansen stands on the Fort Hill Branch Rail Bridge that crosses the Connecticut River from Brattleboro to Hinsdale, N.H. Christiansen jumped from

Drew Christiansen stands on the Fort Hill Branch Rail Bridge that crosses the Connecticut River from Brattleboro to Hinsdale, N.H. Christiansen jumped from the top of the bridge into the river after pouring a bag of ice in for an ALS Ice Bucket Challenge video. (Kayla Rice/Reformer)
You know this is going to cause a local mother to be waiting on the side of the Connecticut river while the rescue departments are fishing with a rope and a grappling hook trying to find her child's dead body in the Connecticut River. Will his dead body get chewed up in the dam?

Is this how morally bankrupt we've become? Are Drew, the Reformer or Brattleboro Ford going to be liable when a teenage jumps to his death off this bridge. You are teaching teenagers to take terrible risks.  This is basically Russian roulette...putting a revolver to head with one bullet in the chamber and pulling the trigger. Is this what you are trying to do. Next the Reformer will trying trying to boost circulation by producing a article on Russian roulette and a Brattleboro Subaru employee will You Tube it by pulling the trigger for Parkinson disease funding.   

Drew is not on the railroad bed...he is on the top of the superstructure.

Lets say, Drew upon trying to climb to the top of the superstructure, he lost his footing and fell to his death. Would it become a cover-up with the Reformer and Brattleboro Ford. Imagine how this would look for these guys.

I see numerous routes of injury  or deaths.

1) Hitting something on the way down.

2) Climbing to the jump perch...slipping off the bridge by accident.

3) That ski pole puncturing your chest or skull.

4) Teenagers jumping in shallower water.

5) Tripping over his flip flops and falling to his death. 

Hey, I got a idea...all the local newspaper and car dealerships could create a trifecta or perfecter. It would be really cheap advertising. Nobody in their right mind would put a horse to such risky behavior. The first to jump off all three, the superstructure of the Seabees bridge, the rail bridge  and the French KIng Bridge while playing Russian Roulette on way down. It is cheating if you know the depth of water where you are going to jump. Think of how much free advertisement you could get out of this? it would even be better if somebody died! 

This is nothing but free "junk"newspaper circulation and advertising...these local companies should just put the money into these organizations instead of risking their valuable employee. You know, it is tax deductible?  

This is going to get out of hand with escalating the risk...these crazies trying to outdo each other.

Locals join nationwide trend of ALS Ice Bucket Challenge for charity


By DOMENIC POLI / Reformer Staff


BRATTLEBORO -- The latest trend in humanitarian efforts is to simply get doused with water.
In an effort to raise money and/or awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease, people have started to record ice water getting dumped on themselves and post it online. The exact origins of this fad, known as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, are debated, but it has recently spread like wildfire.
And plenty of locals have taken up the cause. The Reformer has found videos of employees at Brattleboro Ford, the Hampton Inn of Brattleboro, the Brattleboro Memorial Hospital's radiology department, the Chester Fire Department and Mount Snow and Stratton Mountain ski resorts -- to name just a few -- getting water poured onto them.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Those Nukie Cheaters?

This goes well beyond the Chaleston. These guys get cycled back and forth to the fleet and the schools many times. Many times a school engineer will bring back to a boat some of their enlisted friends. It was called the school and prototype mafia. I think the CO of the school gained benefits... better pass rates. I can't imagine they weren't involved in it. 

Notice how they don't talk about who gained the benefits...why did they take such a risk?

So they would pass those corrupting forces into the the boats and ships...the disease model.
Navy kicks out 34 for cheating at nuclear training site
WASHINGTON — At least 34 sailors are being kicked out of the Navy for their roles in a cheating ring that operated undetected for at least seven years at a nuclear power training site, and 10 others are under criminal investigation, the admiral in charge of the Navy’s nuclear reactors program told The Associated Press.
The number of accused and the duration of cheating are greater than was known when the Navy announced in February that it had discovered cheating on qualification exams by an estimated 20 to 30 sailors seeking to be certified as instructors at the nuclear training unit at Charleston, South Carolina. Students there are trained in nuclear reactor operations to prepare for service on any of the Navy’s 83 nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers.
Neither the instructors nor the students are involved in handling nuclear weapons.
After further investigation the Navy determined that 78 enlisted sailors were implicated. Although the cheating is believed to have been confined to a single unit at Charleston and apparently was not known to commanding officers, the misconduct had been happening since at least 2007, according to Adm. John M. Richardson, director of naval reactors. The exact start of the cheating was not pinpointed.
“There was never any question” that the reactors were being operated safely, he said in an AP interview, yet the cheating was a stunning violation of Navy ethics.
Richardson said he was “loaded for bear” at the outset of the investigation, unconvinced the cheating was confined to a single training unit. But he now believes that it had not spread, and that this was one reason that the ring managed to operate so long without being discovered.
In addition to the 34 enlisted sailors who were removed from the nuclear power program and are being administratively discharged from the Navy, two more who were implicated as “minimal” participants had their non-criminal punishment suspended due to their “strong potential for rehabilitation.”
Also, 32 sailors were implicated by investigators but later exonerated by Richardson, and he gave one officer a verbal warning. The officer, whom Richardson declined to identify by name or rank, was not accused of participating in the cheating. He was faulted for “deficiencies” in his oversight of the exam program, but Richardson said this was not severe enough to merit punishment.
The Navy investigation also concluded that commanders were not directly at fault. “It was not the result of ‘wishful blindness,” it said.
The 68 implicated sailors are in addition to the 10 whom Richardson said are believed to have been “at the center” of the cheating ring and remain under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
The scandal rocked the Navy, but details until now had remained under wraps as senior Navy officials sought to determine the scope of the cheating — including whether it was happening elsewhere — as well as the root causes and possible remedies.
Unlike an Air Force exam-cheating scandal that came to light in January at a Montana base that operates land-based nuclear-armed missiles, the sailors involved in the Navy cheating had no responsibility for nuclear weapons.
Navy investigators did, however, find one key link between the two episodes. Their investigation report said “a triggering event” for the unidentified sailor at Charleston who alerted superiors to cheating on Feb. 2 was media reports a few weeks earlier about exam cheating at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.
“This increased his concern enough about being caught to outweigh the group behavior of his peers,” the report said, apparently alluding to peer pressure this unidentified sailor may otherwise have felt not to report the misconduct.
Richardson said he met individually with each of the accused and heard at least two common themes: a belief that there was little risk of getting caught, and a work environment at the nuclear training site that created stresses and pressures on the approximately 300 sailors who serve as instructors.
In an interview in his Navy Yard office Tuesday, Richardson said he is taking steps to ease the pressures and to strengthen ethics training.
Richardson said the accused at Charleston fell into two main categories:
■ Sailors who cheated on the tests.
■ Sailors who enabled the cheating by providing answers in advance to others taking the test and tipping them off about what test they would be given.
Richardson called the latter group of 10 sailors the ringleaders and said their offenses are considered more serious because they had facilitated the illicit transfer of classified test answers.
An extensive investigation ordered by Richardson and led by Rear Adm. Kenneth M. Perry found that an electronic master file of “engineering watch supervisor” tests and answers was illegally removed from a Navy computer “sometime before 2007.” Investigators failed to identify who took it or exactly when.
The set of test and answer keys became known among the cheaters as the “Pencil Files.”
These files were secretly passed via personal email accounts, compact disks, thumb drives and other non-official electronic systems. Richardson said the Pencil Files contained all 600 answers to questions on five sets of tests.
Also, a “Pencil Number” was passed to sailors to tip them to which of the five exams they would be given.
“The result was a deliberate scheme to cheat ...,” the report said. It found no evidence of espionage.
Exam security was weak. For example, investigators found that the five tests were used in a predictably rotating order and the questions had not changed significantly since 2004, even though written rules require they be changed frequently.
NCIS investigators interviewed four people thought to have knowledge of the origin of the Pencil Files. Three of them denied involvement in the scheme and the fourth invoked his right to remain silent and requested an attorney.
“Thus, no further evidence of the origin of the ‘Pencil Files’ was obtained,” the investigation report said.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Aug 2114: Hinsdale Bridge Inspection

Aug 21: I put a call into the NHDOT's bridge inspection group and they told me they will get right back to me:)
(The NHDOT called me within a hour and they reminded me to call them again if I had any issues. He was really decent to me)  
I swear, I was going to razz the bridge inspectors with, “is that you knocking off the rust”. The NHDOT says that was them knocking off the rust with a hammer yesterday to see the true metal thickness. I said it wasn’t a hammer, it was a sledge hammer or bigger.

The question that comes up, so that amount of rust gets generated in six months? The layered rust they were hitting takes decades to develop. Why weren’t they whacking the hell out of it six months ago on that spot.

He says the bridge is in poor condition and they been trying to get it replaced. Basically the bridge is in the same condition it was six months ago.

I reminded him, you are communicating with the legislator and the local people. You got to down grade that bridge in order to get everyone’s ass in gear.    
Funding remains not a chance in the next decade!!! 
Last week began bridge inspections. So I approach the hinsdsle bridge  , I can see a emplyee shaking his head in disbelief I showed up at just the right time. There was three nhdot guys on my brand new walkway. They had generator going to something. Gas bottles and a welded setup too. Who knows how many guys where under the bridge. They were hammering the piss on a beam or something under the bridge. I mean heavy heavy hammering the beam like it was out of place.

I asked what  are you doing...he said there were just working. I knew that was all I was going to get from him. I mocked, this is the is the USA ain't it? I asked, how do like my new deck. He said it was nice job.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

FERGUSON, Mo

Aug 3: I nailed it: "What is going on in public housing in Ferguson?"

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/another-shadow-in-ferguson-as-outside-firms-buy-and-rent-out-distressed-homes/?ref=us
Another Shadow in Ferguson as Outside Firms Buy and Rent Out Distressed Homes
Ethel Walker and her daughter Tasha pay $650 a month to rent a home in Ferguson, Mo., from an investment firm 1,800 miles away in Los Angeles. A few miles from the Walkers, Corey Bryant and his mother are renting a two-bedroom home in Ferguson from the same California firm.
Certainly the whole clip tells a different story than the short CNN clip. The guy never got aggressive until the police show up.

Everyone knows you got size up the mental status…if he has indications of a mental condition then you got to speak softly at him. Maybe by retreating he would have calmed down. Certainly they could have waited a minute or two until all the rest of those cops swarmed onto the scene.  The outcome would have been different.

 Aug 18:  
Ok, so this is a white insider game. Usually in white flight the rental properties remain in control of the whites. They become house mongrels and tyrants…very powerful and rich. So with the blacks, who owns their own thei r homes and the rentals? What does the property owners of the blacks housing look like?
Usually the property mongrel or lords coalesces into a political force… they go to tax boards or the arbiters of the housing property tax boards or politicians gaining tremendous reduction in property tax rates…
How much corruption and fraud is involved in property values and tax rates?
In the 2009 economic, mortgage and housing collapse/corruptions, how did this shake out in Ferguson and St Louis???         
What is going on in public housing in Ferguson?
I bet you inadiquate police and court funding set this up?

I’ll bet you the kids knew some small crime was unenforced becuase the system including the jails was overwealmed.

Police $4,366,007 4,477,640 4,627,200 4,651,300 4,907,300
 Total4,737,743$ 4,834,244$ 4,999,700$ 5,025,700$ 5,282,900$ Fiscal
Year Ending or Ended June 30,2013 CITY OF FERGUSON, MISSOURIANNUAL OPERATING BUDGETFUNCTION: Public SafetyDIVISION: Police (40
$545,00 increase since 2011.
Divided by 3 equals 184,000 per year.
3.5% incease per year?
Crime rate shot up in 2008?
"Through the 90's Ferguson's population has grown by about 1%. It is estimated that in the first 5 years of the past decade the population of Ferguson has declined by about 4%. Since 2005 Ferguson's population has declined by about 2%."
The municipalities to the south and north of Ferguson are in much worst shape?   





Heroin is a terrible problem in the northeast…has the increase use of heroin acerbated the tension in Ferguson. It is a "white" problem in my area!
St. Louis has a heroin problem. And the problem is growing, especially among suburban youth.

As previously reported by St. Louis Public Radio, the number of deaths in Missouri caused by heroin has doubled in recent years, with 90 percent of those deaths occurring in St. Louis.
Here is my opinion of this. The Ferguson blacks get what they deserve because of their pitiful voting record and poor participation in government.

Aug 18: Well, this answered my question. It is worst than I thought. NH uses a proportion of their court fines to fund police training?

Isn't Obama pitifull!
By JEFF SMITHAUG. 17, 2014
POLITICS, wrote the political scientist Harold Lasswell in 1936, is about “who gets what, when, and how.” If you want to understand the racial power disparities we’ve seen in Ferguson, Mo., understand that it’s not only about black and white. It’s about green.
Back in 1876, the city of St. Louis made a fateful decision. Tired of providing services to the outlying areas, the city cordoned itself off, separating from St. Louis County. It’s a decision the city came to regret. Most Rust Belt cities have bled population since the 1960s, but few have been as badly damaged as St. Louis City, which since 1970 has lost almost as much of its population as Detroit.
This exodus has left a ring of mostly middle-class suburbs around an urban core plagued by entrenched poverty. White flight from the city mostly ended in the 1980s; since then, blacks have left the inner city for suburbs such as Ferguson in the area of St. Louis County known as North County.
Ferguson’s demographics have shifted rapidly: in 1990, it was 74 percent white and 25 percent black; in 2000, 52 percent black and 45 percent white; by 2010, 67 percent black and 29 percent white.
The region’s fragmentation isn’t limited to the odd case of a city shedding its county. St. Louis County contains 90 municipalities, most with their own city hall and police force. Many rely on revenue generated from traffic tickets and related fines. According to a study by the St. Louis nonprofit Better Together, Ferguson receives nearly one-quarter of its revenue from court fees; for some surrounding towns it approaches 50 percent.
Municipal reliance on revenue generated from traffic stops adds pressure to make more of them. One town, Sycamore Hills, has stationed a radar-gun-wielding police officer on its 250-foot northbound stretch of Interstate.
With primarily white police forces that rely disproportionately on traffic citation revenue, blacks are pulled over, cited and arrested in numbers far exceeding their population share, according to a recent report from Missouri’s attorney general. In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of black people — despite the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on black drivers (22 percent versus 34 percent of whites). This worsens inequality, as struggling blacks do more to fund local government than relatively affluent whites.
By contrast, consider the city: After decades of methodically building political power, blacks in St. Louis City elected a black mayor in 1993 and black aldermen or alderwomen in nearly half the city’s wards, and hold two of three seats on the powerful Board of Estimate and Apportionment, which must approve all city contracts. Well-established churches, Democratic ward organizations and other civic institutions mobilize voters in black wards. But because blacks have reached the suburbs in significant numbers only over the past 15 years or so, fewer suburban black communities have deeply ingrained civic organizations.
That helps explain why majority-black Ferguson has a virtually all-white power structure: a white mayor; a school board with six white members and one Hispanic, which recently suspended a highly regarded young black superintendent who then resigned; a City Council with just one black member; and a 6 percent black police force.
Many North County towns — and inner-ring suburbs nationally — resemble Ferguson. Longtime white residents have consolidated power, continuing to dominate the City Councils and school boards despite sweeping demographic change. They have retained control of patronage jobs and municipal contracts awarded to allies.
The North County Labor Club, whose overwhelmingly white constituent unions (plumbers, pipe fitters, electrical workers, sprinkler fitters) have benefited from these arrangements, operates a potent voter-turnout operation that backs white candidates over black upstarts. The more municipal contracts an organization receives, the more generously it can fund re-election campaigns. Construction, waste and other long-term contracts with private firms have traditionally excluded blacks from the ownership side and, usually, the work force as well.
But there’s a potential solution that could help Ferguson reinvest in itself and also help African-Americans compete for a bigger share of the pie: consolidation with surrounding municipalities, many of which face similar challenges. The St. Louis region has seen some preliminary support for the idea, with resistance concentrated in smaller political units whose leaders are loath to surrender control.
Consolidation would help strapped North County communities avoid using such a high percentage of their resources for expensive public safety overhead, such as fire trucks. It could also empower the black citizens of Ferguson. Blacks incrementally gained power in St. Louis City in part because its size facilitates broader coalitions and alliances. Another benefit of consolidation is the increased political talent pool. Many leaders just aren’t interested in running a tiny municipality.
In shrinking cities, politics is often a nasty, zero-sum game. But consolidation could create economies of scale, increase borrowing capacity to expand economic opportunity, reduce economic pressures that inflame racial tension, and smash up the old boys’ network that has long ruled much of North County.
When the state patrol and the national television cameras leave Ferguson, its residents will still be talking about how they can move forward. And they may be ready to expand the conversation so that it’s not just about black and white, but green.

Jeff Smith is an assistant professor of urban policy at the New School and a former Missouri state senator from St. Louis.


 

Friday, August 15, 2014

Palisades .206 Petition - OEDO-14-00145; Initial Recommendation (MF3608)

I am happy they answered me in the documents...this is not going to look good if a accident comes out of this.

Palisades .206 Petition - OEDO-14-00145; Initial Recommendation (MF3608)

Mr. Mulligan,

My name is Jennie Rankin. I have been assigned as the new petition manager for your 10 CFR 2.206 petition dated March 5, 2014 (Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS) Accession No. ML14071A006). This petition was supplemented by your address to the Petition Review Board (PRB) on April 8, 2014 (ADAMS Accession No. ML14143A212) and by email dated May 21, 2014 (ADAMS Accession No. ML14142A101). In your petition, you request a number of actions to be taken by the NRC and Entergy Nuclear Operations, Inc. (the licensee, ENO) for equipment failures at Palisades Nuclear Plant (PNP). As the basis for your request, you state that there have been various recent plant events and equipment failures at PNP, such as Primary Coolant Pump (PCP) impeller pieces breaking off and lodging in the reactor vessel, leakage from the safety injection refueling water tank (SIRWT), and flaws in the Control Rod Drive Mechanisms (CRDM). I would like to note that during the spring 2014 refueling outage, all of the CRDM housings were replaced with new CRDM housings that incorporated a design change in an effort to eliminate the cause of the cracking. In 2013, ENO replaced most of the SIRWT bottom, along with other repairs to ensure any water leaking from the SIRWT would be captured and collected. No leakage from the SIRWT has been noted since these repairs in 2013. I also would like to express my appreciation for voicing your concerns regarding these matters to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

The PRB is comprised of representatives from the following technical divisions within the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation: Component Performance, NDE and Testing Branch and, Vessels and Integrity Branch, within the Division of Engineering; Reactor System Branch, and Nuclear Performance and Code Review Branch within the Division of Safety Systems. The PRB initially met on March 14, 2014. At this meeting, the PRB reviewed your request for immediate action to prevent PNP restart due to a piece of impeller that was lodged between the reactor vessel and the flow skirt. It was determined that there were no safety significant concerns to prevent the plant from restarting as scheduled. Likewise, your request to immediately shutdown PNP until the PCPs are replaced was reviewed and it was determined that there were no safety significant concerns that would require a plant shutdown. This was communicated to you by email dated March 19, 2014 (ADAMS Accession No. ML14083A680). The PRB met again on May 19 and July 28, 2014, to discuss your petition, as supplemented, and in accordance with the criteria for review and rejection described in Management Directive (MD) 8.11, “Review Process for 10 CFR 2.206 Petitions." The PRB determined that the following requests from your petition meet the criteria for review in accordance with MD 8.11:

1. Request for PNP to open every PCP for inspection and clear up all flaws.

2. Request for PNP to replace the PCP’s with a design for their intended duty.

3. Request an Office of Inspector General (OIG) inspection on why there are different analysis criteria for similar PCP events between the NRC regions.

4. Request a ten million dollar fine over these events.

5. Request for PNP to return to yellow or red status, and intensify NRC monitoring of PNP.

I have referred to the OIG those allegations of NRC wrongdoing contained in your petition and in the transcript of when you addressed the PRB on April 8, 2014. I have also forwarded your request for OIG investigation regarding why there are different analysis criteria for similar PCP events between the NRC regions, as stated in item number 3 above.

Your remaining requests do not meet the criteria for review, either because they are not requests for enforcement-related action or because they are issues that have already been the subject of NRC staff review and evaluation for which a resolution has been achieved and the issues have been resolved. Although many of your requests do not meet the criteria of MD 8.11, the NRC staff appreciates your concerns and the below paragraphs explain why your requests were not accepted into the 2.206 process.

Concerns with NRC staff monitoring of PCP impeller issues

(Issue Nos. 1, 2, 11, 12, 14 of petition dated March 5, 2014)

This issue regarding failure of the PCP impellers resulting in pieces breaking free in the reactor vessel is being tracked by Region III through the Reactor Oversight Process (ROP). Region III staff, in addition to the resident inspection staff at PCP, have followed, and will continue to follow up with the licensee regarding the licensee’s corrective actions, in accordance with ROP activities. On August 8, 2012, Region III documented a finding of very-low safety significance and associated non-cited violation for the failure of the licensee to operate the PCPs in accordance with their design operating criteria (ADAMS Accession No. ML12221A340). Region III recently documented their inspection findings in the Palisades Nuclear Plant Integrated Inspection Report dated May 7, 2014 (ML14127A543). The report states the following:

Because the PCP-C impeller was replaced with a new impeller this outage, PCP-B was the only pump that remained in service with a refurbished impeller that was more susceptible to the fatigue-related failures that have been observed.

However, a review of the licensee’s evaluation to justify continued operation of PCP-B with a potentially cracked impeller continues. Additionally, the inspectors continue to review the licensee’s corrective actions to date and going forward to determine whether the licensee plans to eliminate the known susceptibility of impeller pieces breaking off.

In addition to continued monitoring of this issue under the ROP, Region III staff have addressed this issue at the public End-of-Cycle meetings conducted in South Haven, Michigan (ADAMS Accession Nos. ML14192B384 and ML14175A284 for meeting summary and NRC meeting slides). During the public End-of-Cycle meeting, the NRC staff presented a discussion on the reactor vessel foreign material inspection that occurred during the 2014 refueling outage and provided a poster session to answer any additional questions regarding foreign material caused by the failure of the impellers.

In regards to your concerns on why the broken vanes were not reported to the NRC by a Licensee Event Report (LER) or event notification, the requirements for reporting events to the NRC are in accordance with 10 CFR 50.72 and 50.73. NUREG-1022, Revision 3, “Event Report Guidelines 10 CFR 50.72 and 50.73” (ADAMS Accession No. ML13032A220) contains guidelines that the NRC staff considers acceptable for use in meeting the requirements of 10 CFR 50.72 and 10 CFR 50.73. Section 3.0 of NUREG-1022 provides examples and discussion of events that would require event notification or an LER. Region III monitors conformance with 10 CFR 50.72 and 50.73 through ROP activities and did not consider the impeller issues at Palisades to warrant notification in accordance with 10 CFR 50.72 and 50.73.

In regards to your concern on plant debris discovered in the primary side of the steam generators, specifically the impact of loose impeller pieces causing potential wear on the steam generator tubes, PNP’s technical specifications (TS) section 5.6.8 requires the licensee to submit a steam generator tube inspection report to the NRC. This report includes the active degradation mechanisms including foreign objects wear (regardless of origin), location and measured sizes of service induced indications, and any corrective actions (e.g., tube plugging) taken in response to the inspection findings. The NRC staff reviews these reports to ensure that the licensee is detecting potential tube degradation. The NRC staff documents their review in a letter to the licensee, which is made publically available in ADAMS.

Concerns with the design and operation of the PCP impellers

(Issue Nos. 7 and 8 of 2.206 petition dated March 5, 2014 and

Issue Nos. 5, 6, and 7 of supplemental email dated May 21, 2014)

You raised the following concerns:

a. Sequencing of the PCP during startup and shutdown conditions.

b. Potential erosion of the coolant piping walls from metal blade particles.

c. Failure of large pieces of the impeller.

The NRC staff notes that the requests regarding the above 3 concerns were not a request for an enforcement action and thus, did not meet the acceptance criteria in accordance to MD 8.11. The NRC staff understands your concerns and notes that these concerns are closely related to two of the accepted requests (Numbers 1 and 2 above), and will take your underlying concerns into consideration during the review of the accepted requests.

Concerns with pieces of broken impeller causing fuel damage

(Issue Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 of supplemental email dated May 21, 2014)

Many of your requests stem from your concern that broken pieces of impeller (small metal particles) can ultimately cause fuel damage. As a result of the October 2011 vibration event and the subsequent review of the licensee’s operability determination, the NRC staff studied the following potential issues associated with broken impeller pieces (various sizes):

1. Interactions within the PCP including impeding flow, impact with other vanes, impeding pump coastdown, pressure boundary damage, and Final Safety Analysis Report (FSAR) impacts.

2. Passage through a reactor coolant system cold leg including potential impact with a resistance temperature device and pressure boundary damage.

3. Passage / lodging in the reactor vessel (RV) annulus including pressure boundary damage.

4. Behavior after leaving the RV annulus including potential interactions in the lower plenum, blockage of flow channels, fuel cladding damage, and control rod jamming.

5. Effects of a piece moving upstream of the PCP.

The NRC staff concluded there were no significant safety concerns resulting from broken pieces of impeller causing fuel damage due to several factors. Impeller pieces are likely to remain stuck at the flow skirt or at the bottom of the vessel as evidenced by the discovery of previous pieces. Flow conditions are insufficient to elevate larger pieces that may pass through the gap between the flow skirt and vessel wall to the lower core support plate. Should the impeller pieces be small enough to be transported up and through the gaps (a highly unlikely occurrence), the impeller piece would have to become lodged in a position to cause erosion of the fuel cladding. If this occurs, the activity levels in the primary coolant system would increase. Radiation monitoring would detect this increase in PCS levels, and the reactor would be shutdown in accordance with the licensee’s technical specification 3.4.16, “PCS Specific Activity.”

Requests for licensee information

(Issue Nos. 4 and 9 of the 2.206 petition dated March 5, 2014)

In regards to your request for Palisades to disclose internal Entergy reports regarding whether the PCPs were operated outside their design bases, the NRC staff does not require the licensee to disclose internal documents for public inspection as part of the 2.206 process. As part of the inspection process under the ROP, Entergy documents have been, and will continue to be reviewed, and any findings will be documented in the applicable inspection reports which are made publically available.

In regards to your request for Entergy to explain their decision for weld repair of the PCP impellers and details on how other plants have repaired their impellers, the NRC staff notes that this request is not a request for enforcement related action and thus, did not meet the acceptance criteria in accordance to MD 8.11. The NRC staff understands your concern and notes that these concerns are closely related to two of the accepted requests (Number 1 and 3 above). During the process of reviewing accepted request Number 1, the NRC will take your concern into consideration.

In accordance with MD 8.11, you have the opportunity to address the PRB to comment on the initial recommendations, either in person at the NRC Headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, or by telephone conference. Please advise me by return email if you would like to address the PRB. If you would like to meet in person, I will need to schedule a formal public meeting at the NRC Headquarters. If you would prefer to address the PRB via telephone, the NRC staff is available for a conference call at 10 AM ET on September 3, 2014. If I do not hear from you by August 22, 2014, I will move forward to process the acknowledgement letter which will contain our final recommendations for accepting your petition in part.

Thank you,
Jennie Rankin
Jenni Rankin, Project Manager
Plant Licensing Branch III-1
Division of Operating Reactor Licensing
Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation

(301) 415-1530