You know what they call insanity. Doing the same bad thing over and over with with expecting a different outcome. Palisades and Entergy must hold the world record holder with confirmatory orders and fleet wide ethical training that never works. The NRC should have picked up the fraud and falsification much earlier. Palisades have many layers of more educated and experiance employees overseeing these guys charged by the NRC. The more senior managers must have ordered the fraud or turned their eyes away from it. The fraud and falsification was systemic at the plant and organization.
The NRC's violation determination level for falsification and fraud is set way too low in their risk determinations. They should have been ordered to shutdown immediately, a red finding and not start-up till all the penalties were set and understood. The whole stream of management should have been fired. They guys should have gone to court and gotten in excess of ten years. It takes too much legal unobtainable proof to put these nuke guys in jail. The laws are so weak and the public at large is too stupid in the juries to convict these guys. They are a protected class of people by congress. The process takes too long to get any real public justice and cause real deterrence to the workers, Palisades without a doubt, was a corrupt runaway rough operation for many years.
Bottom line, the employees "may" have lost their careers. Palisades got a measly one or two month shutdown to replace most of the safety tank. Mere pennies to these big guys. The little guys paid the big price. I hold Entergy much more responsible for sustaining a grossly rule breaking and unethical organization. This whole deal is another example of the captured NRC. Most of the Entergy fleet continues to intentionally not follow the rules and intentionally not make accurate safety degradation determinations to boost capacity.
If the NRC hit hard Entergy squarely on the head with a sledge hammer, a death, near death experience and deterrence to all the nukes...most of the current serious set of violations fleet wouldn't have occurred since 2011. This would have saved Entergy and the NRC a tremindus amount of money and risk. The resources of the NRC and Entergy were wasted on these event. They are getting overwhelmed. They could have spent a lot of money on little events, not getting to these blockbuster event turning the public perception against the industry.
Bottom line, there was no doubt there was federal corruption with overseeing this plant. The NRC staff and their bosses should have faced the courts and gone to jail. The length of this ADR indicates a deep continued cover-up. Can you believe it, they don't even get a oversight violation over this. Remember when they tore apart the safety tank, the tank was constructed contrary to plant licensing designs.
There is going to be a day of reckoning with this level of blatant corruption.
Do you get it, these sleazy word games both with the NRC and licencee, the selective enforcement of the rules and agreed upon codes, are tremendously intimidating to the licence staff at a power plant. I doubt today outsiders, and even NRC staff, gets the real take of safety culture at a plant from the intimidated staff.
NRC Issues Confirmatory Order to Entergy Regarding Palisades Nuclear Plant
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a Confirmatory Order to Entergy Nuclear Operations Inc. under which the company will perform a series of actions to address failures in handling a leak from the safety injection refueling water tank (SIRWT) into the control room at the Palisades Nuclear Plant.
The plant is located in Covert, Mich., five miles south of South Haven.
The order stems from a settlement reached under the NRC’s alternative dispute resolution (ADR) process requested by plant-owner Entergy to address the violations identified in the NRC’s investigation. The violations are connected to the discovery of leakage from the plant’s control room ceiling on May 18, 2011.
Even though the leak did not result in damage to control room or other safety equipment, the NRC determined that four Palisades employees willfully failed to enter information which identified the tank as the source of the control room leak into the corrective actions program. This delayed Entergy’s response to the issue. In addition, Entergy failed to perform an adequate analysis of the tank’s ability to fulfill its safety function, and failed to follow requirements associated with a missed tank surveillance test. The tank is designed to provide borated water to cool the reactor in case of an accident.
Entergy has already taken a number of actions to address the causes of the violations, which include repairs to the tank to prevent further leakage and strengthening the safety culture at Palisades. The NRC independently reviewed the company’s efforts and noted improvement in these areas.
As a result of the ADR meeting, the company agreed to a number of additional commitments to improve its safety culture. These commitments include: ensuring personnel at Palisades and other Entergy fleet facilities understand lessons learned from this matter; sharing these insights with other nuclear plants; and reviewing applicable procedures. In addition to addressing programmatic and operational issues, the company agreed to modify its interactions with the public on Palisades. Those commitments include: conducting five public meetings by the end of 2018; inviting key stakeholders, such as concerned individuals, non-government organizations, federal, state and local officials to these meetings; focusing meeting discussion on plant safety and operation; and adopting a meeting format which allows members of the public to raise questions and concerns.
The ADR process includes mediation facilitated by a neutral third party, with no decision making authority, who assists the NRC and a licensee in reaching an agreement when there are differences regarding an enforcement action.
“Using the ADR process allowed us to achieve not only compliance with NRC requirements, but a wide range of corrective actions that go beyond those the agency may get through the traditional enforcement process,” said NRC Region III Administrator Cynthia Pederson. “The company will be reporting to the NRC as they are implementing the corrective actions. After Entergy notifies us in writing that they have fully met the conditions of the order, we will conduct an independent review and assessment of the company’s compliance with the order commitments.”
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