Saturday, August 20, 2016

Dead-Ender Oyster Creek-NRC Rules Don't Apply To Them

Dead Ender Oyster Creek has three white findings recently. Two of them has ended with "it beyond not within Exelon’s ability to reasonably foresee and correct" or its a not justifiable old design issues. Basically the violation. don't get put in their report card. The third one is pending...

Do you see a pattern here?

Oyster Creek still running is all you have to know about to explain the USA's great decline...  

Oyster Creek Won’t Receive Extra Scrutiny for ‘White’ Finding

By Daniel Nee
The Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant in Lacey Township. (Courtesy of Exelon)
LACEY – Federal officials, in a quarterly report released recently on the Oyster Creek Generating Station, said they will use their discretion and not further scrutinize the plant following an incident which garnered a minor safety violation, known as a white finding.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its quarterly report on the plant August 3. In the report, the federal agency detailed the “white” finding – spurred by an incident of “low safety significance,” the agency said – which involved a failed electrical relay for one of the plant’s emergency diesel generators.
Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC, said the white finding was spurred by a routine test of the emergency diesel generator on November 9, 2015.
The faulty relay would have prevented the generator from starting, a condition that existed since it was previously run and shut down on October 26, 2015. Exelon completed repairs and returned the generator to service on November 10, 2015. Oyster Creek’s technical specifications state that if one of the plant’s emergency diesel generators become inoperable during power operation, the reactor may remain in operation for a period not to exceed seven days.
“Although this issue constitutes a violation of NRC requirements, the NRC determined that the relay failure which caused the emergency diesel generator to be inoperable was not within Exelon’s ability to reasonably foresee and correct,” the report said, referring to the plant’s owner. “As a result, the NRC did not identify a performance deficiency associated with this condition. The NRC’s assessment considered Exelon’s maintenance practices, industry operating experience, vendor and industry maintenance and testing recommendations for the failed relay as well as similar components, and Exelon’s corrective actions to prevent recurrence of the issue. “
The inspection report also contains a “green” finding – one of “very low safety significance,” Sheehan said – for a failure involving the incorrect reassembly of a reactor recirculation pump during a planned maintenance outage. This led to an unexpected increase in Reactor Coolant System unidentified leakage and a subsequent manual scram, or shutdown, of the reactor on April 30, 2016.
Oyster Creek, the nation’s oldest active nuclear power plant, is scheduled to shut down permanently in November 2019. Officials are currently looking into future options for the plant site, which constitutes a large share of Lacey Township’s tax base. Options include the potential for the site to have an expanded role as a natural gas plant.

No comments: