Paper Mache Nuclear Power Plant Safety Systems

Paper Mache Nuclear Plant Safety systems:

I have been talking about "Paper Mache" nuclear plant safety systems recently...maybe first brought it up in my Palisades 2.206 last week. Paper Mache are non testable safety systems...systems where the engineers create mind boggling tons of paperwork and procedures, but fundamentally the system is never tested under real operating conditions. The system or component is made out of nothing but Paper Mache...and in the first huff and puff of the wolf in "The Story of the Three Little Pigs" the house blows over.

The clear example is the backup cooling water system of our Emergency Diesel Generator, the RHR/Service Water cross connects. Say we lose the intake structure or have to shutdown while not using the control room, it is a very complicated procedure and there is a lot of walking around the plant and outside by the cooling towers, it eats up huge shift resources...then the cooling of the Emergency DG's comes from the deep basin, a big swimming pool type structure, the emergency cooling towers cell and the RHR service water pumps.

The gold standard of nuclear safety is the system has been tested in real conditions and the employees have used the system over and over again so they know easily how to bring on the system. So then when the shock of a accident occurs...then you can almost automatically put on the system without any kinks because you trained over it so many times.

Really, the fire pump becomes a ECCS core cooling systems...and everthing in the fire system and the fire pumps should be Nuclear Safety Grade quality such as the ECCS systems. They never really test this system under real conditions.


NRC examines nuclear plant risks in U.S.

Virgilio addressed the NRC e-mails, obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists through the Freedom of Information Act and released Wednesday. In the e-mails, NRC risk analysts questioned an exercise that simulated a catastrophic loss of power at a nuclear plant due to an earthquake, and whether operators should rely on equipment that was not certified to survive an earthquake.

The exercise, played out on a computer model, looked at what would happen at two U.S. power plants, Surry in Virginia and Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania, with new equipment and procedures, called B.5.b, ordered since the 9/11 terror attacks to make nuclear power plants more resistant to attack. One of the hypothetical accidents that the NRC analyzed was a "station blackout" at Peach Bottom where the plant fails to recover power before backup batteries run out, as happened at Fukushima.

Under the scenario, the plant loses outside power, its diesel backup generators and battery power too, Virgilio said. The new B.5.b strategy would employ new, portable equipment to operate emergency cooling pumps off steam from the reactor core.

One NRC risk analyst questioned how NRC could rely on strategies "that have really not been reviewed to ensure that they will work to mitigate severe accidents.

Questions raised by this and other analysts "are an open item that will need to be looked at," Virgilio said. But he added that the exercise looked at an unlikely scenario — a major earthquake that knocks out power inside and outside the plant.