Emergence of systemic meltdown of Entergy?

01/03/2012

Based on recent events and post red inspection findings at Browns Ferry with NRC tolerance of a site not being according to their rules, policies or procedures...I could make a case the NRC catch regulation violations now  to a tune of a third to one half of all known  or potential violations. In other words, all these plants are littered with tons of not corrected known NRC and engineering violations.

With acceptable not disclosed violation, this is a serious poison to any safety culture or nuclear plant. The implication are if a good employee admits the violation he would be intimidation by his management and the NRC because the NRC finds the non disclosed violations acceptable.
12/27/2011@ 6pm
 "So palisades had had 5 shutdowns this year, the last one a secret start up without knowing what caused the trips, Pilgrim on it third trip with one being a very serious startup trip, Fitzs is reducing power beginning Dec 23 for a condenser leak, and River Bend is just starting up from a prolong shutdown."

"You cheap out on maintenance and personal, then you have more trips, NRCand public scrutiny..."

 "Yea, because it was unsafe...

Imagine a new plant designed to not have failing parts or them failing being inconsequential.

Usually they know about the leak for many months..."

12/28/2011
"Turbine Problem Trips Reactor at Louisiana's River Bend Nuclear Plant...

The reactor at the River Bend nuclear plant in Louisiana shut down automatically after an issue in the turbine caused safety systems to trip."

"I thought these guys were smart, why didn't they have a fifth or sixth relief valve...you only need 4 reliefs...so you just shut the isolation valve and continue on to the next outage."

Saddam Hussein's nuclear industry billionaire palaces

...The government is also considering setting the maximum lifespan for nuclear power plants at around 40 years, they said. The Fukushima No. 1 plant has been running since the 1970s.

Hmm, the nuclear industry’s daddy is the same daddy as the coal, natural gas and the lying green energy sources....all the energy sources that supply our electricity. You got a penny pinching selfish father who for pennies of benefits on the big picture, that is destructively playing his children off against each other.

What makes the nuclear industry so vulnerable is their penchant for secrecy...the right wing has to have secrets in order to be. It is the secrets that gives him the advantage, not hard work and creativity...creating a better world for us all.  

My general complaint with the nuclear industry...nuclear safety... is a they are driven by a distructive 1%er right wing ideology. I think the nuclear technology is a precious gift to us all.

As far as trading lives and jobs with Japanese, there is still 130,000 people who has had their homes stolen from them by the nuclear right wing genie. They are still displaced by the horrors of a of a nuclear accident. I suspect not many of them even have a job and the genie has stolen many jobs not related to the nuclear industry...

I would frame the real and powerful anti nukes as the utility and financial daddy who structures the whole nuclear industry for his singular selfish interest? The real anti nukes are the extreme pronukes who would align the nuclear industry and safety for solely individual gains of the 1%ers and themselves.

I would frame it as the corporate vampires, did you ever see the ostentatious middle east Saddam Hussein's palaces these utility CEO’s have build from themselves...they always just about suck the life blood out of the nuclear technology in order to live like billionair middle east thug kings. The home palaces and the corporate palaces. If they would have plowed back more profits to update their nuclear plant design over the decades instead of the feeding the ostentatious and gilded lives of the corporate utility executives and their really expensive cheater bar Washington and state k street political empires...we’d all be a lot better off. Remember the nuclear industry for decades has been the golden calf for these executive kings. And remember the whole electric industry infrastructure has been starve for funds through the utility 1%ers and the captains’ of the large users of electricity 1%ers.

 

  

Palisades MFP recirc valve shutdown and restart!

Dec 17, 2011

This is not the story the NRC told me yesterday.

One day outage is third in past three months for nuclear plant

Published: Saturday, December 17, 2011 1:06 PM EST

Following repairs to the valve that caused the pumps' automatic shutdown, the plant returned to production at 11:45 p.m. Thursday, plant spokesman Mark Savage said.
From: Michael Mulligan
To: "allegation@nrc.gov"
Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2011 10:41 AM
Subject: Palisades MFP recirc valve shutdown and restart!

To Chairman Jaczko (and allegation)

By the way, the region III NRC public relation people were saying coming from the on site inspector...Palisades was allowed to startup without knowing the cause of the MFP recirc valve misoperation. As of late yesterday afternoon, they were researching the maintenance history of the valve after the startup.

Basically, they were allowed to take the broken valve off line, then immediately start up the reactor. Then trouble shoot and fix it at power. She said it was a non safety system, the NRC doesn't have any authority over this kind of plant operation.

I asked the NRC, the last DC short the NRC doesn't have the guts to declare a stop work and required a immediate shutdown to repair the DC ultra safety system before the flickering lights in the control room and the plant trip while not following procedures. So now you are saying to me the NRC didn't have the horsepower to keep the Palisades plant shutdown until everyone fully understood the broken MFP recirc valve and the organizational problems that drove it, in one of the worst operated nuclear plants in the USA. Are we going to discover in the American Fukushima the NRC had a radical reactionary stance...afraid to get ahead of the developing problem and the agency failing to assert their authority to protect our safety and security?

She said this moved them from green to white on the ROP with unnecessary shutdowns...5 shutdowns in the last year...

I hope i am not seeing the NRC and the plants being timid over the internecine warfare going on in the commissioners office...especially plant information. We are not sure what the hell is going on in NRC commissioners office, so just don't disclose anything is the safest avenue.

It seems the more trouble Entergy gets into...the more reckless they become in asserting to their investors and to the nation in general that our nuclear plant troubles will not interfere with our capacity factor!

Mike Mulligan

Hinsdale, NH

16033368320

Request Emergency Palisades shutdown

NEW 12/15:

Spent a lot of time talking to the region III pr person. She says Entergy tagged it out or took the valve off line, then they started up without knowing what caused it or looking into the historic record.

Palisades nuclear plant down again, this time awaiting repairs after feed pump issues Wednesday

Thursday, December 15, 2011, 12:01 PM Updated: Thursday, December 15, 2011, 12:04 PM

The plant has been plagued by problems in recent months.

"The reactor was manually tripped at 1510 EST on 12/14/11 due to loss of both main feedpumps. Both feedpumps tripped on low suction pressure due to an apparent unplanned opening of the 'A' main feedpump recirculation valve. The cause of the main feedpump recirculation valve opening has not been determined. All full length control rods fully inserted. Auxiliary feed pump P-8A automatically started at 1511 EST on steam generator level as designed (10CFR50.72(b)(3)(iv)(A)). The turbine bypass valve is in service maintaining reactor coolant system temperature [by directing steam flow to the main condenser]. The plant is stable in mode 3 [and the reactor trip was considered uncomplicated]."

"All these past problems are effectively working their way through the beast now, all within their discovery and correcting phase. These things are never black and white at these nuclear plants. We got the continued problems like they discovered last inspection and the ones that are going to occur next inspection. This is a big problem with the NRC. They don't really actually know where we exactly stand. We got all these past but not fully corrected problems, the falsification and inaccuracies. We are not sure in what state of discovery and correction phase they are in; the ones we just discovered and the one identified but repeated ones over and over again. How then the multitudes of serious ones we have not yet discovered, but they are simmering active below the surface unseen. We really don't understand where these problems are in the temporal dimension on the big picture (chronologic, sequential, threat, in stages of completion, there is such a long latency period between emergence of the error and its fix), we know these errors and defects are all spinning around in the organization and in the ether. We have no framework to understand what is the totality of risk or threat to plant reliability right now. We have no quick, we have no visually representation of what happened, what is broken or degraded, what is going on right now, what is going on in the future...like a Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus."

"We are basically plowing along in a car in Midtown Manhattan without ever having been there before and driving by feel."