The big deal out of today is...type 416 ss is cheap metal. All the shafts are made out of 416 ss so why don't they have corrosions like the couplings.
It is shocking to me they are using type 416 on the shafts, as they changed out that material out the couplings...and the NRC and the Entergy never seemed to be worried about the shaft cracking....
Entergy's Root Cause Analysis
January 05, 2012
The three Service Water Pumps (SWPs), P-7A, P-7B, and P-7C, are modified Layne and Bowler pumps. They are comprised of a two stage pump end with stainless steel impellers connected to a discharge head by seven columns for a total height of over 40 feet from suction to discharge.
Lucius Pitkin , Inc . Consulting Engineers
METALLURGICAL AND FAILURE ANALYSIS OF
December, 2011
"P-7A and P-7C are Layne and Bowler Model 25RKHC pumps while P-7B is a Johnston Model 25NMC pump. Each pump is driven by a 350 horsepower (HP) motor providing a rated 8000 GPM at 140 ft total developed head (TDH), which is 50% of the service system capacity [1]."
NEW:
From: "Chawla, Mahesh"
To: Michael Mulligan
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2012 2:45 PM
Subject: Palisades 2.206 Petition dated 1/10/2012 - Mike Mulligan
Mr. Mulligan,
I have been assigned as the petition manager for your 2.206 petition which you submitted on January 10, 2012, requesting an emergency shutdown of Palisades Nuclear Plant. Since you submitted this as a 2.206 process requesting an immediate enforcement action, a Petition Review Board (PRB) was immediately formed.
The PRB met internally on January 19, 2012, and denied the request for immediate action because there was no immediate safety concern to plant, or to the health and safety of the public. Your request for the immediate action of shutdown of Palisades and other Entergy Plants did not have the adequate bases. You have cited numerous equipment failures and made accusations of falsification of records and also you find the ROP process to be inadequate. However, you did not provide any additional information for NRC to consider. The staff is well aware of the information you have provided in the petition and these issues/events are being handled by NRC processes.
The 2.206 process is a public process. The NRC normally makes 2.206 petitions publicly available (except for sensitive or security-related material). I believe you are familiar with our process, but please respond to this email and confirm with us by January 27, 2012, that you have no objection to participating in this public process, and allowing your petition to be made public.
Also, the PRB in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation (NRR) will be reviewing your petition. We offer 2 possible meetings with the PRB. One can be before the PRB reviews your petition, in which you or your representatives have the opportunity to provide any relevant information to the PRB. There will be a second opportunity to address the PRB following the PRB’s initial recommendation on whether or not to accept your petition for review. Please advise if you are interested in either one of these possible meetings. The meeting can be in person, at NRC headquarters in Rockville, MD, or by teleconference. These meetings are transcribed, and the transcript becomes part of the record. Please let me know if you wish to participate in either of these possible meetings.
Mahesh Chawla
Project Manager, NRR/DORL
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
301-415-8371
email: Mahesh.chawla@nrc.gov
Entergy in their Root Cause said Palisades had three Layne and Bowler service water pumps. But they really have two of those 350 hp pumps and other is a Johnson model 25NMC pump.
...On the service water coupling, they talk of this repeated wetting and drying cycling that causing IGSSC...the on and off cycling of the pumps. It dries out in the thread crevice, 10ppm which is a really tiny amount of salt . The problem is, the c pump was on 92% of the time while the coupling failed the first time, then 87% of the time the second failure. You know, where is all this opportunity for all this wet/ drying cycling?
They got a little coupling drain hole right in the middle of the coupling. So the water goes in and out this little hole. You know, what the hell does that hole do when the shaft is spinning so fast , then what about all the flow going up the pump. There seems to be a lot of turbulence going on there. So why isn't all this turbulence flushing out all the tons of salt where the shafts meet.
...So i was asking why was hydro-aire trying to "reverse engineer" the modified Layne and Bowlers pumps couplings. I am confused, so the Layne and Bowler pump company hails from the great country of Turkey. Gets you to wonder where all the couplings were manufactured in?
Preliminary report shows Palisades among worst power plants in U.S.
Final report still in the works
"COVERT, Mich. - If a preliminary report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is made final, the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant, just north of Berrien County, will be one of the worst performing nuclear power plants in the country.
In 2011, Palisades shut down five times unexpectedly, caused three NRC violations, and required two special federal inspections within a month. “We saw a significant decline in the performance of this plant,” said Viktoria Mitlyng, an NRC spokesperson..."
In the last two months I have spend more time with Viktoria on the phone than I have been with my wife. It is clear she serves the NRC, we had disagreements...but I really like her.
Jan 18, 2012 Detroit Free Press Editorial
On Lake Michigan's shore, no room for lax nuclear safety
"Yet documents and testimony suggest that something as simple as changing a burned indicator light has resulted in cascading events; in the case of the light change last September, the plant ultimately shut down. It was one of at least five unplanned shutdowns in 2011."
It is interesting, anyone who has been watching this knows this sentence is utterly inaccurate. It goes to show, what is a huge factor with what causes a Palisades, is a utterly failed 4th estate.
...It is interesting, the Entergy root cause of the emergency airlock not working green light says they were doing trouble shooting (in sept 2011) of the failed light in anticipation of the up coming due surveillance of the airlock. As we know, the light went broke prior to the 2010 Oct outage. One wonders what the surveillance frequency is? It must have blew past failing other surveillance frequencies and why the sensitivities this time? It is interesting the NRC never covered this issue with the approaching surveillance?
Grand Gulf's new NRC inspection report
"The team conducted a walkdown of the Division II emergency diesel generator room as their inspection. When walking down the perimeter of the diesel generator, the inspectors noted a large puddle of lube oil on the floor on the engine end of the machine near the lube oil filter. The puddle of lube oil contained saturated pads, which had been previously placed to contain the oil. These pads had been overburdened such that oil surrounded the pads.
The team identified that in 2009, a problem identification and resolution team reviewed this leakage on the Division II emergency diesel generator. The team presented a minor violation to the licensee as part of their exit for the licensee's failure to correct the lube oil sump leak on the Division II emergency diesel generator. The licensee entered this condition into their corrective action program as condition report CR-GGN- 2009-06385"...
Electricity declines 50 percent with shale boom
Posted on January 17, 2012 at 6:38 am by Bloomberg in Electricity, Energy demand
(Photo: AEI Services)
A shale-driven glut of natural gas has cut electricity prices for the U.S. power industry by 50 percent and reduced investment in costlier sources of energy.
With abundant new supplies of gas making it the cheapest option for new power generation, the largest U.S. wind-energy producer, NextEra Energy Inc. (NEE), has shelved plans for new U.S. wind projects next year and Exelon Corp. (EXC) called off plans to expand two nuclear plants. Michigan utility CMS Energy Corp. (CMS) canceled a $2 billion coal plant after deciding it wasn’t financially viable in a time of “low natural-gas prices linked to expanded shale-gas supplies,” according to a company statement.
Mirroring the gas market, electricity prices have dropped more than 50 percent on average since 2008, and about 10 percent during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a Jan. 11 research report by Aneesh Prabhu, a New York-based credit analyst with Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC. Prices in the west hub of PJM Interconnection LLC, the largest wholesale market in the U.S., declined to about $39 per megawatt hour by December 2011 from $87 in the first quarter of 2008....
Decline in safety culture at Entergy Palisades nuclear power plant to be fixed
Friday Feb 14 message 2
[QUOTE who="Mike Mulligan"]Hmm, it is not the Detroit Free Press? [/QUOTE]
Wednesday Jan 4 message #7
"What is the difference in a NRC branch manager or project manager?
Did Jack (Jack Giessner NRC Branch chief ) say today Palisades is the worst performing plant in region III or was he saying it was the worst in his group of plant he controlled.
I think he said Palisades is the new worst performing plant in Region III?"
Michigan's Palisades nuclear plant may be named one of nation's 5 worst
The Palisades nuclear power plant, which sits on the shores of Lake Michigan, could soon be downgraded by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to a status making it among the nation's five worst-performing nuclear plants after a year of accidents, unexpected shutdowns and safety violations.
(...What I was trying to highlight, was when I first mentioned the Detroit Free Press and when the Palisades article first came out of Jan 15th.)
Transcipt quote from Feb 18, 2010:
"Actually, today is the first day that I have become concerned or fearful of the ramifications that are going around with Entergy and Palisades and Vermont Yankee and stuff."
Palisades Nuclear plant
1) 'Catch-22' 2.206 Petition
Transcripts from my presentation to the Petition Review Board
Feb 18, 2010
Feb 23
April 9
2) 'Casablanca' 2.206 on Feb 22, 2011
You are chicken e-mail:
March 7, 2011
March 31
3) "Nothing Ever Matters" 2.206 NRC on Jan 10, 2012(tues 9:43pm)
...You are going to have to ask, how close is the design flow capacity of the service water pump to the minimum real tested flow capacity of the pump. Does it impart pump power and amps? What flow affects would happen in the riser if you had to bulk up the 40 foot shaft and the couplings? Right, making the shaft and coupling larger would reduce the area in the impeller discharge riser and increase the resistance...head. I suspect it is a pumps design trade off with the increase radical area limiting flow to the area needed for the size of the coupling and shaft.
Remember the coupling and shaft sits in the impeller discharge flow.
...Just to show you how freaking sick the system is...the outcome of this is Entergy promised to hire the very same failed third party survey and investigation type company as what failed before. The whole issue of Entergy hiresing these guys and they generally dictates the outcome of the results. It would be better if was the NRC who choose and paid for these services. The whole idea that perpetrator of this preventable decline is the guy who chooses and controls the third party survey and investigator contractor results....it is riddled with blatant self interest. It is a proven failed strategy in 2008-2009 and the whole lot of them is depending post Jan 11 to do again failure all over again...
Jan 10 petition
"We are broadly are worried about in 2009 over the Palisades security falsification, in the outcome of the violations...whether all the reports and employee cultural surveys with the assortment of NRC and Entergy processes over this very serious violation ever had any meaning at all. According to the Palisades Fukushima Emergency Power System DC short and plant trip the most recent root cause Entergy admits there is deep and widespread safety cultural problems at the Palisades plant. I feel Palisades safety culture was in the pits in 2009 and before...and the (NRC ADR mandated 2008-2009 )cultural safety survey was a grand Entergy and NRC falsification. The NRC Alternate Dispute Resolution session over this, the Confirmatory Order, the Entergy (third party) investigative reports and safety cultural survey, the willing acceptance of this insanity by the NRC and Entergy...the NRC created the inaccurate falsified impression to the outsiders that Entergy had discovered all the cultural safety problems and corrected them (by 2010). Nothing could be farther from the truth, all these corporate and agency processes covered up and deepened, took the public’s eyes off fixing Entergy...where Entergy now is in much worst condition than they were then. I request independent outside investigation on this dangerous agency corruption before Palisades start-up."
...Further...it is a grave corruption where with these engineering contractor service providers, the employee survey and culture investigation contractors....a company like Entergy will dictate the outcome of the contractor service provider before they are hired the invesigators. The job of the outside third party contractor is to come up or manufacture the plausible facts and evidence to fit the dictates of the corporations defined before even the investigation begins. It is the filler material before the artificial results of the so called and independent third party investigation.
That is why they fail over and over to change the results of the nuclear plant behavior like Palisades...
They are all great gamers!
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