Is this the first SG tube leak post San Onofre?
So Robinson was notified of elevated radioactivity going to the outside with ...
On January 31, 2012, Unit 3 control room operators received an alarm that indicated a primary-to-secondary reactor coolant leak from steam generator 3E0-88. The alarm received was from the main condenser air ejector radiation monitors, which continuously samples from a vent line for the purpose of rapidly identifying steam generator tube leaks.
Jan 2012 San Onophe.
MANUAL TRIP DUE TO A PRIMARY TO SECONDARY LEAK GREATER THAN 30 GAL/HR
"At 1505 PST, Unit 3 entered Abnormal Operation Instruction S023-13-14 'Reactor Coolant Leak' for a steam generator leak exceeding 5 gallons per day.
"At 1549 PST, the leak rate was determined to be 82 gallons per day. At 1610 PST, a leak rate greater than 75 gallons per day with an increasing rate of leakage exceeding 30 gallons per hour was established and entry into S023-13-28 'Rapid Power Reduction' was performed.
"At 1630 PST, commenced rapid power reduction per S023-13-28 'Rapid Power Reduction'. At 1731 PST, with reactor power at 35% the Unit was manually tripped. At 1738 PST, Unit 3 entered Emergency Operation Instruction S023-12-4 'Steam Generator Tube Rupture'.
"At 1800 PST the affected steam generator was isolated."
All control rods fully inserted on the trip. Decay heat is being removed thru the main steam bypass valves into the main condenser. Main feedwater is maintaining steam generator level. No relief valves lifted during the manual trip. The plant is in normal shutdown electrical lineup.
Unit 2 is presently in a refueling outage and was not affected by this event.
The licensee has notified the NRC Resident Inspector. The licensee has issued a press release.
| 1975 | Point Beach 1 | Wisconsin | 125 gal/min | Rupture |
| 1976 | Surry 2 | Virginia | 330 gal/min | Rupture |
| 1979 | Prairie Island 1 | Minnesota | 390 gal/min | Rupture |
| 1982 | Ginna | New York | 630 gal/min | Rupture |
| 1987 | North Anna 1 | Virginia | 600 gal/min | Rupture |
| 1989 | McGuire 1 | North Carolina | 500 gal/min | Rupture |
| 1993 | Palo Verde 2 | Arizona | 240 gal/min | Rupture |
| 2000 | Indian Point 2 | New York | 90 gal/min ?? | Rupture |
Plus Fort Calhoun and San Onophe. It is a very rare event...
The Steam Generator Tube Rupture at Indian Point
So these guys were messing around with a potential of a 600 gal leak a minute tube leak. A lot smaller leak took out the two plant San Onofre. You know for a fact everyone is worrying more about the consequence of a tube leak post. A 600 gal leak and even a much smaller one would be a huge post Fukushima national event. A media circus.
So if you were a professional, you got a tube leak...it is increasing. Why would you be gambling so much money and credibility over risking a complete tube failure. Why would you even think of risking throwing away a nuclear plant over a tube leak and putting another black eye in the PWRs.
Unless you are terribly addicted to gambling and you are desensitize to risk!This is exactly what I am talking about. The deal should be with the NRC is to intervene early and heavy with a bad nuclear plant and utility. They dip into the negative column for a very limited amount of time...then the NRC drives them up to better than average grades.
The NRC consumes a tremendous amount resources over a prolonged bad actor like HB Robinson. These guys were terrible actors before the fire in 2010. Right, it consumes NRC resources that should go to other weak actors...to prevent them from becoming another bad actor.
This should be a very cautionary tail...how hard it is to bring a plant back from a near death experience.
So the chickens comes home to roost in 2010 according to the Union of Concern Scientist on the HB Robinson. Only the terrible shaking of the tree during a accident gets us to see the debis under the tree of the broken off leaves and branches...the horrendous component and organization degradation. The leaves didn't break off during the accident...they been there for many years and all the big players seen it It wasn't the NRC exposing the horrendous condition before accident. You catch all the latent NRC violations that went around uncontested for many years in the UCS write up...the licence didn't disclosed them and the ROP wasn't engineer to pick up these violations and extreme safety issues before the accident. We see this a lot in the nuclear industry. An accident happens, then on the investigation a lot of NRC rules and codes were acceptably broken for many years which was a factor in the accident.
I'd just like to see once a serous accident emerge...a real random accident out of nowhere with no current code or secret NRC violation..with no NRC and engineering code violations causing or making worst the event. Just why is there so many dangling violations without NRC attention? There just must be a enormous amount of unenforced regulations and engineering codes going on nationwide. One theory on this says this intentional. If they find a broke a rule, if they find and fix the rule violation post accident, they can quickly start back up without fixing the wider organizational or fix the global quality of components and systems problem.
I mean, if you were a objective observer in a bad actor plant seeing the god's eyes view with all the plant information...you could see the accident coming a million miles away. A dummy could. Bottom line, pre accident, the organization becomes just plane crazy! The UCS:
The most significant near-miss event took place at Progress Energy’s HB Robinson nuclear plant in Florence, South Carolina on March 28, 2010, the 31st anniversary of the Three Mile Island accident. The NRC sent an SIT to the nuclear site to investigate electrical fires.
After uncovering multiple problems, including“design and procurement of safety equipment, maintenance, operations, and training—over many years,” the NRC upgraded the SIT to an augmented inspection team (AIT), used when the risk of reactor core damage rises to a factor of 100.
What ensued at the plant that day was what could be described as a black comedy of errors, with one misstep exacerbating the next. The following is an abbreviated account of the March 28 events as described in the UCS report:See, fix a few NRC violations without understanding if the organization has compromised multiple systems...then another accident pops right back up. With a bad actor plant who never resets all the systems back into initial new plant condition...a plant for decades can hover around just barely safe.
• An electrical cable shorted out and started a fire.
• A breaker designed to automatically open and de-energize power to the shorted cable failed to do so, allowing electricity to flow from a circuit through the shorted cable into the ground, reducing the circuit’s voltage.
• This circuit, which powered a pump circulating water through the reactor core, experienced a drop in power. The pump’s output dropped, triggering an automatic shutdown of the reactor.
• “The electrical problems damaged the main power transformer between the plant and its electrical grid.” About half of the plant’s equipment was then left without power.
• Without power, valves on drain lines remained open, allowing heat to escape from the reactor more rapidly that normal. “The operators did not notice the open drain valves or abnormally fast cool down.”
• When pumps transferring water from a tank to the reactor vessel failed to automatically realign, plant operators failed to notice this failure for nearly an hour.
• Four hours into the event, operators attempted to restore power to the de-energized circuit without checking first to ensure workers had fixed the original fault, which they had not.
• “When the operators closed the electrical breaker to repower the circuit, they reenergized the shorted cable, and it cause another fire. The electrical disturbance also triggered alarms on both sets of station batteries, prompting the operators to declare an emergency Alert.”
The AIT also documented other equipment failures. The cable that started the first fire, installed in 1986, did not meet specified facility parameters. A light bulb replacing a bad bulb in 2008 failed to illuminate, causing an electrical breaker not to open.
The report writes of the March 28 incident:“There is simply no excuse for the fact that the company and the NRC had not detected and corrected at least some of these problems before this event.”
UCS also notes that Progress Energy informed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in writing, that certain diagnostics and testing had been performed at the HB Robinson plant when, in fact, they had not been done.
...The NRC sent another SIT to the Florence, South Carolina plant on October 7, 2010, after an automatic shutdown of the reactor, followed by equipment failures and operator errors. The NRC team determined that the motor failure initiating the event was caused by degradation of insulation on the motor winding. While Progress Energy had been aware of the problem, and had a plan in place in 2003 to deal with it, the motor had never been fixed.
Nearly all of the 14 near-misses documented in the UCS report were the result of known safety problems that went uncorrected. Most of them followed similar scenarios to that at the HB Robinson plant documented above, described in the report as an “error-fest.”
Of highest concern are two facilities: the Browns Ferry 1 power plant in Alabama and the Fort Calhoun plant in Nebraska.The NRC graded nine additional power plants with a “degraded level of performance.” Those include: Browns Ferry 2 in Alabama, Duane Arnold in Iowa, Monticello in Minnesota, Pilgrim in Massachusetts, Point Beach 1 in Wisconsin, Susquehanna 2 in Pennsylvania, Sequoyah 1 and 2 in Tennessee and Watts Bar 1 in Tennessee.
Browns Ferry and the TVA are in the same boat. This three plant facility has been drowning with negligent unsafety for many years... they had a red finding in the beginning of 2011. It took a unimaginable broken broken valve to wake the NRC up. These guys has discovered tons of uncontested and secret hidden from public view...NRC rule violations through the red finding These guys just don't have enough power to quickly throttle out of the degraded condition...they remain on NRC intensive care for many years. Basically TVA tried to lie their way out of this. These utilities have absolutely no fear of the NRC and the public at large...they are unconstrained by a conscience or a organized government force
I think the independence agency is a fail form. I think the agency needs to be under the control of the politicians, thus being under control of the peoples. This form is a result of the teabaggers and anti government campaign contribution influence. It is the main reason this technology is unacceptable by the public and the nuclear technology is a failed endeavor.Blame yourselves folks, for allowing your government and our political to run like this.Basically, Obama has been a completely neutral force over our nuclear industry in the last 6 years ...he terribly mismanage the NRC commissioners office all through his presidential years. He controls the NRC through hiring the commissioners...he hired the do nothing majority of the commissioners.
The leaking steam generator tube is right out of the news today...this kind of behavior would
comes out of a negligent operator whose bad acting and degraded behavior has
been going on for years. This challenges if their tube inspections has been
compromised.
...Check out their safety instincts, they knew they had a tube
leak from Feb 27. How did they know what condition the tube was in...if it
could immediately burst or especially under accident condition? Did they have
the god’s eye view of the condition of that tube or related tubes? No! It is
all guesswork and saving profits and bonuses.
They said the delay in shutting down was because they were
gathering the resources to do a SG inspection. They delayed taking the conservative
safety action to immediately shut down to save a very pennies...just like their
pattern of many years. Why didn’t the NRC order them to shut down?
Remember these guys have absolutely no information with what
is going on in there and even what tube is leaking. It is all guess work over incomplete
information. These are all Confidence Men!
SUBJECT: ROBINSON UNIT 2 SHUTDOWN DUE TO STEAM GENERATOR TUBE LEAK
On March 7, 2014, at 7:00 p.m. (EST), the licensee commenced a shutdown from 100% power due to a Steam Generator tube leak on the ‘C’ Steam Generator. The NRC resident inspectors monitored and observed the shutdown.
The licensee had noted indications of a Steam Generator tube leak on the ‘C’Steam Generator of approximately 1 gallon per day (gpd) on February 27, 2014. The Technical Specification limit is 75 gpd. The licensee closely monitored the Steam Generator tube leakage, including enhanced sampling.
In parallel with the monitoring activities, the licensee planned a maintenance outage for steam generator inspection and repairs due to the gradual increasing leakage. On March 7, 2014, the Steam Generator ‘C’ tube leakage had reached appropriately 37.5 gpd.
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