FitzPatrick: What The Death Rattles Of A Dying Nuke Plant Looks Like

Doesn't Pilgrim with their Safety Relief Valves and Fitzpatrick with their Leaking main condenser look similar? 

Then they recently did the expensive main condenser retube job. What a waste of money?

This severely challenges Entergy's credibility on managing their Enterprise under changing times. Didn't Exelon's CEO Row admit he never seen the natural gas fracking miracle coming? How do these electric utilities CEOs make many tens of million dollars a year being so stupid?

Maybe Entergy can turn Fitzpatrick's new titanium main condenser tubes into radiation titanium gonad (testicles)protection shields for Palisades. (insider joke). The new titanium tubes are just a year old?  

(2014)"During the outage, workers will replace 184 fuel assemblies in the reactor and perform various maintenance activities, tests and inspections on plant equipment. Other major work includes a complete retube of the plant’s main condenser. The plant’s existing condenser tubes constructed of admiralty brass will be replaced with titanium tubes designed to be resistant to silt and other abrasive sediments found in Lake Ontario. 

The new condenser tube material was selected for its long-life expectancy and resistance to environmental erosion and corrosion conditions. The life span for the retubed condenser is projected to exceed the station’s extended period of operation. In 2008 the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved FitzPatrick’s renewed operating license allowing the station to operate an additional 20 years beyond the original license, to 2034. 

“Significant capital investments are scheduled during this refueling outage that will contribute to FitzPatrick’s continued safe and reliable operations,” said Larry Coyle, site vice president and top Entergy official at FitzPatrick. “The FitzPatrick team has worked hard since our last refueling outage and the employees take pride in our commitment to safety first and foremost at all times.”

I got to give Entergy credit with the Pilgrim plant. They didn't purchase expensive top of the line SRVs. The replaced their dangerous and defective 3 stage SRVs with cheap obsolete, dangerous and defective 2 stage SRVs they had in the plant in 2009. I got to give Entergy credit, they are not going to waste money like they did at Fitzpatrick?   

FitzPatrick nuclear plant put off repairs, now plagued by water leaks

SCRIBA, N.Y. - An aging cooling system at the FitzPatrick nuclear plant in Oswego County is springing leaks so often that plant operators had to reduce power 11 times during the first three months of 2014 so that workers could plug the leaks.

FitzPatrick's condenser, which circulates Lake Ontario water for cooling, leaks far more any other U.S. plant, in part because FitzPatrick operators failed to repair the aging equipment, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

View full sizeThe rate of unplanned power reductions at FitzPatrick nuclear plant in Oswego County has fallen off the chart established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to monitor that indicator of plant performance. The number of unplanned power changes per 7,000 hours of operation is one measure of plant stability.NRC 

Now the leaks cause FitzPatrick to reduce power so often that the NRC keeps the plant under heightened oversight.

Nuclear regulators say the leaky condenser does not pose a major safety issue, and the leaks are expected to be resolved by a major repair during a refueling outage later this year.

But in a report issued Monday the NRC also criticized plant owner Entergy Corp. for not doing a better job of anticipating problems with the condenser tubes and getting them fixed before now.

The condenser at FitzPatrick was last replaced in 1995, and the metal tubes within the condenser have an expected lifespan of 15 years, NRC officials said.

"Entergy had earlier opportunities to recognize the degradation of the main condenser tubes and to act to address that,'' said Neil Sheehan, of the NRC, in an email. "There were condition reports internal to the plant in 2007 and 2009 that indicated the condenser was nearing its end of life.''

At this point, frequent plugging of the leaks is a "reasonable" tactic until the condenser can be overhauled during a refueling outage this fall, NRC officials said.

If a nuclear plant reduces power unexpectedly more than six times in 7,000 hours of operation, the NRC puts the plant under heightened oversight. FitzPatrick has been in that category since January 2013, and its unplanned power change rate recently plummeted to 18.4 per 7,000 hours.

On 15 other performance indicators measured by the NRC, FitzPatrick has good ratings.

An independent nuclear safety watchdog, David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the leaks pose no immediate threat absent other equipment failures, but they represent an "amazingly steep declining safety trend.''

Entergy officials continue to make safety their first concern, said Mark Sullivan, speaking for the company.

"The safety and security of FitzPatrick remains our top priority,'' Sullivan wrote in an email. "We applaud the team for the outstanding job they do every day in striving for excellence. We are proud of the way the Fitz team faces challenges and produces outstanding results.''

The condenser is a large metal box positioned beneath the nuclear plant's generating turbine. Steam that drives the turbine then passes through the condenser, where it is cooled and returned to a liquid state by water from Lake Ontario, which circulates in thousands of small metal tubes.

Silt and other abrasive sediments from the lake wear away at the inside of the tubes and can eventually cause leaks, said Sullivan, of Entergy. The most recent leak was May 4.

To find a leak and fix it, operators must reduce the plant's power output, typically by 50 percent. That cuts what the plant can earn from power sales.

Last year, Entergy officials openly expressed concern about the financial health of FitzPatrick, saying New York state's wholesale energy market did not allow the plant to earn enough revenue. Some Wall Street analysts said FitzPatrick was among a handful of plants at risk of closing for financial reasons. The company's fortunes have improved since then.

Thanks to high winter electric prices, Entergy Wholesale Commodities, the subsidiary that owns FitzPatrick and five other nukes, earned $444 million before taxes during the first quarter of 2014, compared with $194 million the year before.

Nuclear critics started drawing attention to FitzPatrick's condenser problem last year.
Lochbaum, a former nuclear plant engineer who now works for the Union of Concerned Scientists, filed a petition in July 2013 asking the NRC to order Entergy to make the repairs this year. Otherwise, he argued, the company might delay the repair. The NRC has yet to rule on that request.

At the time Lochbaum filed his petition, FitzPatrick had experienced 16 condenser tube leaks in a little more than two years, compared with just 12 during that time at all other U.S. nuclear plants.

"Troubling is the recent trend that strongly suggests the bad situation at FitzPatrick is getting worse,'' Lochbaum wrote in the 2013 petition. "FitzPatrick reported three condenser tube events in 2011, nine in 2012, and four during the first three months of 2013."

Contacted by email Friday, Lochbaum said the 11 events during the first quarter of 2014 represented an "amazingly steep'' decline in safety performance.

"Babe Ruth's home run record was beaten,'' Lochbaum wrote. "Lou Gehrig's continuous game record was beaten. Dan Marino's touchdown pass in a season record was beaten. Entergy's condenser tube leak event record will never be broken, even if some company wanted to try."

The condenser is the normal "heat sink'' for energy produced by the reactor core. If the condenser is unavailable, steam produced by the reactor core flows through pipes down into a large water well called the torus and gets cooled there, Lochbaum said. Other emergency systems cool the water inside the torus to allow it to continue to function as an energy sponge.

An unreliable condenser only becomes a safety issue if the backup systems fail also, Lochbaum said. That's what happened at the Fukushima meltdown in Japan. But allowing the condenser to deteriorate creates a "pre-existing impairment,'' Lochbaum said.

"If the luck runs out and the pre-existing impairment factors into a nuclear accident, it'll be hard for Entergy and the NRC to claim they took all reasonable measures to avoid it,'' he wrote