Columbia Nuclear Plant's Fuel Failure Problem

We need a timeframe on these event.

I believe in our pin steam explosion, this was a 2nd or 3rd time in the core. So it was leaking, then went through a outage and restart...then the pin popped.

When I first arrived at VY, the primary system was pretty clean. In the early startup period (1970s), they have severe fuel leakage. This is how we got the AOG building. It was the pellet-clad interaction. We replaced our recirculation pipes in my early years. They chemically cleaned the primary system to reduce radiation for that. As a AO, I had to enter many high radiation rooms. Lets talk the clean up rooms and clean up heat exchanger room. I was required to enter these rooms in cloth cotton cloves, a lab coat and plastic booties. It was minimal radiation protection. All I had on me was my TLD to measure radiation. It took a minute to put my gear on and there was minimal rad protection bureaucracy to back me up. This is what you can with minimal radiation and contamination.

As I was leaving, I had to use a double full radiation suit on and a respirator. It take me about hour to get all dressed up. This was a result from our fuel failures. It was rad protection department intensive. A lot more of my precious time was devoted to getting dress up in full rad protection suits and getting undressed. There was a lot more plastic rad waste as a result. Cycle this through our plant and the industry in general in all the radiation jobs...the was a huge waste of money. You lost big time profits over this. It was a tremendous waste of resources. Remember if you contrast say a simple mechanical job in non radiation environment and same job in a radiation environment...we are talking about a huge expense. The contractor who does the job is going charge VY a lot more money for the job independent of the RP bills.    

Our full cotton radiation suits had to be washed every time. They contracted these jobs out to laundry company in Springfield Ma. Their is a lot of people who never made though high school in my home town. I grew up in Springfield. It is a perfect environment for minimum wage jobs for life. So as our radiation problem built up, this laundry establishment got in trouble for discharging radiation into Springfield's sewer system.  

All I am saying is, VY's radiation department budgets grew exponentially and especially with the foreign troops their brought in for RP protection in the outage. This justifies on a industrial scale not doing certain maintenance because our radiation levels were so high.

So here we sit on the razor's edge of profitability. I believe the huge radiation department budget is starving the safety and maintenance budgets. You can put off safety and maintenance jobs...the NRC will not let you cheap out on radiation budget. They will shut you down the job if you are skimpy and everyone knows radiation protection problems would be a big problem if it got into the papers.

I'd like to contrast the early operations of clean plant and end of operations with lots of fuel failures. Mostly you get a fuel failure, this radiation always stays in the plant...you going to be paying for the rest of the plant life.          

So I believe you are stealing/shifting money for maintenance to plow into preventable radiation protection.

The fuel pin problems I discussed here was just the emergence of later huge problem with fuel problems by the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. The NRC had to intervene. The industry as a whole wasn't investing in cladding engineering. The fuel failure industry wide was massively proliferating. This is a reoccurring theme in many other areas. Not investing money in areas that are vital to the nuclear industry.

You know, contrast the lifetime dose of the "Board of Directors and CEOs"(minuscule) against the poor knuckle dragging slobs at the plant (huge). The guys at the plant have little control and "Board of Directors" call the shots. You can minimize dose to the your troops at the plant  by spending a tremendous amount     

Nuclear fuel pin explosion at VY (in core)

 

(I wrote this in 2010. I fixed it up a little from the first draft.) 

"In the early 1990’s, I am getting a little fed up with all the fuel failures in the plant...we can see contamination and radiation levels spiking up. The radioactive step off pads throughout the plant were proliferating...it was amazing. There is long lines at the final radiation detectors just trying to leave the plant. This is something new, we are all wondering if they got something wrong with the fuel load. The 1980’s were very clean years without fuel failures.

So I am up helping doing one start-up in the control room. We are taking turns pulling rods and doing the heat up. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, where we see huge spike in radiation throughout the plant. The alarms are going off everywhere, on the main steam lines, AOG...we watch them continue to trend up. We was completely baffled with what was occurring...panicking. Where is it going to end? The shift supervisor face was ashen colored. We are just about to scram the plant when the radiation levels leveled out. They stayed high for an hour just below the scram point...then they started coming down. But radiation level throughout the plant never returned to their original levels. Ever! Nobody ever seen this before. We continued on with the startup.

We had a terrible operational period, all sorts of pin hole leaks and high radioactivity. There was an assortment of symptoms...during rod exchange just months before the outage they had another huge radiation spike out of nowhere. It was during this period where I wrote my concerns to the Vermont governor. She responded.

As we got close to the outage, about a month out from it, I made another safety concern to the state and the New Coalition Of Nuclear Pollution.

That is what I always say as a whistleblower. It is a reoccurring theme. The company won't hurt you the most if they fire and blackball you when they steal your career. It is always the responses of your friends and family who will devastate you the most. Whistleblowers got around a 98% chance of getting divorced. My stupid wife is still married to me. We fought like maniacs in the years after my firing. It took her a decade to forgive me. My saving grace is I never drank booze in this period. I have been a recovering alcoholic since 1979. I still the jerk I always was and sober maybe worst.           

England Coalition. I talked to one of the experts with the Union of Concerned Scientist. My  crazy complaint was,

So shoot me, this is my spin...

“they have fuel pellets rattling around freely in the primary coolant system”. Some fuel pellets separated from the pins. They were circulating in the coolant.

So it is about a year later. VY had canned me and I have talked extensively to the New Coalition of Nuclear Pollution. Their chairman says, I just got to tell you a story. You remember the fuel pellet story? After your teleconference with us and the Union of Concerned Scientist...the NECNP spokesman said what mike is talking about, with the fuel pellets being ejected from the pin had never happened in the nuclear industry before. That guy mike seems to be disgruntled and slightly mentally ajar (UCS). You need to stay away from him because he is untrustworthy. He is way out in space and his concern is preposterous. We at the NECNP believed him mike, the NECNP chairman said with a smile. That you are a little bit odd and fuel pellets being outside the pin. We didn't believe VY would operate in that condition. You can imagine our shock when after the first few weeks of that plant shutdown outage. The story was in a Brattleboro Reformer newspaper article. Actually the NECNP official got a call from the state nuclear engineer. We believed the UCS official that you were mentally unbalanced, but it ended up you were perfectly right. The article showed up saying a fuel pin at VY was mysterious discovered with a 8 inch gash in it. Eight fuel pellets were missing from the pin and nobody knows where they went. I told her I'd actually seen a picture of the gash from this outage. The lips of the gash were protruding out. There was a steam explosion in the pin and that expelled the pellets. The gash looked like a steam explosion!

I wanted to show everyone what I had under my hood. I made the concern known a few week before the shutdown through the state nuclear engineer, the newspaper article about the rattling loose fuel pellets in the recirc system. I wanted to get them on the record before they popped the reactor head off. VY responded to the article with ridiculing and belittled of my analysis saying it is absolutely impossible just before the outage. We know who made the complaint, he is a troubled employee. VY agreed with the Union of Concerned Scientist that it never happened before and it couldn't happen. This obviously was a very rare event.

When gash became seen a few weeks later from inside the fuel assembly inspection the state and the NRC demanded a thorough investigation. Vermont Yankee wanted to only inspect some limited bundles. The state made them inspect them all. It delayed the start-up. I told the state inspector VY is doing a very limited inspection and there is more damaged pins in the core. They even discovered more fuel failures over this in the state mandated inspection that the wasn’t seen on the first inspection. Can you even believe these guys with all their enemies closely watching them.

It should be admitted VY spent considerable sums of money doing an investigation of me on this. They back tracked the movement of the pin and me through history to see if I had the opportunity to sabotage the fuel. Me and the pin just never crossed paths!

VY's theory was the pin developed a pin pinhole leak. The gas inside the pin escaped. It was replaced by some water. It turned into steam, then we cooled down. That created a vacuum. This drew in lots of water into the failed pin. It made the uranium pellets over moderated. We pulled a nearby rod to increase power during the startup, this severely overpowered the water filled pin with uranium pellets. It caused a rapid increase in temperature. A localized steam explosion was created leading to the pin 8 inch gash.

It was the first time this happened anywhere in the industry. I predicted it by analyzing the symptoms and what I observed in the control room. Got it written down as a safety concern in newspaper article before we could eyeball the damage.

See, I don’t know about the worth on having ever decreasing margins of safety...trying to sit on the razor’s edge between unsafe and safe behavior. I have also thought we should define a barrier limit, say the integrity of the fuel cladding barrier, or our competence with absolutely containing radioactivity with the piping system and other components. This is not rocket science...it is simple and basic engineering.

It is a really big deal to have an uncontrolled release of radioactivity into the environment. I don't care how small it is! At least it is monitored and controlled. We know it before, and the magnitude, before the leak occurred and is discharged. That is called in total control of the radioactivity.

Basically, the symptoms of competence with a nuclear organization is the ability to contain radioactivity within these barrier pipes and reliable operation of the equipment. The behavior is independent of safety related. If a nuclear plant are breaching these barriers, it may not be safety related or a health consequence. But tho barriers we set independent of safety, no radioactive substance gets past these limits. If the radioactive substance gets past the barrier, that means the competence and skills of the organization are in steep decline. We have just become careless and lackadaisical with maintaining limits. There is something big going on what is incentivizing letting down our guard with maintaining a set barrier. If we were a really professional and competent organization, we never let our bureaucracy degrade to such a pathetic state. It is a leading indicator of a future breach of a safety (actual) barrier.

So an uncontrolled leak of radiation represent a collapse of basic engineering competence not necessity a safety barrier. What we know of these events it can cascade into further and deepening of engineering and organizational incompetence and carelessness. The idea that our engineering expertise, our highly expensive training and profession education...what we know is this carelessness and lackadaisicalness has the ability to pick up steam. It numbs us as the disease progresses. The inertia and velocity of the mental sickness is so severe it blows by us without any warning. It whizzes past the safety limit sitting on the razor blade edge of being safe/unsafe. The speed is so high the employees and the regulators can’t see the breaching of the safety barrier...or the complexity of the declining dynamic system are so enormous, we never understand a safety barrier has been breach or a new type of accident is developing.

You get it. Through this I dragged in a lot of NRC, state and media activity. The next step was telegraphing to outsider we are making changes at the plant and we got this under control. I am convinced Vermont wanted me out of  the plant because I was giving the state a black eye. I am exhausted though all this activity. VY was in the process of yanking my license. Then we had the worst  accident in the life of the plant. They were doing delayed and now improper maintenance in the switchyard. They were replacing the backup power safety circuits batteries. They were taking shortcut and they botched the job. They had degraded diodes in some circuits. It tripped at transmission breakers in the switchyard. We had degraded cooling to the Emergency Diesel generator, the only source of power at the plant. We had poor control of the plant by the control room and unexspected failure of safety equipment.      

 

The problem is what if we are juggling with too many balls in the air. Then a new stressor shows up. This is when we lose track of all the balls, and they all fall to the floor.

When Entergy withholds information from the community...the first one they hide information from is the offending organization itself. You blind yourself before you blind the community. Entergy blinds themselves.

If the community can see, that means you can see?"