Dead Ender FitPatrick Plant: I Guess I Got The Wrong Radation leak?

Update 8/17

Basically the leak of high radiation resin into the tank room is just negligence. Usually the leak in the room comes from poor coordination between the rad waste operator and the clean up panel in the reactor building. Usually valves malfunction and leak during a backwash caused by insufficient maintenance, then overfills the tank and spills this resin onto the floor. It has occurred over and over again. If the NRC really cared about the rad dose of the

Fitz employees, they would figure out how to force management to keep up with the maintenance of the backwash system. They decades ago should have ripped out the resin back-wash system and replace it better designed new system.

Again, this indicates the NRC selectively enforces their regulation and the NRC has a inadequate tool bag of rules to protect nuclear industry employees against negligent rad doses.  Basically this leads to a sense of powerlessness to the rank and file front line employees seeing this poor professionalism and safe rad doses...it leads to a wider risk because the safety culture gets impaired effecting a wider risk of more components failing when needed.

And negligent fuel failures makes the resin hotter than a fire cracker. 

Well, I knew there was a radiation leak going on somewhere. The NRC is going

Dead-Ender Junk Plant FitzPatrick: Radioactive Discharge to Environment

to think I was sending them a special message about a undisclosed radiation leak. It is plausible I was trying to protect somebody.

Dead Ender Junk Plant Fitzpatrick: Ut-Oh from 85% to 70%?

Can’t you imagine all the steam and water leaks now in this poorly maintained plant.

Here above is another brainless guess. I produced a lot of recent articles on this dead ender plant. I think the natural gas prices will continue to drop making this newest deal bankrupt.

'Minor' radiation leak in FitzPatrick nuclear plant has gone unfixed for 4 years

SCRIBA, N.Y. – The owner of FitzPatrick nuclear plant has allowed highly radioactive waste to leak into a contained area of the facility for at least four years, a safety violation that poses no risk to the public but might make it more difficult to decontaminate the site after the reactor closes.

The problem was cited in the most recent quarterly inspection report by federal safety regulators.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the accumulation of spilled radioactive waste in the basement of a building at FitzPatrick is of "very low safety significance'' because it occurred in a locked, highly shielded area that is already highly radioactive.

"The bottom line is, we have been aware of this issue for some time, but it poses no immediate risks to any residents or the environment,'' said Neil Sheehan, speaking for the NRC.

Nevertheless, plant owner Entergy Corp.'s failure to address the leak is of "more than minor significance'' because the company knew about the problem for at least four years, the NRC reported.

Nuclear plant owners are required to minimize the accumulation of residual radioactive waste in their plants, which can "greatly increase the cost and complexity of future decommissioning'' after a reactor shuts down, according to the NRC.

Entergy officials today said they put off cleaning up the spill to avoid exposing workers to unnecessary radiation. They have made a robot to do the job instead, said Tammy Holden, speaking for Entergy.

"Cleanup of the area had not been conducted previously because we did not want to subject our employees to unnecessary radiation,'' Holden said. "We have fabricated a vacuum-type robot that will be used to remove the sludge. The removal is scheduled for this month.''

The NRC inspection report issued Friday did not quantify how much waste has accumulated on the floor of the FitzPatrick radwaste building, or how it might impact the plant's decommissioning costs. The waste consists of beads and powdered resins from filters that are used to clean up reactor coolant, said Sheehan, of the NRC.

Nuclear safety expert David Lochbaum, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said he agreed with the NRC that the leak was of "minor significance.'' It's not uncommon for water spills to occur inside radwaste buildings, leaving waste behind, he wrote in an email. Entergy should have cleaned up the spill because the building floor is not designed to act as a backup storage tank, Lochbaum said.

"It'll be fixed soon now that the NRC (has) shone a spotlight on it,'' he wrote. "Which will demonstrate that it could have been fixed long ago."

The Nine Mile Point Unit 1 reactor experienced a similar long-term spill of radiation waste during the 1980s that was worse than FitzPatrick's, Lochbaum said.

The NRC also criticized Entergy for mistakes during a January 2016 outage that resulted in two plant workers being unintentionally exposed to high radiation levels. Both workers were alerted by alarms from their radiation dose monitors and moved to safety without becoming overexposed, the NRC said.

The NRC is treating both issues raised in the inspection report as "non-cited violations,'' which means FitzPatrick will not face penalties or increased oversight because of them.

Entergy has agreed to sell the 850-megawatt nuclear plant to Exelon Corp., which operates the nearby Nine Mile Point nuclear facility. Until the sale was announced last week, Entergy had planned to shut FitzPatrick permanently when it ran out of fuel in January 2017.

Anti-nuclear activists said the NRC report should raise concerns about the aging FitzPatrick plant, which started operation in 1975.

"These violations highlight the ongoing dangers posed by the upstate nuclear reactors and the lax enforcement by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," said Tim Judson, of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. "Entergy has known that this highly radioactive waste spill is a problem for four years, but the NRC has not imposed any fines or other penalties.''

The NRC rates FitzPatrick's general safety performance as "green'' in all 17 categories monitored, the best of four color-coded ratings.