Dead Ender and Junk Plant Pilrim: Three Leaking Main Steam Isolation Valves

Update: It was not a trip, thus no event report yet.

I find it preposterous even for Pilgrim, it could be leaking control air tubing like recent past. If it is the copper air tubes, I would consider it abnormal vibrations in the steam lines.   

So they got four of these big valves inside containment and four outside containment. They would have to shutdown the plant to inspect the valves inside containment because the radiation levels would be too high. Certainly the short term steam gamma radiation would be too high on the outside of MSIVs containment...but reducing power would certainly allow the inspection. I believe the outside MSIVs are in the steam tunnel room. It has temperatures instrumentation and a water sump. They count the times the sump pump starts. From there, they can calculate the amount of water leaking into the room and trend it. We always had water on the floor indicating outside water was coming into the steam tunnel room. So they knew a abnormal leak was in there and have been aware of it trending up.

There is no doubt a burst steam pipe in the steam tunnel room would get into the reactor building and take out all or most of the electrical equipment and reactor safety instrumentation by exceeding environmental temperatures.

As example, there are two of their giant valves in each main steam line. These valves are safety valves more than radiation containment valves.  One valve leaks and then the other would stop the leak. But if both valves were leaking, you would be "up the creek". But say in the burst of the main stream line in the steam tunnel, a tremendous amount of energy would enter the reactor building. You couldn't stop the leak until the plant cooled down and depressurize. There is a high probability this would blind the control room totally from knowing what is going on in the core. It would be a very serious accident and they'd get in a site emergency...the highest...quickly.

There is no doubt these leaks have been going on knowingly for a very long time.

I can't wait for the event report disclosed tomorrow.       

Pilgrim remains shut down 

By Christine Legere

PLYMOUTH - Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station remains shut down today after the discovery of leaks in three of the eight main steam isolation valves, designed to close quickly to prevent radioactivity from leaking into the environment during a nuclear incident.

One of the three valves was declared inoperable and had to be removed from service, said Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan.

"There were subsequent efforts to fix the leak on that (valve), but they were unsuccessful," Sheehan said. "Our resident inspectors assigned to Pilgrim observed the repair efforts prior to shutdown via camera. They also observed the reactor shutdown and will closely follow the repair work and restart planning."

A similar leak in a main steam isolation valve forced a shutdown of the reactor in mid-August.

Pilgrim, owned and operated by Entergy Corp., was lowered to the Column 4 performance category by the NRC last year, making it one of the worst-performing plants in the country. The category is one step from forced shutdown.

Based on federal inspections and reports, the 44-year-old plant, slated to permanently shut down in June 2019, continues to be plagued by equipment problems and poor operator performance.

A team of 20 inspectors from around the country spent from Nov. 28 to Dec. 9 scouring systems and worker performance at Pilgrim, based on its poor performance status. They will return for a final week Jan. 9.

In an in-house email outlining preliminary observations, which was mistakenly sent to citizen activist Diane Turco, president of the Cape Downwinders, the leader of the inspection team described staff as "overwhelmed."

On inspector Donald Jackson's list of findings were failure of plant workers to follow established industry procedures, broken equipment that never gets properly fixed, lack of required expertise among plant experts, failure of some staff to understand their roles and responsibilities, and a team of employees who appear to be struggling with keeping the nuclear plant running.

"The corrective actions in the recovery plan seem to have been hastily developed and implemented, and some have been circumvented as they were deemed too hard to complete," Jackson wrote of Entergy's plan to bring Pilgrim back up to acceptable standards. "We are observing current indications of a safety culture problem that a bunch of talking probably won't fix."

Plymouth selectmen demanded that an NRC representative attend a meeting held last Tuesday, but Daniel Dorman, director of the northeast region for the NRC, declined. Dorman said the observations in the email were preliminary. An agency representative would only meet with selectmen when the full inspection was completed and the final report drawn up. That won't happen until early February.

Selectmen vowed to push, through the region's state and federal legislative representatives, for a meeting in January when inspectors return to Pilgrim.

At the time that the main isolation valve leaks were discovered, the reactor was operating at a reduced power level of 25 percent to take care of some required testing of turbine valves. That inspection was completed.

Entergy spokesman Patrick O'Brien said the problem involving the main steam isolation valves was found during a "walk through" to check other systems at the plant....