Do you speak Mulliganese?
If I read just one more time my "stuff like that" phrase I am going to hang myself:)
Official
Transcript of Proceedings
NUCLEAR
REGULATORY COMMISSION
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Excerpts
·
MR. MULLIGAN: Thank you. Deterrents. You know, we
look at deterrents as far as the NRC's activities associated with a nuclear power
plant, and we see that the NRC doesn't have any, very little deterrents on the
bad behaviors of other plants.
·
As far as all of the issues with Palisades over
the years, a recent newspaper wrote up an interesting set of articles about
Palisades and all the troubles they had. And what you see over this thing is
there is, one thing, the NRC doesn't have any horsepower to, you know, put fear
in the eyes of these guys. And that's, basically, you know, if you go one-by-one
with these regulations and stuff like that, you're going to consume all the
NRC's resources stuff like that.
·
And so there's the deterrence part of the NRC's
activities. You know, the utilities are going to exhaust the agency with all
the nickel and dime stuff if there's not a deterrence part of this deal, if
they don't fear the NRC and that type of thing.
·
We also know that -- I believe that, generally,
in the last five years, as shown by the articles in the newspaper, that with
all of our troubles, Palisades had better capacity factor than they had in the
early years and stuff. And this is all, essentially, because of risk
perspectives and reductions of regulations and all that sort of stuff. And so
in spite of all their troubles and that type of thing, Palisades has been
allowed to continue on in the way they've always done.
·
Palisades did a relatively good job on the
control rod drive mechanisms of recent, but they had a horrible history of CRDM
problems and that type of stuff. Palisades has had numerous issues of falsifying
documents, intimidating employees, lying to inspectors over the recent years
and that type of stuff. And, you know, like the recent issue with the security guards,
they had a similar incident four or five years ago, basically the same thing:
lying and falsifying documents to the NRC. And I know the NRC basically says after
two or three years, we’ll just make believe that it never happened, you know,
the history never really is caught up knitted
together. And you don't have enough influence and power to keep a plant
like Palisades straight.
·
What's happened here is really ugly. What's
happened with the impellers is ugly. It's unprofessional. It makes our nation a
laughing stock to all the other nations that are desperately trying to, you
know, maintain their fleet safely and stuff like that.
·
And I've heard from numerous professional people
in the industry basically saying they cannot believe that we allowed the
Palisades plants to operate for so many years with these reactor coolant pumps
and all these different kind of warnings we've had over the years and stuff and
all these indications. And we're only getting, the outsiders are only getting
the bits and pieces of what really went on with these impellers and stuff. You
know, a lot of nations think of this as irresponsible and not worthy of a great
nation when you get down to these impellers and stuff.
·
And then you've got Salem, like I talked about,
the recent issues with a horrendous, all their bolts being loose and stuff like
that, prior, you know, prior warnings and that type of stuff that were ignored,
and the NRC really hasn't stepped in there and done what the public wants. They
don't want to have a Salem. You know, a crack starts somewhere in a reactor
coolant pump. They want that crack fixed. They don't want to have to deal with
these problems for years and years and deal with the broken bolts and fallen
down components and the pumps and stuff. That's ugly. The amount of cracked and
broken impellers, it's ugly. It's unprofessional. It's an essence of an
indicator,
·
you know. If they can't keep these impellers, you
know, if they don't have to spend so much resource on these broken components,
impellers, the tank that recently leaked, the control rod drive mechanisms, and
stuff like that. You know, they're just consuming plant resources, and we fear
that other safety problems aren't being dealt with adequately.
·
A lot of these kind of components breaking and
stuff like that, that has a tendency to make the employees disillusioned and
they know that it's wrong and stuff like that. And they know that the NRC
doesn't back them. They know that, you know, we have to make they'll be up in
the control room and they'll have the indications of a big blade being thrown
off the pump, and everybody will sit
back and not give what the public really wants the Agency to force
Palisades to do, to shut down, pay a price, deterrence, deterrence, and make
them pay a price so that, you know, when they're in their little rooms and
they're making these decisions about, you know, well, we've got some part of
the impeller cracked, we can either fix it right, put in new parts so we don't
have to deal with this in the past, or the NRC is going to, down the road, if, you
know, bigger parts start falling off the pump or it gets strewn about the
plant, they're going to make us pay a horrendous price.
·
Most of the people, you know, what is safety
related and all that sort of stuff, you know. We think when you talk about
Palisades is safe that means that you are pretty sure that they won't have a, you
know, a type of severe core damage and off-site relief where you'll have a
fatality. That's what you're saying when you say a plant is safe, and that's just
not an appropriate standard. We don't think that's an appropriate -- we think
this ugliness is a pretty good indicator of the future and that it shouldn't be
tolerated. It should be nice and clean, and the operation of the plant should
be nice and clean, and they're not all caught up with these degradations and
broken components and all that sort of stuff. It's a clean plant. The staff is
not excessively busy or the control room employees don't have all these complicated
procedures in place of, you know, a well-engineered plant. And, you know,
everybody is diligently paying attention to the plant, not paying attention,
not worrying about the degradations.
· We worry about Palisades, but there's a risk if a
lot of plants have degradation mechanisms that the NRC doesn't have under
control and, you know, necessarily what you can prove isn't the most unsafe. It's
a lot of the stuff that's behind the barrier that's degraded, that's degrading
in an unknown fashion, and that's a threat to the nation and to a plant.
·
So that's kind of what we're worried about with
-- rules don't carry a lot of information and stuff. You know, staying within
the rules doesn't have a lot of information. Usually, human intelligence and a
brain can process a lot of information and that type of thing, and so that's
what I worry about is a lot of these rules and stuff is designed to make us
become more stupider than we really are.
·
I think, like I said, we worry about what's going
on if regulations will tolerate this kind of ugly behavior at Palisades,
certain events in the industry that are pretty concerning that are out there
that kind of questions whether it's a lot more uglier than what's being
portrayed by the NRC.
·
You know, it almost gets to the point of, you
know, the NRC says, you know, well, cheating isn't safety related, you know. We
can't -- it doesn't, it's un-safety related. It can be repaired, or it's not a big
deal, or it's not modeled appropriately in all your risk perspectives and stuff
like that.
·
Another issue we have is really you don't have
any proof, there's no engineering proof that those reactor coolant pumps are
safe. You don't have any, I don't see any model of, you know, actual building a
plant, building, more or less, a prototype type of deal where you're beating
the hell out of the pumps and you're getting those kind of blade failures and everybody,
you know, you're experimenting a lot on a system like the Palisades pumps and
its relationship to its primary coolant system and stuff like that. You don't
have really any actual, I don't see any actual engineering that those pumps are
safe. Studies, actual studies. It's all kind of, more or less, you know, the
fallback of the NRC, it's our opinion that it's safe and stuff like that.
That's the privilege of the NRC. They get to say that, basically, the professional
people, they get to say, you know, a guy like me needs triplicate proof that
Palisades is unsafe, even when it's all there. You guys get to say, "It's
my opinion that it's safe," and you don't have any evidence to back it up.
·
So the evidence I'm talking about is, would be
some engineering document showing that, you know, we've gone through all of
the, you know, not necessarily intellectual kind of thing that the NRC likes to
do, but we really set up a system and we've repeated the degradation mechanisms
on Palisades with their PCP pumps and stuff like that, and we actually seen the
results of the broken impellers and stuff like that. We have a full engineering
understanding of the mechanisms of what potentially could go wrong in the future
with those pumps. I don't think a lot of you guys really understand how difficult
that is being in the control room and, you know -- you guys all mostly get to
see a lot of this stuff in hindsight. Those guys in the control room get to see
those events when equipment fails and they have no idea why it failed and why
it's behaving that way. Then they get stuck with procedures that don't work. It's
a terrifying situation and unnerving situation in the control room.
·
And we think, you know, with this Palisades deal
being ugly and stuff, your inability to enforce integrity and truth-telling --
Palisades is not afraid to lie when they need to or be deceptive to the NRC. That's
the history of Palisades and stuff like that, and we think actually that
happens a lot throughout the industry.
·
And then the general stated the nuclear industry
as a whole and incentives nowadays for a lot of these utilities with their
economic troubles to cut back and stuff. You know, our fear is if we seen all that
was going on there, we could foresee, and the NRC could behave in a different
way. But there's tremendous barriers. A lot of rules are set up, you know, like
in this thing here. I can't see all the documents and stuff like that.
·
And if we had all of the knowledge in front of us
of what was going on, outsiders could intervene, just like if everybody seen
what was going on in Fukushima and the anti-nukes could have that kind of ammunition,
maybe that wouldn't have happened. Maybe we could have captured a couple of
minds and consciences and not have such an ugly situation facing us in the future.
