Honestly you want me to start talking to my buddy NRC inspectors?
Mr. Sickinger,The NRC heavenly monitors my blog looking for emerging problems at nuclear plants and they highly favor my advice.“NRC: Proof I instigated The 2014 Christmas River Bend plant Scram Special Inspection”“Columbia Nuclear Plant and their new Whistleblower”I am a highly influential person with the NRC. The agency has created large inspections over just my say and I was heavily involved with the recent Pilgrim Plant problems heading towards a permanent plant shutdown. I live 2 miles from Vermont Yankee and they blame me for permanently shutting down the plant. I am pro-nuclear as strange as it sounds. The agency is really frightened I can see the big picture. I have many relationships with many NRC inspectors and higher NRC officials.I saying if you get my name in your paper most likely the NRC will throw a big inspection at Columbia. Isn’t that in everyone’s interest? The NRC knows I can read behind the line of Columbia’s NRC documents and I can make the agency miserable if I get involved in the agency’s process.I going to throw you a telephone call. You can call my anytime.SincerelyMike MulliganHinsdale, NHcell***1-603-209-4206
The danger to the NRC is with Columbia's whistleblower letter and what was documented in NRC 's inspection activities...you can contrast the differences. This is extraordinarily dangerous for the agency.
This implies there has been a catastrophic breakdown in NRC regulatory oversight. Columbia is in region IV and severely infected by the southern and western republican teabagger government hatters. We got the gross failure of regulatory oversight in San Onofre and prolonged shutdown Fort Calhoun.
Outside safety experts like me have always been concerned with troubled plants drawing attention away from emerging troubled plants. The NRC withdrawing resources from the perceived good plants (but severely declining) to deal with other troubled plants. Improper NRC priorities and insufficient NRC resources leads to the NRC increasing becoming blinded and this impairment not seen by anyone. You can only see this NRC impairment after a terribly destructive plant event. Davis Besse was this kind of accident. In the post accident investigation it was seen effectively the on site inspector became blinded to the decline of the plant. We all know post accident investigation FirstEntergy was managing Besse horrifically. What can blind the corporation and the NRC to a catastrophic industry credibility event like Davis Besse or San Onofre? I think this all comes a severely enforced particular corporate and NRC financial and self-interested ideology. Money and glory about safety. The population of the USA has become our enemies and our families and self survival are at stake. We for survival sakes have to do whatever it takes to keep our families many flowing.
Ongoing events in the industry. Their in a process of blinding themselves and us.
- The natural gas fracting miracle. It is deflating the price of electricity and demand in general has been sluggish. Highly subsidized green electricity is doing the same. We are in once every hundred year storm over deflated electric price on the grid. These deflated prices are going to continue for decades.
- The NRC is severely resourced restrained and undergoing profound budget cutting. This is drastically going to jack up their priorities systems. We think the corporations are politically and intentionally blinding NRC with this and making a lot of rules non-enforceable. We just don't have enough money to enforce all the rules. We don't have enough power to make a plant and corporation behave in the greater interest of our great nation.
- Here is the industry's campaign contribution and political arm (Nuclear Entergy Institute NEI) beginning to enforce a 30% industry wide budget cut. It is like they are blinding you in one eye. You get it, the nuclear industry and NRC are simultaneously undergoing profound and severe budgets cut. This is not going to end good. It is a process of blinding themselves. Inappropriate priorities, budget cutting and resource starvation is at the root of all the accidents in this industry. Gold dollars in the eyes of all the industry executives is at the bottom of this all.
I pushed the new Fort Calhoun NRC resident inspector...why didn't the NRC force Fort Calhoun to fix their leaking ceiling damaging a emergency diesel generator in 2006, 2009, 20014 and 2015. I told the inspector I pitied him as our congress and NRC doesn't give you the proper tools and power to turn the bad actor licensees behavior around. I push him hard and the NRc should be given great credit for allowing me to speak to these inspectors. Remember massively complex machines and their bureaucracies. He reminded me the NRC is a sampling agency. It is the NRC's go-too excuse for not caring. The NRC inspector told me the NRC basically has only very limited onsite resources, so they only get a miniscule picture of the goings on in their plant (massively complex machines and bureaucracies). If the licensees hide problems to them it is only worst. In the tragic shutdown of San Onofre, in the after permanent shutdown of the two unit plant of the NRC over the defective steam generators...the plant inspectors and all the higher NRC executives spoke again and again about the "federal regulatory sampling philosophy" and their severe lack of regulatory resources at San Onofre. If we had money maybe we could have caught the defective steam generators before installation.
In some ways Fort Calhoun is worst than the average plant. The plant is owned by tiny Omaha Public Power District and post NRC mandatory shutdown in 2011 the plant is managed and operated by Exelon. Can you begin to even imagine how how massively complex these two bureaucracies are? In many ways over this ceiling leak, I consider this a "cry for" help by the NRC staff at Fort Calhoun.
The NRC Arkansas Nuclear One (ANO) has been using tremendous NRC resources in recent years, They dropped a 600 ton stator in their turbine building and this killed one and injured eight. I believe they got three unprecedented yellow findings. Right now 50 NRC inspectors are at ANO doing the follow up inspection to the early 2013 event. Two of the yellow findings were over secretly covered-up..."we are a sampling agency"...flooding deficiencies and violation discovered by accident with a the 600 ton stator severed service water pipes. It flooded the plant and flooding seals leaked like sieve. The NRC only enforces a small percentage of the known federal violations at a plant. Did the problem at Fort Calhoun (2011) and San Onofre 2012 steal NRC oversight resource from Columbia. I could make the case San Onofre stole NRC oversight resources from ANO causing the stator drop accident. Then San Onofre,ANO and Fort Calhoun stole or exhausted NRC oversight resources causing Columbia's present condition. Its like miniscule pellet particles through leaking fuel rods "flees" jumping serially from one employee to another employee( Insiders with massive fuel pin leaks will get what I am saying. Its an insider joke)
In 1992 I was a licenced operator at Vermont Yankee. Vermont Yankee is very similar to my condition as Vermont Yankee. We had runaway budget priority problems and everyone including me had to tell lies to survive. The NRC was giving the plant way above average grades and they had a pretty good capacity. I told the NRC VY is in deep trouble, the NRC brushed me off saying the NRC sees VY as a above average plant. All my plant buddies were talking how dangerous the plant was becoming. We had leaking fuel for many years and everyone was lying about the condition of safety equipment. I got fed up with them all and god help me I was thinking about my young family. I wrote my concerns about the failed fuel and the increasing unreliable core cooling system. Said we are heading for a very serious accident if outsiders don't get involved. Sent my anonymous concerns to the NRC, Vermont Govern Kunin and the head of the Vermont Public Service Board.Two months later I still anything at the plant from the NRC. Kunin and Vermont were supposed to be very liberal and anti-nuclear. It is all a facade. This when you begin to learn as a whistleblower, your friends and family can/are going to hurt you the most. The corporation can only fire and blackball you. So I came up with the bright idea of talking with the local anti nuclear. I told them I am a Vermont Yankee employee, I am a whistleblower...the plant is in a very dangerous condition. I said the employees are lying about the condition on a safety pump. I wrote a letter to the governor and she is siting on my information. I trust no one except you. They asked my how can they help. I said you need to accuse the governor of nuclear safety corruption for sitting on my letter I sent her. In a few days she was out on a podium speaking about receiving a anonymous letter from Vermont Yankee. The pump was stated in documents it was perfectly operable and functional, but Vermont discovered it actually was completely broken. I quickly was the talk of the news media and with my employee buddies at the plant. I told no one at the plant. The Governor demanded a NRC inspection...the agency denied her request at first. We then get a massive plant investigation, the state became heavily involved in VY and finally the NRC did their own investigation. A lot of investigative noise by governmental officials pressured by the news media and the plant was still perilously getting more dangerous during this process right under out feet. Believe me, I was the talk of the employees in this anonymous. They nicknamed the "anonymous alligator" who could jump out and eat their careers and family at any moment. About a year later we had the worst accident in the history of the plant. We got a plant scram, quickly got disconnected from the grid (LOOP)...then had a severe disturbance to the cooling water to the only remaining source of electricity to the plant. Both diesel generators had engine cooling water severely throttled to them. It scared the pants out of everyone at the plant. A host of safety equipment broke or was discovered degraded in this LOOP. The control room crew was overwhelmed by the problems. That is when they set up the huge lying machine. They were so brazen with deception and and lying I became concerned my life was in jeopardy.
Columbia Nuclear Plant And Their Whistleblower
The executive board of the region's only nuclear power plant agreed Wednesday to hire an independent investigator to look into whistleblower allegations that the plant's performance has steadily declined, that it ranks among the worst in the country and that management has been hiding those results from employees, the board and members of the public.An anonymous letter attributed to employees was circulated to several board members and The Oregonian/Oregonlive in recent weeks. It suggests managers have been glossing over operational and potential safety problems at the plant and pushing to keep it online "at all costs."The Columbia Generating Station is a 1,200-megawatt reactor located north of Richland, Washington. It is owned and operated by Energy Northwest, a public corporation that sells power at cost to public utilities in the Northwest.Mike Paoli, a spokesman for Energy Northwest, said the industry performance scores referenced in the letter are proprietary, so he couldn't confirm or deny any specific information in the letter."Our performance is not at the bottom. The letter only provides a look at select measures," he said. "In some areas we are among the poorer performers. That was sent to you via the letter. In other areas, some just as important, we are among the top performers. In some areas we're in the middle."Critics have argued for years that Columbia Generating Station is an aging plant that poses safety risks to the region and no longer makes economic sense to operate given other sources of cheap power. The Bonneville Power Administration, whose public utility customers buy the plant's output, has said it continues to believe the plant is well-run and economical. In 2012, it was relicensed for an additional 20 years by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.The reactor does have have a history of operational problems. It experienced a series of unplanned shutdowns in 2008 and 2009, and was subsequently rated as one of the two worst performing nuclear plants in the country by an independent, industry-funded group that tracks various operational and safety measures in the nation's nuclear fleet.That review found deficiencies in human performance, leadership and equipment reliability, prompting the replacement of its management team and an aggressive push to improve performance.For some time, the plant's ranking did apparently improve. But according to the anonymous letter, its electricity production relative to its capacity now ranks 91st out of 99 plants in the country. The letter says the plant's equipment reliability index, is the lowest or second-lowest in the industry. And despite a spate of recent problems, including a stuck valve in the reactor that may have contributed to fuel leaks in the fall, the letter said management has pushed to keep the plant running "at all costs," when the "conservative and safe decision would have been to shut the plant down and fix it correctly and safety."The authors of the letter said the plant's overall score had slipped back into the bottom quartile in the ranking, and could now be near the bottom of that."Senior management continues to tell the organization and public how we are an excellent performing nuclear power plant while ignoring the precipitous fall of our industry standing by measures of reliability, equipment health and radiation protection," said the letter, which was circulated to various members of the board and became the center of board meeting discussion at its meeting in Lacey, Washington, on Wednesday.Paoli said the author or authors of the letter were cherry picking statistics. "That's why context is needed, but it's protected, and it's not our information to give to the public. We are allowed to share it with employees, but we don't own it."He said the plant had gone six years without an unscheduled shutdown, that it broke its monthly electricity-generation record in December and achieved a new record for continuous generation – 683 days – before entering its last refueling outage in May.Some board members expressed frustration at Wednesday's board meeting that they were not informed of the deterioration in the plant's performance scores, however."It's a legitimate criticism that managers continued to say things were fine when they weren't," said Jim Malinowski, a board member and commissioner at Clark Public Utilities. Malinowski said he still has confidence in management and that he'd been assured by federal nuclear regulators that the plant was well operated. The real test would be whether managers could get the performance scores back into the first or second quartile and keep them there."It's good that members of the staff are asking these questions, and it's good that it's getting out on the table," he said. "Hopefully it will produce a good result."Paoli said it became apparent at the board meeting that not all members fully understand the measures and charts being used by the chief executive and chief nuclear officer in briefings. But he said thethe executive board's decision to hire an independent investigator was not a validation of the issues raised in the letters they received."It's an endorsement of our nuclear safety culture that allows any employee to raise concerns with the certainty that their concerns will be taken seriously and fully addressed."- Ted Sickingertsickinger@oregonian.com
