Gregory Jaczko, President Obama's new NRC head, outlined his priorities for the agency in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. He said little about new reactor applications, except that the agency would focus its limited application review resources on projects most likely to be built first. What does that mean?
What about DOE and the NP-2010 initiative, and Congress' Next Generation Nuclear Plant? What about new plant licensing? What about the high cost of new plants? What about operating plant performance improvements?
Chairman Jaczko needs to get the chance to firmly plant his feet. Then he should take off charging. If DOE's to have any impact on energy, NRC has to support their effort. They (the NRC) also need to support (coax, push, encourage and pressure) industry to get its act together. For thirty years there has been precious little new nuclear development of new U.S. nuclear application processes and thought. Yes, we have new LWR designs, but we're designing them like we did thirty years ago. And they really aren't new, they're evolutionary. Other than go to exhaustive extremes to prove the licensing cause under Part 52, precious little is new.
We need new thoughts, processes and challenges, and Chairman Jaczko must make that happen.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
How we can boldly improve nuclear plant safety
June 26, 2009 rev June 14
Hon. Senator Thomas A. Carper, Chairman
Senate Environmental & Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air & Nuclear Safety
United States Senate 513 Hart BuildingWashington, DC 20510
How we can boldly improve nuclear plant safety
Dear Senator Carper:
Removing nuclear plant safety concerns renews confidence in nuclear energy development. Improving nuclear plant safety requires reducing safety mistakes. Random safety errors like uncharged safety injection lines or reactor nozzle corrosion present near misses. Most nuclear safety errors randomly evolve from design process failures. Nuclear plant safety design anticipates all types of expected equipment degradation and provides the means to control their safety risks. Loss of safety design basis places errors deep into nuclear plant operational processes. Usually they only result in near misses. Rarely, something more happens than loss of defense-in-depth. Consequently, safety errors are unacceptable - particularly preventable ones. All non-random safety errors are preventable. Random factors should not determine nuclear safety when improved processes can entirely remove their threats. Most safety design losses come from failure to operationally integrate design. Aging equipment creates more safety design loss failure threats. Effective design basis integration preserves design-intended nuclear safety functions better - even with aging processes leading to equipment failure.
At Palo Verde, uncharged safety injection lines in both trains of the three units’ safety injection systems compromised capacity to supply emergency reactor cooling water. For a lengthy period, lost defense-in-depth substantially increased public safety risk. Though less risky (but more unnerving), Davis-Besse’s single reactor nozzle corrosion failure was another near miss. However, both presented the specter of direct nuclear fuel damage - a significant safety barrier loss. Direct fuel damage escalated into the calamity of an actual radiation release at Three Mile Island, creating the worst U.S commercial nuclear reactor accident. Persisting uncorrected for a lengthy period, in spite of multiple evident indications, uncharged safety injection was a “common-cause” failure - an especially insidious problem. Independently failing safety controls at Davis-Besse and Palo Verde reveal systemic industry problems - echoing Three Mile Island. Organizational behaviors powerfully influence common-cause failure risks. Training to improve nuclear safety awareness helps combat complacent cultures, but is not enough. Strengthening underlying safety processes provides additional needed assurance. Integrating safety design processes adds fundamental defense-in-depth. Integrating safety design with operations remains the most comprehensive way to improve error-prone nuclear safety.
Whether designing new plants or operating old ones, improving the design basis requires asking candidly how to correct the fundamental causes of design basis loss. Operating a three unit nuclear plant for many years with not just one but both safety trains inoperable in every unit does not generate public health and safety confidence. Flying in a commercial airliner with only one system to operate the plane controls, knowing all backup hydraulic controls were inoperable would also make the general public reluctant to fly - if in fact, they knew safety equipment was inoperable. People can personally assess flight risk from their own experience. After all, most of the general public flies today. However, few people today understand nuclear plants. They must trust others who do.
Commercial airline pilots cannot choose whether they do preflight instrument checks, leaving public flight safety to chance. Rules specify preflight system flight checks to assure safety performance. No plane leaves the ground with known, inoperable safety devices. However, commercial jet airliners integrate safety design into operations. Nuclear plants don’t. Discounting evident safety failures reveals safety weaknesses in the nuclear design process. While most of the time nuclear plants are safe, design basis integration would make them far safer. Ever so rarely, coincident multiple safety system failures randomly align, violating diversity, redundancy and principles of defense-in-depth. And once in a very great while, a nuclear accident happens. Overseas, in the military and at our National Labs nuclear accidents have killed people. Nuclear accidents can happen. Further reducing nuclear accident risk requires improving how we translate the underlying safety design basis into operational requirements. This requires integrating nuclear plant operations with plant nuclear safety design.
Nuclear safety performance improvement requires integrating the plant design basis. How can we justify not taking the next steps to further reduce nuclear safety risk? Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or the commercial airline industry have taught us nothing, if we have decided today that we are “safe enough.”
Sincerely,
J.K. August, PE / J.J. Hunter, SRO
CORE, Inc. 303-425-7408/970-330-1411
Terms: Design Basis (DB); Nuclear Safety Framework; Nuclear Safety Performance, Reliability Assurance Program (RAP); Systems Structures and Components (SSC), Component Part Aging; Next Generation Nuclear Plant NGNP; Failure; Failure Event; Failure Mechanism; Light-water Reactor (LWR); Actionable, Common-cause failure
Attachment: Strategic Nuclear Initiatives
Distribution:
US NRC
Gregory Jaczko (Chairman)
NRC Office of the Inspector General
Hubert Bell (Inspector General, US NRC)
Department of Energy
Steven Chu (Secretary, DOE)
House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Henry A. Waxman, CA, Chair
Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
Edward J. Markey, Chairman
Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality
Rep. Perlmutter, CO Member
Senate Energy & Natural Resources CommitteeJeff Bingaman (Chairman)Lisa Murkowski (Ranking Member)
Senate Environment & Public Works Committee
Senator Barbara Boxer (Chair)
Senator George Inhofe (Ranking Member)
Matt Dempsey (Communications Director, Sen. James Inhofe Office)
Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety
Thomas R. Carper (Chairman)
Laura Haynes (Legislative Assistant, Senator Carper’s Office)
David Vitter (Ranking Member)
George V. Voinovich
Max Baucus
Benjamin L. Cardin
Bernard Sanders
Jeff Merkley
Christopher S. Bond
Annie Caputo, Senior Technical Staff
Government Accountability Office
Mark Gaffigan (Director, Natural Resources and Environment, GAO)
Nuclear Energy Institute
Marvin S. Fertel (President & Chief Nuclear Officer)
Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO)
Jim Ellis (President & CEO)
Professional Engineering Societies & Consensus Standards Organizations
American Nuclear Society (ANS)
Jack Tuohy, Jr. (Executive Director, ANS)
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
Kevin Ennis (Director Nuclear Codes and Standards, ASME)
Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)
John R. Vig (President and CEO, IEEE)
Industry
Westinghouse
Regis Matzie (Sr. Vice President/Chief Technical Officer)
General Electric (GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy)
Robert Brown (Senior Vice President, Regulatory Affairs GEH)
Areva NP
Tom Christopher (CEO & Vice-Chairman)
Mitsubishi Nuclear Energy Systems
Frank Gillespie (Senior Vice President, New Plant Technology, MHI)
Shaw
Steven Stamm (Vice President Business Development, Shaw)
Bechtel Power Corporation
Brian Reilly, Principal Vice President
Attachments sent to Senators/Representatives and others listed in red; letter only black.
For email or hardcopy copies of all materials, please send request via email with email address to:
jkaugust@msn.com
J.K. August
CORE, Inc.
P.O. Box 606
Arvada, CO 80001
Hon. Senator Thomas A. Carper, Chairman
Senate Environmental & Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air & Nuclear Safety
United States Senate 513 Hart BuildingWashington, DC 20510
How we can boldly improve nuclear plant safety
Dear Senator Carper:
Removing nuclear plant safety concerns renews confidence in nuclear energy development. Improving nuclear plant safety requires reducing safety mistakes. Random safety errors like uncharged safety injection lines or reactor nozzle corrosion present near misses. Most nuclear safety errors randomly evolve from design process failures. Nuclear plant safety design anticipates all types of expected equipment degradation and provides the means to control their safety risks. Loss of safety design basis places errors deep into nuclear plant operational processes. Usually they only result in near misses. Rarely, something more happens than loss of defense-in-depth. Consequently, safety errors are unacceptable - particularly preventable ones. All non-random safety errors are preventable. Random factors should not determine nuclear safety when improved processes can entirely remove their threats. Most safety design losses come from failure to operationally integrate design. Aging equipment creates more safety design loss failure threats. Effective design basis integration preserves design-intended nuclear safety functions better - even with aging processes leading to equipment failure.
At Palo Verde, uncharged safety injection lines in both trains of the three units’ safety injection systems compromised capacity to supply emergency reactor cooling water. For a lengthy period, lost defense-in-depth substantially increased public safety risk. Though less risky (but more unnerving), Davis-Besse’s single reactor nozzle corrosion failure was another near miss. However, both presented the specter of direct nuclear fuel damage - a significant safety barrier loss. Direct fuel damage escalated into the calamity of an actual radiation release at Three Mile Island, creating the worst U.S commercial nuclear reactor accident. Persisting uncorrected for a lengthy period, in spite of multiple evident indications, uncharged safety injection was a “common-cause” failure - an especially insidious problem. Independently failing safety controls at Davis-Besse and Palo Verde reveal systemic industry problems - echoing Three Mile Island. Organizational behaviors powerfully influence common-cause failure risks. Training to improve nuclear safety awareness helps combat complacent cultures, but is not enough. Strengthening underlying safety processes provides additional needed assurance. Integrating safety design processes adds fundamental defense-in-depth. Integrating safety design with operations remains the most comprehensive way to improve error-prone nuclear safety.
Whether designing new plants or operating old ones, improving the design basis requires asking candidly how to correct the fundamental causes of design basis loss. Operating a three unit nuclear plant for many years with not just one but both safety trains inoperable in every unit does not generate public health and safety confidence. Flying in a commercial airliner with only one system to operate the plane controls, knowing all backup hydraulic controls were inoperable would also make the general public reluctant to fly - if in fact, they knew safety equipment was inoperable. People can personally assess flight risk from their own experience. After all, most of the general public flies today. However, few people today understand nuclear plants. They must trust others who do.
Commercial airline pilots cannot choose whether they do preflight instrument checks, leaving public flight safety to chance. Rules specify preflight system flight checks to assure safety performance. No plane leaves the ground with known, inoperable safety devices. However, commercial jet airliners integrate safety design into operations. Nuclear plants don’t. Discounting evident safety failures reveals safety weaknesses in the nuclear design process. While most of the time nuclear plants are safe, design basis integration would make them far safer. Ever so rarely, coincident multiple safety system failures randomly align, violating diversity, redundancy and principles of defense-in-depth. And once in a very great while, a nuclear accident happens. Overseas, in the military and at our National Labs nuclear accidents have killed people. Nuclear accidents can happen. Further reducing nuclear accident risk requires improving how we translate the underlying safety design basis into operational requirements. This requires integrating nuclear plant operations with plant nuclear safety design.
Nuclear safety performance improvement requires integrating the plant design basis. How can we justify not taking the next steps to further reduce nuclear safety risk? Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or the commercial airline industry have taught us nothing, if we have decided today that we are “safe enough.”
Sincerely,
J.K. August, PE / J.J. Hunter, SRO
CORE, Inc. 303-425-7408/970-330-1411
Terms: Design Basis (DB); Nuclear Safety Framework; Nuclear Safety Performance, Reliability Assurance Program (RAP); Systems Structures and Components (SSC), Component Part Aging; Next Generation Nuclear Plant NGNP; Failure; Failure Event; Failure Mechanism; Light-water Reactor (LWR); Actionable, Common-cause failure
Attachment: Strategic Nuclear Initiatives
Distribution:
US NRC
Gregory Jaczko (Chairman)
NRC Office of the Inspector General
Hubert Bell (Inspector General, US NRC)
Department of Energy
Steven Chu (Secretary, DOE)
House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Henry A. Waxman, CA, Chair
Subcommittee on Energy and Environment
Edward J. Markey, Chairman
Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality
Rep. Perlmutter, CO Member
Senate Energy & Natural Resources CommitteeJeff Bingaman (Chairman)Lisa Murkowski (Ranking Member)
Senate Environment & Public Works Committee
Senator Barbara Boxer (Chair)
Senator George Inhofe (Ranking Member)
Matt Dempsey (Communications Director, Sen. James Inhofe Office)
Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety
Thomas R. Carper (Chairman)
Laura Haynes (Legislative Assistant, Senator Carper’s Office)
David Vitter (Ranking Member)
George V. Voinovich
Max Baucus
Benjamin L. Cardin
Bernard Sanders
Jeff Merkley
Christopher S. Bond
Annie Caputo, Senior Technical Staff
Government Accountability Office
Mark Gaffigan (Director, Natural Resources and Environment, GAO)
Nuclear Energy Institute
Marvin S. Fertel (President & Chief Nuclear Officer)
Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO)
Jim Ellis (President & CEO)
Professional Engineering Societies & Consensus Standards Organizations
American Nuclear Society (ANS)
Jack Tuohy, Jr. (Executive Director, ANS)
American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
Kevin Ennis (Director Nuclear Codes and Standards, ASME)
Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)
John R. Vig (President and CEO, IEEE)
Industry
Westinghouse
Regis Matzie (Sr. Vice President/Chief Technical Officer)
General Electric (GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy)
Robert Brown (Senior Vice President, Regulatory Affairs GEH)
Areva NP
Tom Christopher (CEO & Vice-Chairman)
Mitsubishi Nuclear Energy Systems
Frank Gillespie (Senior Vice President, New Plant Technology, MHI)
Shaw
Steven Stamm (Vice President Business Development, Shaw)
Bechtel Power Corporation
Brian Reilly, Principal Vice President
Attachments sent to Senators/Representatives and others listed in red; letter only black.
For email or hardcopy copies of all materials, please send request via email with email address to:
jkaugust@msn.com
J.K. August
CORE, Inc.
P.O. Box 606
Arvada, CO 80001
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
