NEWS RELEASE

RELEASE DATE Feb 2, 2010 1:55 PM

                                                                           Contact:  Ray Shadis - Consultant 207-882-7801
                                                                                         Clay Turnbull - NEC Staff 802-257-0336

 

NEW ENGLAND COALITION FILES WITH NRC:  SHUTDOWN VY TO FIND LEAKS

 

NEC will be filing a 10 CFR 2.206 Enforcement Petition today requesting that NRC undertake a number of enforcement actions in response to:

    (1)   growing concentrations of radio-contaminants in the soil and groundwater at VY,

    (2)   Entergy’s failure to know and understand Vermont Yankee’s design, layout, and

           construction,

    (3)  the obvious inadequacy of Entergy VY’s underground piping aging management plan

          as presented and approved in ENVY’s License Renewal Amendment application,

   (4)  the agency’s failure to catch on until the situation became grossly self revealing.

 

  • NRC will be asked to require VY to go into cold shutdown and depressurize all systems in order to slow or stop the leak. Entergy would then be permitted to pressurize one system at a time, possibly using fluorescent dye tracers, in order to isolate the source of the leak. (Poking holes in the ground and sampling is okay for site characterization, but it is an unnecessarily long slow path to isolating and identifying a leak.  We suspect that Entergy is simply buying time until the scheduled April refueling outage.)
  • NRC will be asked to require that VY re-establish its licensing basis by physically tracing details all plant systems.
  • NRC will be asked to investigate and determine why Entergy was allowed to operate VY since 2002 without a working knowledge of all of the plant’s systems and why NRC’s Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) and License Renewal Amendment Review Process, let this dereliction go unnoticed.
  • NRC will be asked to take notice of ENVY’s many maintenance and management failures, and the ROP’s failure to get ahead of them, and to undertake a full Diagnostic Evaluation Team Inspection (a process identical in regimen to the 1996 MY Independent Safety Assessment).
  • NRC will be asked to require Entergy VY to apply for an amendment to its License Renewal that would address both aging analysis and an aging management for all piping carrying or with the potential to carry radionuclides. NRC will also be asked to provide a hearing opportunity on this Amendment.
  • Meanwhile, in a separate letter NEC will ask the Commission to stay action on NEC’s Petition for Review of the ASLB hearing and Order on License Renewal pending the outcome of the foregoing.
  •  

Why this call for a shutdown now? And not a week ago before the VT Public Service Board? A continued increase in concentrations for this period of time is more indicative of a plant system leak, rather than diminishing concentrations which would be more indicative of the dispersal of some pool or reservoir left from some past contamination incident. Shutdown would permit isolation of various plant systems and thus the leak.  NRC is the only agency with authority to order a shutdown, or indeed any action, with respect to nuclear safety.  Right issue. Right reasons. Right Time. Right venue.                

 

Ray Shadis for New England Coalition

 

THIS RELEASE AND ADDITIONAL FILINGS WILL BE POSTED AT  www.NECNP.org

 

_______________________________________________________________________

BRATTLEBORO REFORMER

 

 

New England Coalition seeks to close VY

By BOB AUDETTE

02-02-2010




BRATTLEBORO -- The New England Coalition on Nuclear Pollution, which is opposed to the relicensing of Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, is asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to shut the plant down until the source of a leak of tritiated water can be found.

 

"Because the rate of contamination appears to be increasing, they need to cease operations until they determine the source," said Ray Shadis, NEC’s technical consultant.

Entergy has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to extend the operating license of Yankee for another 20 years, from 2012 to 2032. In addition to NRC approval, Entergy must also receive a certificate of public good from the Public Service Board and the OK from the Vermont Legislature.

 

The Legislature and the PSB were on track to decide whether Yankee should be allowed to continue to operate when a tritium leak discovered on Jan. 7 derailed the process.

When the state was notified about the leak, regulators learned that Entergy didn’t reveal the extent of buried piping at the power plant during public hearings before the Public Service Board last year.

 

During a status conference last week with the PSB, Entergy was ordered to go back and review every single page of testimony presented to it to identify any other areas where Entergy might have left out important information.

 

"It’s a start," said Shadis.

 

Entergy is scheduled to return to the PSB next week to let it know how long the review could take.

"It may or may not be that they intended to mislead, but what they did shows great disrespect for the process by trying to blow past these questions," said Shadis.

In the five or six proceedings in which NEC has been a part, "In every instance their answers were coy and evasive," he said.

 

While it may be OK to not offer information that has not been asked for in a criminal trial, said Shadis, it’s not OK "when an applicant is asking for the state’s goodwill for a permit. They act like defendants instead of applicants."

Information that Entergy has turned over so far "is not helpful," he said.

 

A list of buried pipes submitted by Entergy was nearly illegible, said Shadis, and had no description of the piping systems except for engineering codes with no legend to explain what those codes were.

 

"If this is the way it’s going to be, we will be bumping heads soon," he said.

The state also needs to investigate how the tritium leak could affect decommissioning costs, said Shadis.

 

Rough calculations indicate cleaning up the tritium leak could add as much as $113 million to the costs of decommissioning the power plant when it closes, said Shadis.

"They have to go back to the drawing board," said Shadis. "We need them to do a thorough site survey."

 

Bob Audette can be reached at raudette@reformer.com, or at 802-254-2311, ext. 273.

 

 

 

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