Politics & Government

San Onofre Nuke Plant Safe but Not Perfect, NRC Says

Nuclear regulators have dinged the San Clemente plant for a bunch of violations over the past 10 years, but the NRC says they posed little threat to the public.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission enforcement documents show that the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station has had several violations over the past five years, but an NRC official said they posed little threat to public safety.

San Onofre chief made the rounds last week that the plant could have withstood an earthquake and tsunami similar to the one that devastated parts of Japan earlier this month.

According to the Associated Press, the NRC voted Wednesday to conduct a two-step review of all nuclear power plants in the U.S., even though regular inspections resulting in citations such as those at San Onofre have been under way for years. As a result of past inspections, an NRC official said the commission considers San Onofre one of the safer facilities in the U.S., despite heightened scrutiny over personnel, equipment and log-keeping problems.

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VIOLATIONS

The most serious violation at the San Onofre plant over the last 10 years was a loose bolt on an emergency battery wire found in 2008. But NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said the other emergency systems in place were designed to activate if the battery terminal didn’t connect.

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The battery-wire violation was designated as the second-lowest level violation—a “white” on a scale that runs green, white, yellow, red. Green is the least serious, and red is the most potentially dangerous, Dricks said.

Also according to the documents, a tank full of mildly radioactive liquid waste had a small leak from a transport vessel in Utah where San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station waste goes for storage.

The September 2006 document stated, “The actual safety consequences of this event were low”; the leak was small, involved waste that was only mildly contaminated and was cleaned up quickly.

But the document said plant staffers didn’t properly follow procedures for securing the container.

Another relatively serious set of violations happened when a contractor faked fire safety certification log entries “on numerous occasions from April 2001 to December 2006,” according to a 2008 NRC document.

Regulators also dinged the plant in November 2009 because, , workers “failed to adequately assess and manage the increased risk” associated with construction activities. Certain crane operations could have endangered the switch yard and transformers, the 2009 document stated.

EFFORTS TO COMPLY

The plant had to reach a settlement with the NRC as a result of the fire safety falsifications, agreeing to implement better ethics training and disciplinary programs, among other measures.

In a more recent regulatory document dated July 30, 2010, the NRC was critical of San Onofre’s efforts to address staff problems.

“When compared to the findings from the previous inspection in September of 2008, the findings of this inspection indicate that the corrective action program effectiveness has declined,” the document states.

Problems included routine log-keeping entries that were falsified and written procedures that were incorrect because they had not been updated after new equipment was installed.

Enforcement documents also raised concerns about a deficient “safety culture.” In 2009, an employee sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor alleging he experienced a hostile work environment meant to discourage raising safety concerns.

Some of these issues have since been addressed, in part because of increased training and in part because the plant has implemented surveillance of employees, randomly checking that they have completed the necessary procedures before marking them as completed in the company logs, according to the NRC.

WHERE SONGS STANDS

Despite these violations, Dricks said the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is categorized as one of the safer nuclear power plants in the U.S.; 85 percent of the plants are in that same category, however.

No plants currently licensed are classified in the riskiest categories, Dricks said.

But Dricks said the San Onofre plant is still under heightened NRC scrutiny because of some procedural and human resources issues. One of these includes the processes by which supervisors and employees work back to figure out the reasons for mistakes. The processes in place to review mistakes were inadequate as far as the NRC was concerned.

The plant has taken steps to remedy these problems, Dricks said, and a May inspection could clear the plant from regulators’ enhanced scrutiny.


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