Skip to main content

NRC Discusses Preliminary Results from North Anna Inspections

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a public meeting yesterday to discuss its team’s preliminary inspection results on how the North Anna nuclear plant withstood the August 23 earthquake that rippled throughout the East Coast and the adequacy of the plant’s response.

What did they find?

David Heacock, Dominion’s president and chief nuCaptureclear officer, explains in a short video clip at the meeting:

The plant operated as designed with a few minor equipment problems and the people did a fantastic job operating the plant and safely shutting it down.

Each nuclear plant in the United States is built to safely withstand an earthquake—North Anna is no exception. But Heacock explains how having an additional safety margin helped the plant when the unexpected quake struck.

These plants were designed for a seismic event about the size of this seismic event, but for a much longer duration. Duration is very important. As duration gets longer, more and more energy gets imparted upon the plant. This event lasted about three seconds for the strong shaking, but we’re designed for a minimum of 15 seconds of strong shaking. So this is really about 20 percent of the energy the plant is designed to take.

Next steps: Starting tomorrow for about a 10-day period, the NRC will have a five-member crew conducting a thorough inspection at the site to ensure that all equipment is available and that there isn’t damage to safety equipment before the plant restarts. Last Friday the NRC outlined its post-earthquake requirements, which Dominion must meet before the plant is allowed to restart.

For more information, check out the NRC’s website where you can find current actions at the plant, a chronology of events, and frequently asked questions.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fluor Invests in NuScale

You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Wednesday Update

From NEI’s Japan micro-site: NRC, Industry Concur on Many Post-Fukushima Actions Industry/Regulatory/Political Issues • There is a “great deal of alignment” between the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the industry on initial steps to take at America’s nuclear energy facilities in response to the nuclear accident in Japan, Charles Pardee, the chief operating officer of Exelon Generation Co., said at an agency briefing today. The briefing gave stakeholders an opportunity to discuss staff recommendations for near-term actions the agency may take at U.S. facilities. PowerPoint slides from the meeting are on the NRC website. • The International Atomic Energy Agency board has approved a plan that calls for inspectors to evaluate reactor safety at nuclear energy facilities every three years. Governments may opt out of having their country’s facilities inspected. Also approved were plans to maintain a rapid response team of experts ready to assist facility operators recoverin