NEI Nuclear Notes

This morning in a conference call with nuclear energy bloggers , NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane, in response to a direct question about the safety of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, said "[We] believe the plant is safe ... Otherwise it still wouldn't be operating." For the why behind that conclusion, you ought to review two reports that were released yesterday afternoon. On Wednesday, PG&E released a report confirming the seismic safety of Diablo Canyon Power Plant . The report, the Central Coastal California Seismic Imaging Project , is 14 chapters long, but the bottom line is delivered succinctly by The Tribune , the paper of record in San Luis Obispo. The report will now be peer reviewed by an NRC committee that includes Neal Driscoll , a professor of geology and geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego . When asked about the report after its release yesterday ... [Driscoll] said PG&E marshaled many state-of-the-art tools f...

The Associated Press yesterday ran a sensationalized account of an internal Nuclear Regulatory Commission dispute over the seismic safety of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. It actually wasn't much of a dispute insomuch as one NRC voice advocated to have Diablo Canyon shut down until additional seismic testing of the site could be conducted, while the larger regulatory body over many years has exhaustively analyzed seismic threats at Diablo Canyon,  always concluding that the site is safe .    Diablo Canyon Power Plant Federal regulations require that nuclear plants be able to withstand extreme natural events that may occur in the region where they are located, and the NRC most recently required that nuclear utilities have seismic experts re-evaluate the potential earthquake impact at their sites using the latest available data and methodologies. But earlier this year the NRC reminded the pub...

Scott Peterson The following is a guest post by Scott Peterson, NEI's Senior Vice President of Communications. Companies that operate America’s nuclear energy facilities today will submit new information regarding seismic safety as part of a series of actions the industry is taking to implement lessons learned from the 2011 Fukushima accident . This comes at a time of heightened interest in earthquakes given the Los Angeles-area temblors this past weekend . However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2012 required energy companies to reevaluate potential seismic hazards for each of America’s 100 reactors. Nuclear energy facilities were designed and built with extra safety margin, in part to be able to withstand an earthquake even beyond the strongest ever at each site . Nonetheless, over the past decades, the industry has re-evaluated the seismic safety of its facilities. Each time new seismic information became available, plant operators have confirmed, and in many ca...

The USGS is reporting that a minor earthquake struck Maine near the town of Lake Arrowhead shortly after 7:00 p.m. this evening . The nuclear power plant closest to the epicenter of the quake, Seabrook, which is in the midst of a refueling outage, declared an unusual event in response. The following is an official statement from NextEra Energy, the owner of the plant: This evening, by procedure, Seabrook Station declared an unusual event due to the seismic activity felt throughout the region. An unusual event is the lowest of four Nuclear Regulatory Commission emergency classifications. The plant has been and is currently shut down in a planned refueling outage. There has been no impact to the plant from the earthquake and our outage activities have not been affected in any way. We expect to exit from the unusual event shortly. By way of background, Seabrook is designed to withstand the strongest earthquake ever experienced in New England, and then some. Thanks to the team at N...

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 nu clear 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 impart...

Georgia Power is applying some price pressure on its Plant Vogtle project (where Peter Pepper picked a peck of peppers, apparently), as its ability to charge ratepayers a little bit more now saves a lot later . Georgia Power has cut $18 million from its planned nuclear expansion project at Plant Vogtle, informing state utility regulators Wednesday that their cost for the project is now $6.09 billion. Now, you may say that now or later, it’s the same amount, but not so. The cost of Georgia Power’s portion of the project originally was approved for $6.4 billion but reduced to $6.09 billion after the utility was allowed to collect financing costs from customers. The $18 million in reductions stem from financing costs that were lowered “primarily as a result of changing in the timing of cash expenditures,” the report said. Which means that the interest costs are declining because Georgia Power can pay as it goes on at least some of the activities associated with the two new...

Those of us on the east coast have yet another major event to remember – a 5.8 earthquake that shook virtually the entire east coast. No one who doesn’t come from the west is used to such an event, so the level of surprise and mystified reaction was considerable. We won’t know for awhile if there was substantial damage or casualties. Let’s hope for little of the former and none of the latter. But we do know something about the nuclear facilities. Dominion Virginia Power shut down its two North Anna reactors  as a result of the earthquake, according to the  the company. The earthquake was felt at the North Anna Power Station and the reactor operators, following procedures, shut down the reactors," said company spokesman Jim Norvelle. "It was a manual shutdown." The plant declared an alert, the second lowest level of emergency declaration, a commission spokesman said. About what you’d expect. Virginia was at the epicenter of the quake. Domini...

Harvard Seismology has put together a fascinating set of maps and preliminary data about the Japan earthquake. All of it is interesting, but two especially struck me in relation to the events at Fukushima Daiichi. Here’s the explanation of this map: The figure … shows the relative amount of energy release from various locations that radiated energy during the first 25 minutes (darker orange showing higher energy release). The largest energy release occurs downdip of the epicentre, and the regions south of the epicentre release more energy than segments to the north (partially due to multiple large aftershocks on Mw 9.0 earthquake). If I read this right, the Onahama and Fukushima plants were struck by the bottom most energy release, but the text indicates Fukushima would also have been affected by the upper energy release. it looks like it was sandwiched between two massive energy releases. This map shows the current earthquake and historical instances: Here’s the explan...

(4/18/2008) - This morning at 4:37 central time a 5.2 magnitude earthquake shook southeastern Illinois . Illinois is home to six nuclear plants operated by Exelon and are located in the central and northern parts of the state. Here is a statement from Exelon on the earthquake and its nuclear plants: None of Exelon Nuclear's six Illinois nuclear energy stations were affected by early morning seismic activity near the southern Illinois town of West Salem, the company said today. Plant equipment continued to function normally at each of the six operating nuclear stations. Station operators and technical experts conducted extensive pre-planned inspections when the seismic activity occurred. Operators performed "walk-downs" to search for potential effects and confirmed by this morning that the earthquake caused no damage to equipment or otherwise affected plant operations. Additional plant walk- downs are scheduled throughout the day. Each plant continued to operate at its nor...