NRC: Indian Point Safe to Restart

Two days before showing up in person to discuss their annual safety performance assessment of Indian Point, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said Unit 2 is safe to restart. 

"Overall, Indian Point operates safely and continues to operates safely," David Lew, deputy administrator for NRC region 1, told reporters in a webinar Monday.

But that opinion does not hold water with Indian Point's foes, who plan to hold protests and press conferences before the Wednesday event in Tarrytown, as well as speak during the hearing.

One group, comprised of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, the Office of The Hon. Alden Wolfe, Chairman, Rockland County Legislature, and Friends of the Earth, said in a press statement today that advocates of closing Indian Point would:

present new, previously unreported information about the nuclear plant.  Experts will explain the unprecedented damage and deterioration recently discovered inside the IP-2 reactor, and why restarting it, as the plant owner Entergy intends to do this month, poses a significant danger to the public. They’ll also address how Entergy is trying to get New York ratepayers to underwrite the extraordinary costs of Indian Point’s continued operation.   Elected officials will renew calls for Indian Point to shut down in light of the crisis.  The former head of the New York Power Authority David Freeman and the international organization Friends of the Earth will discuss an emergency petition recently filed with the Nuclear Regulator Commission to block the restart of IP-2, and demanding the IP-3 reactor also be powered down and investigated for similar damage.

“There’s no putting a brave face on this for Entergy. The core of Reactor 2 is damaged and Reactor 3’s core — virtually identical in age and operating history — could be as well. It calls into question the soundness of both reactors,” asserted Riverkeeper President Paul Gallay, who will also be at the press conference.

But in their conference with reporters on Monday, NRC staffers told a different tale. 

They discussed four main topics: tritium-contaminated groundwater; the degradation of bolts in Unit 2's core; the natural-gas pipeline past the plant; and the evacuation zone.

Lew, a former resident inspector at Indian Point, said that the performance assessment was the result of 10,000 hours of independent observation by specialists as well as resident inspectors, including assessment of the unplanned shutdowns that had downgraded Unit 3's status for one performance indicator.

Then Jack McHale, chief of the vessels and internals integrity branch, talked about the infamous baffle-former bolts, part of the baffle assembly that helps keep the reactor cool and safely shut down. The NRC has since 2009 required aging plants of Indian Point's design to do an ultrasonic inspection of those bolts, based on the discovery in France of irradiation-assisted stress corrosion cracking because the bolts are exposed to neutron radiation from the reactor core.

In all, 227 of 832 baffle-former bolts were either degraded or -- 14 bolts could not be accessed for testing, and two bolts were missing. Entergy is replacing all of the 227 as well as an additional 51 to help insure the plate’s integrity, McHale said. The new bolts are redesigned in a way that reduces stress at the bolt head.

NRC staffers do not believe that Unit 3 will have the same bolt-degradation problem because it has logged fewer operating hours. They said they were alert to the potential generic implications. 

Entergy will have metallurgical analysis results in a few months on the bolts, which the NRC will follow closely, they said.

Jim Nagle, branch chief in the Region 1 Devision of reactor safety, said while the source of the tritium-contaminated groundwater leak has not yet been determined, "Multiple near-term corrective actions have been taken. The licensee inspected all floor drains, with 17 partial blockages ID'd and cleared."

He said there was no impact on public health or safety, contrasting the 0.00001 millirem per year to the average annual dose for the average American, which is 620 millirems each year primarily from natural sources including cosmic rays and radon.

As for the pipeline Spectra Energy is constructing near Indian Point, NRC staffers pointed out that the new pipeline will be farther away than the two that run under the plant -- one since 1952 and the other since 1965.

Actual explosions confirmed that the NRC's risk analysis was conservative, they said. The equipment needed to shut down the reactors would remain available during and after a pipeline explosion.

NRC staffers said they have cooperated with New York State, which decided to do independent assessments at Indian Point, and have allowed the state's inspectors to accompany their own as well as communicating regularly.

Entergy officials said Unit 2 was on schedule to start back up later this month.

The hearing, at the DoubleTree hotel in Tarrytown, is scheduled to start at 7 p.m.

SEE ALSO: 

• Problem Inside Indian Point 2 Reactor: Bad Bolts
• NRC Sending Radiation Specialist to Indian Point
• UPDATE: NRC to Re-Analyze Costs of an Accident at Indian Point
• NRC Eases a Testing Requirement at Indian Point
• UPDATE: Radioactive Water Leak at Indian Point
• Unplanned Reactor Shutdowns Bring More NRC Inspections
• NRC Issues Report on Indian Point 3 License Renewal 
• FERC Answers Cuomo's Request to Halt Pipeline Expansion