{news} Fwd: Nuclear Plant Has Flaw Undetected for 19 Years - New York Times

[Karin Lee Norton]

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Subject: Fwd: Nuclear Plant Has Flaw Undetected for 19 Years - New York Times
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Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2005 20:15:11 -0400
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Subject: Nuclear Plant Has Flaw Undetected for 19 Years - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/14/national/14nuke.html

<http://www.nytimes.com/>
Nuclear Plant Has Flaw Undetected for 19 Years

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 14, 2005

PHOENIX, Oct. 13 (AP) - A potential problem with the emergency 
reactor core cooling system at the nation's largest nuclear power 
plant went undetected from 1986, when the plant began producing 
electricity, until last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and 
the plant operator confirmed Thursday.

The issue, a design flaw, was identified when engineers at the plant, 
the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, did an analysis after 
commission overseers raised questions at a detailed inspection early 
last week. The analysis showed that the emergency cooling system 
might not operate as expected to provide water to reactor cores after 
a small leak in the reactor cooling lines, said a commission 
spokesman, Victor Dricks.

The worst-case result of an emergency cooling system failure is a 
meltdown of the reactor core and release of radioactivity into the 
atmosphere. Plants have redundant systems, however, and many other 
failures would have to occur before that happened, nuclear experts 
say.

Still, the design flaw put the Palo Verde plant outside of its 
licensing guidelines, and its operator, the Arizona Public Service 
Company, shut down two of the plant's three reactors immediately 
pending a resolution of the problem. The third reactor at the 
complex, which lies 50 miles west of Phoenix, was already down for 
maintenance and refueling.

Engineers are looking at reconfiguring the system or writing new 
manual procedures to get around the problem, said Jim McDonald, a 
plant spokesman. They are also rechecking their calculations to see 
if the system may actually operate as expected.

The plant provides electricity for as many as four million customers 
in 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/california/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>California, 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/arizona/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>Arizona, 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/texas/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>Texas 
and 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/newmexico/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>New 
Mexico who are served by seven utility companies, and there is no 
estimate as to when it will be back online. Its power is cheaper than 
that of many other sources, but several of the utilities said it was 
unclear whether they would need to raise rates to recoup their losses.

The emergency cooling system in each of the three units is designed 
to replace, in unusual circumstances, water that cools the reactor 
core. Earlier this year, the commission fined Arizona Public Service, 
a subsidiary of the Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, $50,000 
because of a problem in a different part of the same cooling system. 
In the more recent case, pumps that provide emergency cooling water 
may not sense that a storage tank is getting low on water, and so may 
not switch to another source, Mr. Dricks said.

That the problem took so long to be discovered should prompt the 
commission to look at other plants and procedures, said David 
Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned 
Scientists, a nuclear watchdog group.

"It's a fairly subtle problem, and it was a good catch by the 
N.R.C.," Mr. Lochbaum said. "It just would have been a great catch 
sooner."




-- 
Karin Lee Norton
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