The Independent Safety Assessment Entourage
In 1996, a marginally acceptable nuclear plant- the Maine Yankee plant-was a hotbed of unfinished work orders, unfollowed procedures, shoddy work practices, dozens of "workarounds" where some jury-rigged gilhooley wangdoodle of a home made temporary solution was left in place on a semi-permanent basis... extension cords ran through the control room powering items that had been designed to have their own power supply-but didn't. This plant requested a power uprate from NRC, and received it, even though a calculation proving its ability to withstand a small loss of coolant accident, had been kluged by simply referring to another calc, the case of a large coolant break, and the slipshod workaround of simply saying "Oh, if it withstands the large coolant break, it oughtta withstand the small break, right?"
Amazingly, this slipshod evasion of a true calculation was allowed to stand as "engineering judgement" by NRC, even though the plant's Final Safety Analysis Report-its FSAR-(part of its license) had promised to calculate the loss of coolant break in all sizes, from smallest to largest, in ten percent increments. A whistle blower went public with the evaded calculation, and two organizations were in deep, deep trouble.
Maine Yankee was in trouble because, short of staff, and money-starved, it had trained itself to skate on the edge of failure, and talk its way past the resident NRC inspectors.
NRC was in trouble, because it had failed to enforce a written committment for Maine Yankee to do ten calculations, and had accepted a single "one size fits all" safety calc in its place. Internally, NRC groused about just how bad, bad was, and just how good a plant needed to be, to be acceptable. It knew someone had messed up.
In a desperate bid to salvage its credibility, NRC devised a special emergency administrative tactic, a one time only self-reinvestigation, by way of bringing in 25 new inspectors to do a "vertical slice" inspection at Maine Yankee. At the end of the exercise, in November 1996, the 25 new inspectors had developed a laundry list of bad conditions found in a 3 month period,the worst being a safety injection pump that would not have functioned when needed, because its starting wire was not connected, and a set of several hundred meaningless valve tests , done religiously by the plant's test group, but so ineptly designed, that the tests as performed did not really test for anything, thus calling in to question the ability of almost every valve in the plant to perform its function when called upon, and a control room air conditioning system, which was allowed to ice up and fail repeatedly for years, without ever being permanently fixed.
The Maine Yankee Atomic Power Company was not a real corporation with a credo, or a corporate identity, it was a consortium of ten local power companies kicking in 10% each, to start a nuclear plant, and who then simply milked the plant from day one, doing everything the most evasive way possible to save cash, never hiring enough staff to do upkeep work, and simply riding the nuclear tiger for profit, almost like a band of strict Maine preachers of old , buying a ten percent interest in a brothel somewhere, forced to never own up to any responsibilities, because it was, well, a damned nuclear brothel, right?
NRC had been flim flammed by the preachers, and had bigtime egg on its face. Good will, or trust, had not been enough, and NRC needed more penetrating inspection methods, and a rating system, able to tell shoddy from bad, and unacceptable from acceptable. Out of the experience, NRC crafted its Reactor Oversight Process-- a system of constant inspections, with ratings given to each category in each plant. The one-time Independent Safety Assessment was made an every-week occurrence, and forms the backbone of NRC's working method today-- (Incidentally, the period when the ROP has been enforced is also the period when nuclear plants went from 30% efficiency to 99% efficiency).
So--- was the Maine Yankee Independent Safety Assessment successful? Yes, in that it upped the standards for every plant, and formed the kernel of a new ongoing set of high inspection standards, universally enforced.
Should it be done once more, in 2007?
The Maine Yankee situation was unique. Indian Point, and its corporate mentor Entergy bear no resemblance to Maine Yankee whatsoever, and ten years of NRC test results are in the public domain to prove it. That is ten years of tests identical to Maine Yankee's ISA, done on a constant rotating basis (aside from the resident inspectors at the plant permanently), and therefore a call for a new ISA, shows either an absolute ignorance of the nuclear industry, the ROP, and the rigid recurrent ISA's always going on at Indian Point, or else is simply a cynical stunt, done for political purposes. If NRC even were to comply, and hold a new "ISA", it would be forced to interrupt its own series of ongoing ISA's at the plant to do so.
So, was Hillary Clinton's staff misled by some antinuke activist, a Ray Shadis maybe, someone who had heard about Maine Yankee, but who suppressed the facts of the new constant ISA regime brought in afterwards? I suspect this is exactly what happened.
Is there a debt to pay, in using sliphsod "activist movement" reporting tactics, as a basis for making real world governmental policy? Bigtime. It puts egg on John Hall's face, Hillary's face, and incidentally on the faces of Westchester's 17 county legislators, although their faces have very little room for more egg, being sloppily smeared with a veritable Western Omelette of shame for their sycophantic obeisance to personalities like user Mike "The Kapo" Kaplowitz, who trots them around at will, kind of like Britney Spears' entourage.
And that's why an Independent Safety Assessment at Indian Point is not needed. Indian Point is already doing it.
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