Fission Stories #131: You Can’t Fix Stupid
Dave Lochbaum, director, Nuclear Safety Project
[link to allthingsnuclear.org]

[snip]


In March 2002, workers were “shocked” to discover that boric acid had eaten entirely through the carbon steel reactor vessel. The only thing that kept the reactor cooling water inside the reactor vessel was the thin veneer of stainless steel (the silverfish area in the photograph) applied to the inside surface – and it was bulging outward and cracked under the pressure).

The control rod drive mechanisms had been leaking borated water for many years. Contrary to its boric acid corrosion control program, workers at Davis-Besse never removed all the boric acid residue and formally evaluated the carbon steel underneath for damage. Instead, they ignored warning after warning.




The very near-miss at Davis-Besse happened because its owner violated 10 CFR Part 50 Appendix B repeatedly over many years. Similar breakdowns caused year-plus outages at Millstone, Salem, Sequoyah, Fort Calhoun, and many other reactors over the past four decades.

As described in Fission Stories #121, the Palisades reactor operated last year for 30 days with a leak that NRC’s safety regulations only permitted to exist for 6 hours. Time and again, the Palisades reactor violates this key safety regulation. And time and again, the NRC does absolutely nothing about it. Nothing at all, unless looking the other way counts as something.

The NRC did not revise or supplement any safety regulations following the near-miss at Davis-Besse. There was no need. Regulations had existed for many years that did not allow what had long been done at Davis-Besse. Yet the company did not follow them and the NRC did not enforce them. What’s the point of lawmaking when you clearly don’t care about lawbreaking?