Reactor Revival
Commentary: Many of the nation's aging neclar plants are scheduled to be shut down over the next decade. But the Bush administration - despite serious safety issues-is hoping to give them a new lease on life.
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Last February, maintenance workers at the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina noticed a dusting of white powder around several openings atop the Unit 3 reactor vessel, which houses the intensely radioactive fuel core. The powder was boron. It meant one thing: The cooling system, critical to preventing a nuclear meltdown, had sprung a leak.
After a two-month investigation, Oconee's owner, Duke Energy, detailed the extent of the problem to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (nrc). The aging metal on nine nozzles inside the reactor dome had cracked. Two cracks were getting large enough that the nozzles could have broken apart, blocking circulation or causing coolant to gush out and the reactor to overheat—the kind of problem that led to the near-catastrophic Three Mile Island accident in 1979. The discovery set off a flurry of activity at the nrc, which is scrambling to identify similar cracks that may exist in 69 other reactors across the country.
Such flaws are a stark reminder that America's reactors are getting on in years. During the nuclear building boom of the 1960s and '70s, the industry and federal regulators assured the public that aging reactors would be shut down and decontaminated after four decades of service. Instead, what once seemed impossible is suddenly very real: The industry, with the strong support of the Bush administration, is pushing to extend the life of aging reactors like Oconee for another 20 years— despite mounting evidence that as nuclear plants grow old, they also grow increasingly unsafe.
The nrc has started accepting applications to relicense existing plants, which would allow owners to squeeze another two decades of revenues from their aging facilities. The first extension, for the Calvert Cliffs reactor on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, received swift approval in March 2000. By the end of 2004, companies are expected to seek license renewals for a third of the 103 plants now operating; one industry executive predicts that almost every reactor owner ultimately will seek such an extension.
Vice President Dick Cheney, the architect of the administration's nuclear-friendly energy plan, has given his unqualified endorsement to prolonging the life of old reactors. According to the plan, the nation will need as many as 1,900 new power plants over the next two decades—but given that no new nuclear plants have been built in the past 25 years, the administration is eager to keep existing reactors online. "We can't keep those plants going without relicensing," Cheney told a gleeful audience of nuclear power executives last spring.
To their owners, the old plants appear to be a terrific bargain. Many are operating at or near capacity and are producing electricity more cheaply than gas- or coal-fired plants—although consumers will continue to pay for construction debts and waste disposal for years to come. But in the rush to keep reactors going, regulators are ignoring widespread signs of wear and tear in aging plants. A study of nrc records found that eight reactors were taken out of service due to age-related equipment failure between March 2000 and April 2001. One of the shutdowns occurred at North Anna Unit 2 in Virginia, four months before its owner submitted a request for a license extension to the nrc. In that instance, water leaked from the reactor's cooling system at about 10 gallons per minute—fast enough that nrc regulations required an emergency shutdown to keep the core from overheating.
"Unfortunately, the nrc is neglecting a well-known fact that applies to lightbulbs, computers, and nuclear-plant components," says David Lochbaum, who spent 17 years as an engineer at nuclear plants before joining the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. "Equipment fails most often during the break-in and wear-out phases. It could be a recipe for disaster."
Regulators insist that they are ensuring the safety of older reactors by requiring plant owners to have "aging management" programs in place when they file for a license renewal. The existence of such programs is of "primary concern," says nrc chairman Richard Meserve.
But the track record of such programs suggests that they often miss critical warning signs. Case in point: Oconee's leaking nozzles. In 1993, the nrc notified Duke Energy and other plant owners of the likelihood of cracks developing in pressurized water reactors like Oconee's, calling the possible deterioration "an important safety consideration." But Duke failed to notice the worsening cracks—even as it assured regulators that its maintenance programs were thorough enough to identify any potential problems. Last year, the nrc granted the company a 20-year extension of its operating license for Oconee, only to have Duke Energy notice the boron residue 10 months later.
"Those cracks didn't develop after the license was granted," says Lochbaum. "They just weren't detected until after they leaked water." Such mistakes, he adds, show that aging management programs are "little more than a paperwork exercise that is frequently contradicted by actual experience."
Duke Energy, which discovered the cracks while the reactors were shut down for refueling and inspection, says the incident proves that its aging management programs are performing exactly as they should. "Our system of inspections and testing discovered this issue long before it could ever become a safety factor," says spokesman Tom Shiel. "It was a cup of boronated water from a system containing 80,000 gallons. It was a symptom of a potential problem." The utility has repaired the leaking nozzles and will replace the reactor vessel heads in its Oconee units at a cost of about $20 million.
The danger of aging reactors is compounded by a recent overhaul of nrc safety rules. For years, commission inspectors routinely visited reactors in search of trouble in the making. But under a new system phased in over the last several years, almost all of the oversight is now performed by reactor operators themselves. Critics worry that the lack of independent inspections, coupled with the nrc's apparent eagerness to keep the plants running, means that problems are being overlooked by operators and regulators.
According to Michael Mariotte, executive director of the nonprofit Nuclear Information and Resource Service, the attitude at the nrc is, "We're not interested if the plant meets the safety standard; we're interested in making sure the standards fit the plant." Deregulation of the electricity industry, he predicts, will only make matters worse. In the past, operators could pass on to customers the cost of taking a reactor off-line, making expensive repairs, and buying replacement power. But those expenditures now come directly out of an owner's bottom line. "When the utility's ability to earn money is directly tied to the power plant staying online," says Mariotte, "there is enormous pressure to keep that plant running."
Utility executives scoff at the idea that safety decisions are driven by dollars and cents. "Safety is our first priority," says Shiel of Duke Energy, "and we have the systems and process in place to make sure that priority doesn't change."
There is evidence, however, that cost comes before safety. In the late 1980s, after cracks were discovered in steam generators built by Westinghouse, the company agreed to settle lawsuits by supplying plant owners with replacements for the equipment. Despite the free upgrade, Consolidated Edison chose not to incur the costs of shutting down its Indian Point nuclear plant 30 miles north of Manhattan to replace its 26-year-old generators. The replacements sat on-site for 12 years until one of Indian Point's steam-generator tubes ruptured in February 2000, causing a radiation release that forced the plant to shut down for nearly a year.
Such mishaps have done nothing to deter industry's renewed enthusiasm for nuclear energy. Wholesale energy companies are aggressively outbidding each other to buy up aging reactors, confident that they can operate profitably well into the future. Exelon, a product of the merger of Philadelphia's peco Energy and Chicago's Commonwealth Edison, now owns 17 reactors and is searching for others to add to its nuclear "fleet." Entergy Corp., a New Orleans rival, owns nine reactors, including Indian Point 2, which it bought in September. Dominion Resources of Richmond, which owns the North Anna and Surry reactors in Virginia, last year spent $1.3 billion for controlling shares in Connecticut's two Millstone reactors; and Baltimore's Constellation Energy Group, owner of Calvert Cliffs, paid $815 million for a stake in New York's two Nine Mile Point reactors.
Wholesalers argue that with large staffs of safety experts and years of technical expertise, they are far more capable of running a reactor safely than a small utility with a single nuclear plant. "This is something we feel to be our core competency," says Marilyn Kray, Exelon's vice president for nuclear acquisitions. Among the plants in Exelon's stable is Oyster Creek in New Jersey, the nation's oldest operating reactor, which went into service in December 1969.
But the pressure to satisfy investors by producing profits from aging plants worries critics like Michael Mariotte. "When you look at the history of nuclear accidents, they always have the same root cause: human error," he says. "Human error typically arises from complacency, a feeling that an accident can't happen. With this new nuclear boosterism, the level of complacency that existed pre-Three Mile Island is back in droves. Add to it the fact that these reactors are much older than they were at the time of tmi, and you've got the potential for much more serious consequences."
Susan Q. Stranahan was the lead reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer's coverage of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, which won the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
