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Flooding
is one of many natural hazards that U.S. nuclear power plants must
withstand in order to safely shut down and protect the public. Well
before last year’s accident at Fukushima, the NRC was hard at work
ensuring U.S. plants have robust flood protection measures in place, and
now we’re focused on having the plants update their flooding analyses.
We’ve
devoted significant efforts at two sites – Oconee in South Carolina and
Fort Calhoun in Nebraska – to oversee those sites’ work in addressing
flooding issues noted by our resident inspectors at the sites. The Fort
Calhoun improvements paid off last summer, when the plant safely rode
out severe flooding along the Missouri River.
The
effort at Oconee, focused on dams upstream of the plant, has been
underway for several years. Today, all the information available to the
NRC leaves us satisfied that the plant’s owner, Duke, has put
appropriate temporary flood-related features in place to ensure the
public’s safety in case of flooding at Oconee. We’re monitoring
additional work Duke has under way to further enhance Oconee’s permanent
flood protection.
The
experience at those two plants, however, led us to take a broader look
at upstream dams to see if anything else needed to be done. That work
was largely completed when Fukushima occurred, and the
upstream dam analysis played a role in the NRC
requiring
every U.S. plant to perform a comprehensive reanalysis of all potential
flooding sources. The screening analysis did not evaluate the changes
at Oconee or Fort Calhoun; instead it answered the question of whether
there were possible improvements at other plants.
The
NRC has to keep some of that upstream dam information out of public
view for several reasons. For one thing, we must coordinate the use of
dam-specific information with our federal partners at the Army Corps of
Engineers, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Department
of Homeland Security. Other plant-specific information in the analysis
also falls into security categories that are withheld from public
release.
Two
NRC staffers, one of whom worked on the analysis, have offered their
opinions that more information should have been made available. They
submitted their concerns to the NRC’s independent
Inspector General,
which is one method the staff has to formally disagree with an agency
decision. While the IG does its work, the NRC can only comment on the
analysis currently available on our
website.
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