Lara Uselding
Public Affairs Officer, Region IV
The NRC will hold a public meeting March 27 to discuss the status of the
Fort Calhoun nuclear plant,
located 19 miles north of Omaha. As many know, the plant has been shut
down since April 9, 2011, for a refueling outage. The outage was
extended due to historic flooding along the Missouri River followed by
an electrical fire that led to an “Alert” declaration and further
restart complications.
We’d like to bring readers up to speed on where we are since January’s
blog update and share four new updates.
First, the NRC recently revised the
Confirmatory Action Letter (CAL)
we originally issued in June 2012, outlining actions Omaha Public Power
District (OPPD) had agreed to do before restarting the plant. The
revisions added three categories to the restart checklist – OPPD will
address containment internal structure issues, the use of Teflon seals
on electrical cables passing through containment, and several event
reports involving recently identified equipment problems.
This
was followed by an update to the detailed 450+ action item list known
as the basis document to reflect the three new CAL categories. After
conducting independent verification of OPPD’s work, the NRC has closed
more than 100 items on the basis document list, although none of the 18
restart checklist categories have been closed.
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The
third update is that a 15-member NRC inspection team led by a veteran
Senior Resident Inspector Greg Warnick, stationed at another plant, has
been on site conducting a thorough inspection and independent
verification of Fort Calhoun’s current safety status. The team
inspection will provide the NRC a real sense on how much progress OPPD
has made in preparing plant systems, structures, components, people and
processes for restart. The inspectors are using the basis document’s
450+ items as their guide.
Fourth, an
inspection report issued
yesterday, lists two NRC-identified issues, including a failure by OPPD
to get NRC approval before making changes to the plant’s flood
protection strategy. Inspectors also identified that OPPD failed to
address a 2012 violation involving six sluice gates and motors that
control the flow of water from the Missouri River into the plant’s
cooling system. By not following the process to classify these sluice
gates as safety related, the intake structure may not properly protect
the cooling water system and pumps during a flood.
The public is encouraged to join us in Omaha for the
meeting where the NRC staff will be available to answer questions about these topics.
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