Word: plante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...rare point of agreement with activists, the nuclear industry also says regulations threaten to drive some plants out of business, but it argues that many NRC rules boost costs without enhancing safety. "The regulatory system hasn't kept pace with advances in technology," says Steve Unglesbee, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's p.r. unit. "Industrywide, our safety record is improving. But NRC creates so many layers of regulation that every plant is virtually assured of being in noncompliance with something...
...report didn't contain the safety analysis for what we were doing," says Galatis. "No heat-load calculations." It was then he realized the plant had been routinely operating "beyond design basis," putting 23 million BTUs into a pool analyzed for 8 million, which is, he says, "a bit like running your car at 5,000 r.p.m...
Then, in late 1992, David Lochbaum and Don Prevatte, consultants working at Pennsylvania Power & Light's Susquehanna plant, began to analyze deficiencies in spent-fuel cooling systems. They realized that a problem had been sneaking up on the industry: half a dozen serious accidents at different plants had caused some water to drain from the pools. In the worst of them, at Northeast's Haddam Neck plant in 1984, a seal failure caused 200,000 gal. to drain in just 20 min. from a water channel next to the fuel pool. If the gate between the channel and the pool...
...accident is infinitesimal. But the agency's risk-assessment methods have been called overly optimistic by activists, engineers and at least one NRC commissioner. The agency's analysis for a fuel-pool drainage accident assumes that at most one-third of a core is in the pool, even though plants across the country routinely move full cores into pools crowded with older cores. If the NRC based its calculations on that scenario, says Lochbaum, "it would exceed the radiation-dose limits set by Congress and scare people to death. But the NRC won't do it." The NRC's Taylor...
...that experience told him there was no problem. The pool hadn't boiled, so it wouldn't boil. If a problem ever developed, there would be plenty of time to correct it before it reached the crisis stage. "We live and work here. Why would we want an unsafe plant? We had internal debate on this topic," DeBarba told TIME. "Legitimate professional differences of opinion." In 1977, he says, the NRC stated, "We could make the choice [of a full-core off-load] if it's 'necessary or desirable for operational considerations.' But that does not mean that what George...