U.S. regulators on Monday took the Tennessee Valley Authority's Browns Ferry power station off a watch list after forty-one months and scheduled a conference to review flood protection safety at Arkansas Nuclear One.
The Huntsville, Ala., plant with revenues of $1 billion per year – a tenth of TVA's total revenue – was put on red warning status in May 2011 after a series of safety concerns, the most serious being problems with Unit 1's emergency cooling lines.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission returned all three of Browns Ferry's units to a normal inspection level Monday. NRC also noted the facility now has three resident inspectors to keep up rigorous oversight of plant operations.
The agency said the final problem addressed by the TVA after an expanded inspection grew to include the entire operation was control room staffing during emergencies.
Also on Monday, the NRC scheduled a regulatory conference for Oct. 28 with officials from Entergy Operations, Inc., to review apparent problems at Arkansas Nuclear One, related to flood protection.
The NRC has the two-unit plant in Russellville, Ark., on yellow safety status, determining the plant has “substantial safety” issues that came to light during an accident on March 31, 2013.
Workers on that day were removing a 525-ton component out of the plant's turbine building, when the lifting rig collapsed. The accident damaged a fire main in the plant's Unit 1 turbine building, which caused fire pumps to activate. This revealed degraded floor seals that allowed two inches of water to accumulate in a lower Unit 1 auxiliary building.
The flooding in turn put a backup generator fuel storage area in jeopardy, which could be a serious problem if fuel for the backup generators were needed.
The conference is scheduled for 9 a.m. at the NRC Region IV office in Arlington, Texas. The public is invited and there will be a question and answer period, the agency said.
Anonymous comments will be moderated. Join for free and post now!
