Note to reporters: On March 18, 2006 the Detroit Free Press ran a front page article entitled “Nuclear safety left hanging as crane dangled fuel rods: Michigan incident got warning but no fine,” by Hugh McDiarmid Jr., Free Press Staff Writer. The article revealed a previously unreported October 2005 incident at the Palisades nuclear power plant on the Lake Michigan shoreline in southwest Michigan. According to a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspection report, a container weighing 110 tons, fully loaded with high-level radioactive waste, dangled for 55 hours from a stuck crane above the reactor’s irradiated fuel storage pool. Plant personnel, lacking proper knowledge about the crane, and without permission from plant management, inappropriately manipulated the crane’s brake system, increasing the risk of the heavy load crashing, out of control, back down into the pool. The falling container could have severely damaged the pool, draining the cooling water. A radioactive waste fire could have followed, resulting in tens of thousands of cancer deaths from radiation exposure to a distance of 500 miles downwind, according to a separate NRC report. Our spokes people are available for further commentsee contact information above.
Covert, Michigan — Living up to the name of its hometown, Consumers Energy’s Palisades nuclear power plant has managed to keep the public in the dark until now about an incident over five months ago that could have led to a massive radiation release. According to NRC document NUREG-1738, tens of thousands of people, out to a distance of 500 miles downwind, could have died as a consequence of such a disaster. An NRC quarterly inspection report dated February 2, 2006 (posted March 6, 2006) states at page 9 the following:
“The [NRC] inspectors concluded that working outside the bounds of a work package on a crane with a suspended load that if dropped would damage the spent fuel pool warranted a safety significance determination…Had the load dropped, the spent fuel pool could have sustained severe damage. The inspectors were also aware that the individuals involved in the work activity were not fully knowledgeable of the crane’s design, operation, and failure modes at the time the work occurred.” In order to compensate for the gap in knowledge, the licensee [the owner, Consumers Energy, and operator, Nuclear Management Company] obtained telephonic support from the crane vendor. Therefore, the inspectors concluded working outside the bounds of the approved work package and manipulating the brake release represented an increase in the risk of a load drop. This increase in risk is directly associated with the reactor safety cornerstone objective of the spent fuel cooling system as a radiological barrier.”(NRC Inspection Report 05000255/2005012 )
“The crashing cask, fully loaded with high-level radioactive waste and weighing 220,000 pounds, could have cracked the bottom of the pool and drained out the cooling water. In a matter of hours or less, decades worth of accumulated high-level radioactive wastes stored in the pool could have gotten so hot that it would have ignited into a radioactive hellfire.” said Gary Karch of Don’t Waste Michigan. (NRC report NUREG-1738 spells this out at pages 3-16.)
Given that Palisades is an operating reactor, the wastes in its storage pool are radioactively and thermally hot, increasing likelihood of zirconium fire. “…the possibility of a zirconium fire leading to a large fission product release cannot be ruled out even many years after final shutdown…” (NUREG-1738 Executive Summary page roman numeral x)
“These NRC reports reveal just how excruciatingly close we all came to a nuclear catastrophe last October” said Alice Hirt of Don’t Waste Michigan. “NRC admits that once the cask had cracked the pool and drained the cooling water, radiation doses near the pool would have killed any emergency responders who approached too near after just a few minutes exposure time. Firemen would have had to sacrifice their lives in any attempt to stop the quickly unfolding disaster. As the NRC has chillingly stated, such an accident must be prevented in the first place, because once it starts, it’s impossible to put the deadly radioactive genie back in the bottle.”
“Citizens of Western Michigan barely dodged a Chernobyl on the shore of Lake Michigan,” said Michael Keegan of Coalition for a Nuclear Free Great Lakes. “Not only could tens of thousands of people have died from radiation exposure and cancers, but much of Michigan’s tourism and agricultural industries could have been ruined forever.”
Despite this, the NRC quarterly inspection report stated “because the actions by the worker did not result in any load motion and both crane brakes remained set, NRC management determined the finding to be of very low safety significance.”
“NRC has let Palisades off with a slap on the wrist,” said Kevin Kamps of Nuclear Information Resource Service. “This parallels the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant near meltdown in 2002 near Toledo, in which the NRC’s own inspector general reported that both NRC and the nuclear utility put company profits over public safety. In that case, we almost lost Toledo. In this case, we almost lost west Michigan, and Lake Michigan as well.” (See http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/insp-gen/2003/02-03s.pdf)
Coincidently an NRC event report from October 12, 2005 reveals that “Portions of the Palisades Plant Process Computer (PPC) including the Emergency Response Data System (ERDS) became inoperable due to failure of a plant inverter…” (NRC Event Number: 42053) This occurred during the 55 hour fuel crane failure.
The Palisades nuclear power plant is located in Covert, Michigan, on the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Reference Documents Available on Request