Today, an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted a motion filed earlier by AmerGen, the operator of the Oyster Creek nuclear power station, to render moot a contention filed by a coalition of environmental, consumer and public safety groups challenging the adequacy of the utility’s application for a 20-year license extension of the atomic power plant. The licensing board decision came in response to the power company’s revised commitment to inspect the corroded structure’s most damaged area during the next refueling outage and then once every 10 years for continued signs of a thinning containment wall. The licensing board at the same time refrained from dismissing the petition for 20 days from issuance of the order to allow the citizen petitioners the opportunity to file a new contention in the proceeding.
“We most certainly will move forward with our challenge,” said Richard Webster with Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic, who is representing the coalition of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Jersey Shore Nuclear Watch, New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, New Jersey Sierra Club, Grandmothers, Mothers and More for Energy Safety and the New Jersey Environmental Federation. “We share the concerns of NRC’s technical staff that AmerGen’s plan for managing the severely corroded structure is inadequate to insure public safety margins.”
“AmerGen’s revised commitment to measure the thickness of the reactor containment’s most damaged area just two more times is totally irresponsible,” said Paul Gunter, Director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) based in Takoma Park, Maryland. “The NRC order provides no technical or safety justification for accepting AmerGen’s arbitrarily long inspection interval given the evidence of systemic errors discovered in the company’s inspection methodology,” concluded Gunter.
Both Webster and Gunter were referring to the discovery by the petitioners and the NRC’s technical staff of decade old discrepancies in AmerGen’s sound wave measurement or ultrasonic testing results taken in 1992, 1994 and 1996 where a trend in the thinning of the steel containment wall thickness measurements abruptly indicated in 1996 the physically impossible; that the severely corroded and thinned steel containment wall had grown thicker (50 mils) in 1996, far beyond expected margins of error. In a NRC meeting at headquarters in Rockville, Maryland with AmerGen on June 1, 2006, the technical staff issued a request for additional information to AmerGen to explain the “anomaly” of spontaneous thickening of the steel wall in the severely corroded sand bed region of the steel dry well liner which is a vital part of the primary containment structure for Oyster Creek.
“We look forward to having a debate on the substance of this public safety matter rather than on purely procedural technicalities,” concluded Webster.
AmerGen filed its motion to dismiss on April 25, 2006 asserting that the petitioner’s contention as submitted in November 2005 and admitted by the licensing board on February 27, 2006 was moot based on the company’s December 2005 docketed commitment to inspect the corroded containment at the most damaged region once every 10 years amounting to one additional inspection during the 20-year license extension period and later supplemented with a single UT inspection at its next scheduled refueling outage in October 2006. The upper region of the component is inspected every 4 years.