Nuclear safety officials have concluded that a fluke mishap last year at Progress Energy's Brunswick nuclear plant near Wilmington was caused by the lack of worker qualification for more than a decade.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its preliminary findings yesterday, but the federal safety agency is continuing its investigation to determine the safety significance of the incident.

The unusual mishap that shut down the Brunswick Unit 2 reactor last November may be the only such incident in U.S. nuclear history.
 

Nuclear safety officials dinged Raleigh-based Progress Energy for a minor safety violation at its Brunswick nuclear plant near Wilmington.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this morning that the plant's emergency diesel generators were not properly protected from possible flooding during a hurricane. The generators are needed as a backup source of electric power to operate pumps and other emergency equipment required to keep nuclear fuel from melting down and releasing radioactivity.

The generators were not properly protected because the Brunswick plant had not sealed off the fuel-oil tank room that stores the diesel to run the generators.

The agency said the oversight was of "low to moderate safety significance." It did not merit a fine, but the NRC will increase its oversight of the nuclear plant with an extra inspection.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said today it will conduct a special investigation at Progress Energy's Brunswick nuclear plant near Wilmington after a highly unusual mishap caused boiling water to flow out of a reactor chamber that was not properly sealed.

The federal inspectors will spend much of next week at the twin reactor Brunswick plant to understand what went wrong in the incident regarded as so unusual it may be unprecedented in U.S. nuclear history.

The incident, at Brunswick's Unit 2 reactor, posed no risk to the safety of employees or the public, and the moderately radioactive water that spilled out collected in a drain for normal processing. Raleigh-based Progress is also investigating the mishap, and Brunswick's Unit 1 has been generating electricity without interruption.

The NRC will issue a report within 45 days of the special inspection, which could include fines and other enforcement actions. A special inspection involves NRC specialists pulled from headquarters, regional offices or other nuclear plants to work with NRC's on-site inspectors at the plant to determine how the malfunction happened.

Brunswick's Unit 2 reactor has been shut off since the overflow was discovered early morning Wednesday. At one point, moderately radioactive water, coming directly from the reactor core, was pouring out of the reactor vessel at 10.1 gallons per minute, which is about 100 times more volume than would flow out under normal circumstances.

The state is coordinating with the American Red Cross, Salvation Army,
N.C. Baptist Men and N.C. Social Services to shelter and feed evacuees. Mass Care Support trailers and mobile animal trailers are on standby in Halifax and Northampton counties to support those shelters.

Federal nuclear regulators began a special inspection at Progress Energy's Brunswick nuclear plant in Southport yesterday after an accidental release of a fire suppressant at the plant.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said today investigators are trying to determine why Brunswick delayed its emergency response after issuing an alert that halon gas had discharged into the basement of the emergency generator building.

NRC rules require nuclear plants to coordinate a response within 75 minutes, but it took Brunswick personnel about twice that long to organize.

Nuclear regulators have begun a review of fire safety conditions at Progress Energy's Brunswick nuclear plant.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the safety of the nation's 104 reactors, notified Raleigh-based Progress and the other utility companies this month that their nuclear plants have multiple risk factors.

The April 21 letter opens an NRC review of the power plants to determine the actual level of risk at each facility. The letter identifies "eight risk factors that can lead to elevated on-going risk if not appropriately mitigated."

The next step in the review will be public hearings with the utility companies that operate the nuclear plants. The companies will ultimately be required to fix the problems.

The two sites sites with the greatest number of risks are Brunswick and Florida Power & Light's Turkey Point. Both are cited for seven out of total eight risks identified by the NRC.

The risks include such factors as emergency procedures that require a large number of operator actions and complex operator actions where "there is not high confidence that operators would be able to implement them in fire conditions."

Progress Energy spokesman Mike Hughes said the company is aware of the problems and has put measures in place to mitigate the risks.

"These typically involve manual fire watches and the like, and meet, or exceed the standard requirements," Hughes said.

The NRC said that none of the nuclear sites have as many risks as Browns Ferry did when it caught fire in 1975, exposing glaring design flaws in the nation's nuclear plants.

Browns Ferry has become legendary in the nuclear community for the fire that a quarter-century ago shut down the plant for more than a year. The fire began in a Keystone Cops fashion when a plant employee checked for air leaks with a candle, setting fire to electrical cable insulation.

That fire triggered sweeping reforms that are still rippling through the industry.

One of the reforms required nuclear plants to wrap electrical conduits in fire-retardant cable. However, the industry invested millions of dollars in insulation that failed to withstand high heat in laboratory tests.

Progress is still dealing with the fallout from the defective cable at its Shearon Harris nuclear plant in southwestern Wake County.

Shearon Harris requires round-the-clock fire patrols and other steps to compensate for the safety deficiencies at the plant.

Progress is in the process of adapting the Shearon Harris plant to a new set of safety regulations adopted by the NRC. The company plans to complete the transition this year and submit the changeover to the NRC for review.

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It took just seven particles of metal -- each the size of a speck of ground pepper -- to shut down Progress Energy's Brunswick nuclear power plant near Wilmington.

In a special inspection report describing the incident, federal nuclear regulators said Tuesday the malfunction that shut down the Brunswick plant near had a very low safety significance.

Progress Energy, the Raleigh-based power company that operates the nuclear plant, shut it down for a week and a half in September after one of the emergency backup diesel generators wouldn't start during a test.

Federal regulators have launched a special inspection of a malfunction that forced a shutdown last week of two nuclear reactors at Progress Energy's Brunswick power plant near Wilmington.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates that three inspectors will spend at least a week at the Brunswick site assessing the causes that disabled a backup emergency diesel generator. The inspection team will also review safety procedures at the plant.

NRC safety rules require that each nuclear reactor be backed up by two emergency diesel generators as sources of power to run emergency equipment in the event of a blackout. The agency's rules permit a nuclear power plant with two reactors to operate with three diesel generators for as long as a week, but Raleigh-based Progress was forced to shut down both Brunswick generators Sept. 20 after one of its generators was inoperable for an entire week.

A special inspection is the lowest level of safety inspection; it's conducted for an unusual event and typically requires specialized expertise beyond the knowledge of on-site NRC inspectors at the plant. The NRC began the special inspection Friday and will issue a report within 45 days of completing the inspection.

Progress Energy was forced to shut down its two reactors the Brunswick Nuclear plant near Wilmington on Sunday after an emergency backup generator failed to start.
Federal nuclear regulators require that each nuclear power plant have two diesel generators for each nuclear reactor at the site. The generators are used to create electricity to run emergency equipment in the event if the plant lacks power.
A nuclear plant with two reactors is allowed to operate with just three generators for up to one week.
The Raleigh-based power company was repairing one of the generators at the Brunswick plant and had hoped to have it fixed by Sunday, when the week-long grace period ran out. But the generator failed to start, forcing a shutdown.