NEWS
RELEASE
August 19,
2003
Contact: Jim Warren
919-416-5077
Another Cooling
Failure at Shearon Harris Reactor
Eighth
emergency shutdown in four months dangerous and costly
DURHAM, NC – The Shearon Harris
nuclear plant continued building its reputation as one of the nation’s most
dangerous reactors Sunday evening when a pump failure in its cooling system
led to an emergency shutdown of the reactor. It was the plant’s eighth
system failure in the past four months, and the 12th since 2002.
The industry average is one emergency shutdown, or “trip,” each 18 months.
Initial reports by Progress Energy to
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicate a pump failed in the condensate
system, for unknown reasons, causing a second pump to fail. Plant operators
shut the reactor down in anticipation of an automatic shutdown. The
condensate system exhausts large amounts of excess heat from the steam
generators, which in turn must constantly remove heat from the reactor core.
“Harris is one of the most
problem-ridden reactors in the country, and having it’s cooling system
interconnected with the nation's largest spent fuel pools is not
comforting,”
said NC WARN’s Jim
Warren today.
The group is pressing
for Progress to lower the density of cooling pools at all the company’s
plants due to their enormous concentration of radioactivity and
vulnerability to accident or attack. “The Harris cooling
system wasn’t designed to link four pools and a reactor. If the reactor
were to melt down or explode, the pools are likely to burn as well,”
he said.
In addition to the safety concerns,
the shutdowns are costing Progress Energy dearly in lost electricity
generation, and could impact the nation’s tenuous grid situation in the wake
of last week’s massive blackout in the Northeast. The NRC indicated that
Harris was in the process of restarting the reactor last night, the same
circumstance as last May when the reactor repeatedly tripped while being
powered back up.
The danger comes when an initiating
event such as a reactor trip is followed by either an operator error or
another compounding factor. Such a combination of factors is what led to
the meltdown at Three Mile Island (TMI), and the disastrous explosion of the
Chernobyl reactor in 1986. At TMI, 12 cooling system failures in one year
preceded the April 1979 meltdown.
Some of this year’s failures occurred
while Harris was down for refueling in April – a time when there's less
margin for safety – although the NRC classifies those failures differently
from full-power trips. One of the earlier failures was particularly
serious.
Although Harris’s back-up systems
again worked properly on Sunday, the continuing failures could be cause for
a deeper level of concern. David Lochbaum, nuclear safety
engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said today, “The more
times you rely on the airbag to protect you, the more likely your luck will
run out.”
