Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1)
Following the NRC notification, all transfers of waste canisters were stopped until the situation at San Onofre could be investigated and step taken to prevent any repeat. SCE decided that the problem occurred because of inadequate training, oversight and supervision. Since August 3rd, SCE has put many new checks and balances in place to prevent repeats of the event under investigation.
Cameras will be aimed at the canisters and transfers will be monitored in real time. Alarms have been installed to trigger if there is a sudden major change in the weight begin held by the canister-lowering machinery. Two people were monitoring the transfers before the incident but that will be increased to eight. Two of those observers will be above the operation in lift baskets to get a different perspective.
SCE workers at all levels have received much more rigorous training in the process of loading canisters into the Holtec Hi-Storm UMAX system and supervising the process. The design of the canisters has been changed since the workers were trained. The new canisters are bigger than the canisters that the workers originally trained on, so they are a tighter fit in the vault and harder to get into place.
There have been personnel changes throughout the whole chain of command from the top to the low levels workers. There are sixteen more managers for oversight and six are dedicated exclusively to monitoring Holtec activities. SCE says that their management will be much more “intrusively engaged” in keeping the contractors under observation.
During the investigation, it was found that the steel canisters being loaded into the Holtec system were likely scratched as they were lowered into the vault because of the change of design and the tighter fit. SCE and Holtec say that the scratches pose no problem in the “short term.” This is troubling because it implies that there may be problems in the long term and these canisters are supposed to safely store spent nuclear fuel for decades.
The NRC is concerned about the possible long term impact that those scratches may have. They were also critical of SCE management in their apparent failure to plan adequately given the complexity and risks of such canister loading. Some activists monitoring the canister loading are worried that scratches could lead to cracks which could compromise the integrity of the canisters in the long term and post a safety threat.
Donna Gilmore is a retired systems analyst who is the director of SanOnofreSafety.org. She said, “The question is, ‘How bad are the gouges?’ And since there is no method to find or repair the gouges, this is an unacceptable situation. This system must be recalled. It’s clearly a lemon.”
An inspection-and-maintenance program for loading the canisters is being developed and it is scheduled for completion in 2020. Mini-robots with cameras that can crawl down into the vaults and examine the canister closely may be used. The loading of the canisters should never have been done without such a plan already available.
So here we have a company decommissioning a nuclear power plant displaying incompetence, failing to follow nuclear regulations, failure to inform the NRC of regulation violations, inadequate training, and other bad behavior. This is a perfect illustration of why I say that current corporate culture is simply not up to the task of safely and competently constructing and operating nuclear power plants.