The Salem Nuclear Power Plant is located on Artificial Island in the Delaware Bay of New Jersey. It contains two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors which together can generate two thousand two hundred and seventy five megawatts of electricity. Unit One began commercial operation in 1977 and was licensed for forty years of operation. Unit Two began commercial operation in 1981 and was licensed for forty years of operation. The plant is owned by PSEG Nuclear LLC and Exelon Generation LLC. In 2009, the reactors at the plant were granted extended licenses, Unit One to 2036 and Unit Two to 2040.
The population in the NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of ten miles around the plant contains about fifty thousand people. The NRC ingestion pathway zone with a radius of fifty miles around the plant contains about five million four hundred and eighty thousand people. The NRC estimates that there is a very low risk of an earthquake that could damage the plant.
In 1995, the operators shut down Unit One because the ventilation fans for the electrical switchgear rooms were not functioning. The NRC had been tracking performance decline at the plant for years at the Salem plant but had allowed operations to continue. A month after Unit One was shut down, Unit Two went into automatic shutdown. The NRC had identified forty three technical issues and twenty one programmatic issues. Among the problems were leaky generators, unreliable reactor controls and workers who were afraid of retaliation if they reported problems. The NRC told the Salem operators that they should not restart either reactor until the problems had been fixed. The steam generator tubes in Unit One showed extensive cracking so the Salem operators worked to restart Unit Two first while they repaired Unit One. The repairs to Unit Two took two years. Ultimately, the operators bought new steam generators for Unit One. It took three years to fix all the problems at Unit One.
The reactors at Salem are cooled by water drawn from Delaware Bay. Sometimes layers of grass clog the intake pipes and the reactors run at reduced power for weeks. The coastal flooding that came with Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused the operators of the plant to shut down Unit One because four of the six recirculation pumps were no longer available. Non-radioactive steam had to be vented into the atmosphere because the pumps were off.
Critics of the NRC have pointed out that the NRC knew of most of the problems for years before the plant was shut down for fixes in 1995. Once again we have design problems, equipment breakdowns that were not promptly fixed and management that appeared to be more interested in profits than safety. Fouling of intake pipes is either a matter of poor design or poor maintenance. Global climate change will result in more extreme events like Hurricane Sandy that will threaten reactors on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean.
