More Trouble at Local Nuke Plant

It’s enough to make one wonder whether Homer Simpson is manning the controls at Shearon Harris.

A combination of equipment malfunctions led to yet another cooling system failure this week at Progress Energy’s nuclear power plant southwest of Raleigh. In the past two years, the facility has experienced problems at a rate far higher than the national average, reports environmental watchdog group N.C. WARN.

According to federal documents, Monday’s troubles followed maintenance performed on safety equipment. The reactor had been shut down for two days to begin a weeks-long refueling outage. When workers restored electrical power to the safety equipment, a malfunction caused an emergency diesel generator to start automatically, interrupting the flow of cooling water to the nuclear fuel.

Operators were able to manually start the pump four minutes later, restoring cooling to the reactor core. Sixty-two minutes later, a backup pump was also started.

“Operators once again were able to manually correct technical problems at Harris,” says NC WARN Director Jim Warren. “But it’s that combination of system failures – occurring in sequence – that reduces safety margins.”

Since 2002, equipment failures in the plant’s cooling systems as well as human errors have caused Harris to experience more problems than most reactors. The latest data from 2003 showed Shearon Harris’ sudden reactor shutdowns, or SCRAMs, were running 10 times over the industry average since 2002, and at least one additional SCRAM occurred at the plant earlier this year.

Shearon Harris is also a violator of fire safety regulations for nuclear power plants, illegally relying on complex manual procedures designed to prevent a meltdown in case of fire instead of installing fire barriers and other physical safeguards as required by law. For an excellent in-depth look at nuclear plant fire safety that explores the situation at Shearon Harris, read this story from the August issue of The Progressive.