NRC and public spar over Oyster Creek
BY PATRICIA A. MILLER
Staff Writer

Although the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station operated safely in 2006, there are still issues that need to be dealt with, federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said recently.

"Our first and foremost responsibility is safety," said Ronald Bellamy, the NRC's Chief of Division Reactor Projects, Branch 6.

"Tonight's meeting is one example of that. Our attempts to be open continue."

The meeting was held to discuss Oyster Creek's annual performance assessment. Top officials from AmerGen, a subsidiary of Exelon Corp., the plant's owner, were also present.

"Overall, Oyster Creek operated safely," said Mark Ferdas, an NRC senior resident inspector. "There will be some additional inspections and some additional NRC oversight."

Timothy Rausch, AmerGen's site vice president for Oyster Creek, said the company agreed with the NRC's assessment of the plant.

"Plant safety is our overall goal," he said. "We take that very, very seriously."

PHOTOSBY PATRICIA A. MILLER Top, representatives of AmerGen, the company that owns and operates the Oyster Creek nuclear plant in Lacey Township, prepare for the plant's annual assessment by the NRC at a meeting in Toms River last week. Bottom, Richard Webster, a Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic lawyer who represents a coalitions of groups that oppose the relicensing of the Oyster Creek nuclear plant, addressed Nuclear Regulatory Commission members at a hearing recently.

But Rausch said he was disappointed that the plant had not yet been able to meet the NRC's requirements to close a "white finding" related to an August 2005 event at the plant.

"We take ownership for these issues," he said. "We've made marked progress. We take all the findings discussed here tonight very seriously."

The white finding in question stems from an Aug. 6, 2005, event when a large amount of sea grass clogged the north side intake structure screens, which resulted in a decrease in the intake structure water level. The intake water level decreased for roughly 60 minutes, which met the values for an unusual event and alert declarations.

But plant operators did not declare an event and did not activate their emergency response procedures, the NRC has said.

Licensed plant operators failed to use the nuclear plant's emergency plan matrix to determine if the conditions warranted the declaration of an unusual event and a subsequent alert, according to the NRC.

The NRC has left the finding open during the relicensing process. AmerGen wants to operate the 38-year-old plant for another 20 years.

Oyster Creek is scheduled for a re-inspection on the white finding issues on June 4.

Oyster Creek is doing more community outreach, holding classes for more licensed and unlicensed plant operators, and upgrading the plant's infrastructure, Rausch said.

"We are committed to operating the plant in a safe and reliable manner and being a good neighbor in our community," he said. "We are investing in our people, our plant and our processes."

When NRC and company officials had finished speaking, it was the public's turn.

"We are not going to attempt to answer every question," Collins said. "We are incapable of that. We do understand that nuclear power and nuclear plants can be an emotional issue. We ask for civil discourse. If we can keep it at that level, I think we will be successful."

Only one audience member spoke favorably about Oyster Creek's relicensing.

That was Edward Stroup, president of Local No. 1289.

"No one cares about safety more than my members," he said. "They are highly skilled professionals who take their jobs very seriously. Never in America's history have we needed nuclear power more than we do now."

He attacked those who use "hype and hysteria to smear the reputations of highly skilled professionals."

Resident Marilyn Fontenetta questioned the plant's vulnerability to terrorist attack.

"The population of Ocean County has grown tremendously," she said. "The infrastructure of the roads has not kept pace. The plant appears to be very vulnerable to terrorist attacks, by land from Route 9, by sea and by air."

Collins and Richard Webster, a lawyer with the Rutgers Environmental Law Center who represents a coalition of citizen and environmental groups that oppose the plant's relicensing, sparred a number of times over the thickness of the metal in the plant's dry well.

Webster said the first portion of the meeting appeared to be skewed in Oyster Creek's favor.

"It's very hard to judge if the answers are responsible, if there is no one here to give a counterpoint," he told Collins.

"This is not supposed to be a debate," Collins replied.

Webster tried to pin Collins down about the thickness of the plant's dry well and how much of the metal has deteriorated since the plant opened in 1969.

The dry well is a spherical vessel designed to catch radioactive steam in the event of an accident, after water is sprayed on the reactor core.

The "magic number" for a safe dry-well wall thickness appears to be .736 inches, according to AmerGen's own assessment, Webster said.

He wrote to the NRC during a November 2006 plant outage to ask how much of the dry-well wall may be less than .736 inches, and received no answer, Webster said.

He was still waiting for the answer, Webster said at the meeting.

"That information is not readily available to us," Collins said. "It's not part of the original study. That's the answer."

"How can you assess the safety of the plant if you don't know the answer?" Webster said.

Webster said after the meeting that too much time at the meeting was spent "really not telling people very much.

"It was a strange brand of corporate speak that I don't think meant much to the people in the room," he said.

The dry-well shell is just about half as thick as it was when it was built, Webster said.

If there are areas in the dry-well shell that are less than .736 inches thick, the dry-well shell could collapse under certain scenarios, he said.

"How big are the areas they've measured?" Webster said. "I've been asking and asking and they haven't given me an answer in six months. As far as I can tell, the NRC doesn't know how big these areas are. If they knew, they would have told me by now."