The company in charge of decommissioning a New Jersey nuclear power plant violated federal safety regulations after an accident involving a spent fuel storage canister caused a site worker to be doused with contaminated water, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.
During a February safety test at Oyster Creek Generating Station in Forked River, N.J. a faulty snap-ring caused a valve system to blow off one of the 33 canisters containing the plant’s spent nuclear fuel, according to an NRC inspection report dated May 18. The result was an “unexpected leakage of contaminated water” that exposed a nearby worker to a small dosage of radiation.
Holtec documented the incident but didn’t immediately identify the faulty snap-ring as an issue to NRC. The failure to “identify and correct a condition adverse to quality” violated the agency’s regulations concerning nuclear materials management, the report said. The company has since added the defect to a corrective action program.
Since “the safety significance of the issue was determined to be very low, and because the violation was not willful or repetitive,” the commission is treating the incident as a low-level violation under its enforcement policy.
Holtec finished moving all of Oyster Creek’s spent fuel inventory to an onsite storage pad last week. The plant’s decommissioning is “on track for becoming the most expedited decommissioning program in the nation’s history,” the company said in a press release May 21.
Oyster Creek, which shut down in September 2018, is now completely defueled — a turnaround time that Holtec said last Friday is “a new world record.”
All this after a judge in February ratified Holtec’s settlement agreement with the plant’s host community of Lacey Township, N.J. As part of the settlement, Holtec agreed to provide daily updates to the township and include it in its safety evaluation correspondence with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company also pledged to maintain a $10 million overflow storage cask at its headquarters.
The Lacey Township administrator’s office didn’t return a request for comment by deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor on whether it had been made aware of either the February incident or the May 18 commission report.
Holtec has said that it expects the decommissioning of Oyster Creek to wrap up by 2025.
