By John Stang
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to adequately review questionable safety findings from one of its scientists regarding an underground gas line that passes through the property of the Indian Point Energy Center nuclear power plant in upstate New York, according to the agency’s inspector general.
A New York senator voiced anger at the situation Wednesday during an oversight hearing on the NRC. “The NRC now has a real credibility problem around Indian Point,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) told the commissioners.
In its report dated Feb. 13, the Inspector General’s Office (IG) said Indian Point owner Entergy and the NRC provided incorrect information to another federal agency and the public on the agency’s assessment of Entergy’s site hazards analysis and NRC’s independent analysis of the impact of a potential rupture of the portion of a new pipeline beneath Indian Point.
The report zeroes in on a specific but unidentified NRC “physical scientist,” who used several improper variables and assumptions for safety calculations on a potential explosion of the pipeline and the results of such an accident. It quotes an unnamed NRC branch chief as saying: “It appeared, from looking at the Physical Scientist’s scenarios, that the Physical Scientist was backward engineering for a desired result.”
The Indian Point complex, in the village of Buchanan 24 miles north of New York City, encompasses three reactors. Reactor Unit 1 has been closed since 1974. Entergy plans to retired Unit 2 by April 30, 2020, and Unit 3 a year afterward. Last April, the New Orleans-based power company said it would sell the complex to Holtec International, which would assume responsibility for decommissioning all three reactors. However, the NRC must first approve the transfer of the plant’s reactor and spent fuel storage licenses.
Beneath Indian Point is a natural gas pipeline that is part of the Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) Project. AIM is owned by Spectra Energy Partners Algonquin Gas Transmission LLC. which serves parts of the northeast United States. The 42-inch pipeline was intended to augment two lower-pressure pipelines already built to run through the property.
Entergy conducted a safety study on adding the pipeline, and the NRC reviewed Entergy’s work. The regulator concluded the new pipeline posed no extrasafety hazards and forwarded those conclusions to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which provided the information to the public in 2014 and ultimately authorized the project.
In 2015, private citizen Paul Blanch, a longtime nuclear industry expert and critic, voiced concerns to the NRC about the safety math and conclusions from Entergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The agency replied that its conclusions were on target. By January 2017, the new gas pipeline was in use.
Last year, an unnamed stakeholder — the Feb. 13 report did not indicate whether it was Blanch — approached the inspector general with the same concerns about the calculations and conclusions. The IG ’s office looked into the matter.
Its new report says the NRC did not use conservative enough values in its safety calculations, falsely implied additional analyses were done, did not document or provide reasons for deviating from standard engineering values in tackling the calculations, and did not take into account the piping was buried. A buried pipeline would include debris being flung as flung as “missiles” — a scenario missing in a strictly above-ground explosion, according to the report. Also, the agency did not have a sufficient review process nor a quality assurance program in place to double-check the physical scientist’s calculations and conclusions.
The NRC also used a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration computer program for some of its work, which was not designed for certain specific pipeline safety tasks. In addition, if the pipeline ruptures under Indian Point, the NRC said the valves to that segment of could be turned off in three minutes, when in reality pipeline company Enbridge Inc. — which merged with AIM’s overall owner, Spectra Energy in 2017 — told the agency it would take six minutes, the IG report said.
All four serving NRC commissioners appeared Wednesday before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
“After this flawed safety analysis. …. many people have lost faith in the NRC,” Commissioner Jeff Baran said after Gillibrand raised the issue.
Commission Chairman Kristine Svinicki added: “The things identified by the inspector general are real. They are important.” She said the situation will be investigated internally — along with the pipeline hazards needing to be reanalyzed — with preliminary results ready in 20 days and final results ready in no later than 45 days. Those results will be made public.
Entergy hopes to sell all three reactors to Holtec by the third quarter of 2021, pending NRC approval of the transfer of Indian Point’s operations and spent-fuel storage licenses. Holtec says it can complete decommissioning within 15 years for $2.3 billon. The site’s decommissioning trust fund is expected to hold $1.9 billion at the beginning of 2021.
In early February, the New York state Attorney General’s Office and three other parties filed petitions with the NRC for hearings on the proposed license transfer and sale of the Indian Point Energy Center. The other petitioners are: jointly the town of Cortlandt, village of Buchanan, and Hendrick Hudson School District; the Safe Energy Rights Group, a Peekskill-based organization that opposes what it believes are harmful energy infrastructures; and Riverkeeper, an Ossining-based organization focused on environmental issues for the Hudson River.
While there are some differences in the petitions, they cover the same topics in broad strokes: concerns about whether prospective plant owner Holtec International would be able to fully fund decommissioning and whether the project’s corporate family tree shields Holtec from responsibility if the cleanup money falls short. With approval from the NRC, the organizations would be able to raise the issues at a hearing for consideration in licensing.
On Wednesday, Gillibrand asked Svinicki whether the NRC will approve those hearing requests. Svinicki replied the NRC is still reviewing whether such hearing requests meet the legal criteria to approve them.
