The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday issued a notice of violation against the owner of the shuttered Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station for a onetime employee’s repeated failure to check radiation detection systems.
The NRC’s Office of Investigations found that a senior radiation protection technician, who is no longer working at the Entergy plant, from January to September 2016 intentionally failed to follow procedure for daily source checks of personnel contamination monitors (PCM) during the night shift. Documentation collected by NRC investigators indicated a specific technician had falsified records to indicate the checks had been conducted.
The NRC, though, noted that the industry standard is to conduct PCM source checks on a weekly basis, and the systems at Vermont Yankee were checked at least every four days by other personnel. There was also no sign the systems had not functioned due to the technician’s deliberate inattention.
Given the low safety threat, but also the intentionality of the infraction by the employee, the regulator designated the violation as Severity Level IV for having “minor safety significance.”
Entergy must now prepare a response to the notice for the NRC.
“We are reviewing the Notice of Violation and, as instructed by the NRC’s letter, will be providing a response to the NRC no later than July 26, 2017,” Joseph Lynch, Entergy senior government affairs manager, said Tuesday by email. The company said it would have no further comment on the matter.
Entergy closed Vermont Yankee in December 2014. It is now seeking regulatory approval to sell the plant to NorthStar Group Services for decommissioning.
NRC OKs Backup Site for Plant Wastewater
Separately, NRC staff last week approved the request from Entergy to use a facility in Idaho as a backup location for storage of wastewater from Vermont Yankee.
The regulator in April issued an environmental assessment that found there would be “no significant impact” in a plan to ship 200,000 gallons of low-activity radioactive wastewater by tanker trucks to a US Ecology treatment and disposal operation in southwestern Idaho. The NRC followed that with a safety evaluation, posted Wednesday on the agency’s website, that said staff had determined this material for disposal will not endanger life or property or the common defense and security and disposal is otherwise in the public interest.”
The 200,000 gallons covered by the NRC staff approval is a portion of roughly 885,000 gallons of process water that was used in operations at Vermont Yankee before its December 2014 closure. The water cannot be legally discharged in the state, and must be shipped off-site before decommissioning can begin for the nuclear plant.
Entergy still has no plans to send the wastewater to Idaho, Lynch said. The preferred end site remains an EnergySolutions disposal facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Meanwhile, the EnergySolutions site as of this month had received 536,000 gallons of groundwater that had intruded into the Vermont Yankee plant’s turbine building.
