The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has no immediate safety concerns at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, following yet another operational malfunction, but the regulator is assessing the situation with continued heightened scrutiny at the troubled plant, an agency official said Wednesday.
The latest issue for the beleaguered 45-year-old Massachusetts facility occurred on Friday, when operators failed to follow proper procedure and allowed water to inadvertently flow into Pilgrim’s torus. The torus is an enormous doughnut-shaped water reservoir located at the base of the reactor building; it holds more than 1 million gallons of water and is used to condense steam and filter out radioactivity in the event of an accident.
The NRC said the event occurred after workers with plant owner Entergy finished flushing the core spray line, using water from the condensate storage tank, which holds hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. When they were done flushing, the operators failed to properly line up the valves, according to NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan. He said the issue was discovered quickly through a control room alarm, and Entergy corrected the issue. NRC resident inspectors were quickly deployed to the site to verify that water was no longer flowing into the torus. Sheehan said the regulator is still assessing how the flooding could have impacted the torus’ depressurization and cool-down functions. Excess water levels could disrupt those functions, Sheehan said.
“There’s no immediate safety concern, but there is the question about adherence to procedures, particularly against the backdrop of – the plant is under heightened oversight, and they’ve had a number of these performance issues, procedural compliance issues in recent months,” Sheehan said.
The Plymouth plant has experienced a number of operational failures, procedural failures, and unplanned shutdowns dating to 2013, and environmentalists and residents have called on the NRC to close the facility. Pilgrim is rated as one of the worst-performing nuclear plants in the country, after being downgraded in 2015 to Column 4 of the NRC’s Action Matrix, which is the lowest rating for an operating nuclear reactor.
