Nuclear energy has to be part of the US energy mix
Autor: Alberto Ricardo Präss | Publicado: 2011-06-14T09:54:00-07:00


Interview with Mr. Doug Walters, Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI).

Obviously, in the minds of many people, when we talk about nuclear plant safety is what happened in Fukushima in Japan, regarding the earthquake that struck there and the damage that was done. How do our plants in this country differ from the Fukushima situation?

First of all, as to the events in Fukushima, – it was an earthquake followed by a tsunami, – they experienced very powerful natural phenomena that perhaps exceeded what was expected. We’ve taken a look at those events – we don’t think the earthquake was much of the problem, though we are still waiting for the lessons learnt to come out on that. And certainly the tsunami they experienced was fairly significant. We’ve looked at those events, we’ve looked at what was designed and then we looked at what we’ve got in place. That might help us, should we have an event or events like they had. For example, clearly the issue was the fact that they lost all offsite power and then subsequently lost their diesel-provided power. We’ve looked at what we have in place here. We will see if we need to make some improvements in terms of how long we can cope in terms of safety standpoint, should we lose all power. We’ve already carried out an analysis that showed we can cope for minimum of four hours, should we lose all power. So, these are still early stages but we’re certainly looking at the things that happened there and what capabilities we might have in place for dealing with some types of them.

But in America, when they designed power plants, they designed them with the knowledge that there’s a possibility that an earthquake may occur and they were built to withstand it, right?

That’s correct. And then you had some margin, in terms of additional things you might do. So, all that is going to be looked at. We and the NRC have looked at some of the things we’ve done post 9/11. Following those catastrophic events, we did analyses of aircraft impacts on our plants, and then the subsequent fire that might evolve from that. And we’ve put in place procedures to assist in mitigating something that might occur at that kind of magnitude. Recently we’ve had evaluated our implementation of those measures and we did well. We have some things that we need to focus on in terms of procedures. But in terms of the capability the things we did post 9/11 we think would certainly be beneficial in dealing with the type of event they had in Japan.

As we both know, President Obama issued an order to inspect all nuclear facilities after the Fukushima disaster. How did we fare in that review?

We fared well. The part of that review that was mentioned was what the NRC did. We’ve also had done our own review through our Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. They issued some requirements, as we call them, to look at how they are implementing certain things like station blackout, which presumes that you’ve lost all offsite power and all on site power, and making sure that the procedures, which we have to deal with in that situation, are adequate and that they are being trained on, and that they are ready to go in the event if we would experience something like Japan. The NRC is continuing to do their review of the situation. Obviously, the lessons learnt, coming out of Fukushima, are going to take some time to assemble. We’ll see if those lessons learnt would be responded to appropriately.

Given the fact that it takes so long to build a plant and technologies moving so rapidly, do you foresee that types of nuclear plants to be built in the future and being built now will be much more secure against earth quakes and natural disasters and much better built than they were 10-15 years ago?

There’s no question that the new designs are safer than, or have more safety components built into their design than the existing ones. The technology is already there. We’ll take the lessons learnt from Fukushima and for the designs that are currently under certification to the extent that we’ll incorporate additional measures to make them even safer – we will do that for a normal process for certification of designs that are yet to be submitted for certification. I’m sure those standards will be looked at with those lessons learnt and they’ll see what they can do in the design process to incorporate those technologies that would make them even more safe. So yes, I think that’s the direction we’re going in.

What are the most common mistakes that your institute and the NRC find in the maintenance an operation of nuclear plants? Maybe operator errors or operator not following their logs properly?

&nbsp;I think any time that the NRC does the inspection there are things that they find that were not arranged in terms of the issues. In some cases we find that it was indeed an operator error. In other cases it maybe a weakness or an improvement needed in a maintenance procedure. Those things happen, and I can’t say there are specific things that continuingly come up. We evaluate those IMA trends – that’s one of the strength of our industry, which is that we continuingly feed back into what we call our operating experience programme. We try to avoid the things we’ve done in the past, and with the operating experience programme we’re able to do that. We know that there was a problem with some procedure around maintenance done on a particular valve – we feed that back and other sites will look at that, evaluate their own procedures and make adjustments if they think it’s appropriate. Really, one of the strengths of our industry is getting that feedback and feeding it into the operating experience programme.

Briefly, how do you see our nuclear power in our future, given the fact of climate change, greenhouse gases? How much of a bigger role do you see for a nuclear power plant?

It clearly plays a role and it has to be part of the energy mix of the country. I think that these large energy generating facilities that are being built now are going to provide very affordable clean energy for the customers. I think we are going to see that trend continue now. The overall economic condition of the country has contributed I believe to perhaps some of the companies who have expressed interest in their nuclear slowing down. But we have around 18 applications under review. Again, they may not be proceeding at the same rate envisioned when they were submitted. Nonetheless, they are being reviewed, companies are being working on them towards getting the license. We have designed certifications in for review. All that says that nuclear energy has got to be part of the energy mix, because it provides affordable non-emitting energy.
Source:&nbsp; The Voice the Russia