Industry Presents New Strategy to Increase Safety, Address NRC’s Post-Fukushima Recommendations

The industry will present a strategy to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today on how it plans to enhance safety at the nation’s 67 plant sites to better equip them for unexpected events. The strategy—known as the “diverse and flexible mitigation capability,” or FLEX—addresses many of the recommendations set forth by the NRC’s Fukushima task force and takes into account some of the early lessons from the Fukushima accident on the need to maintain key safety functions amid conditions where electricity may be lost, back-up equipment could be damaged, and several reactors may be involved.

NEI’s Adrian Heymer, executive director for Fukushima regulatory response, held a media briefing Wednesday to explain the FLEX approach:

FLEX is a set of portable equipment that is located in diverse locations around the plant. We think there needs to be more than one set of equipment at diverse locations that can be quickly deployed and connected to provide injection and power supplies for instrumentation. What you want to do is inject water so that you keep the reactor [and spent fuel pools] cool. At the same time you want to know what is going on in the reactor—so it’s instrumentation for monitoring, for which you need power supplies.

FLEX will include equipment such as additional pumps, generators, batteries and chargers that will be located in diverse locations—for instance, on the east and west sides of the plant site. The equipment will be commercial-grade, but with program controls—which are still being defined—so that the equipment will be tested with results being subject to NRC oversight.


The strategy is “flexible” in that it does not dictate that permanent equipment be installed, but rather that the plant sites prepare portable equipment that could be used for any catastrophic event. The New York Times’ Matthew Wald explains:

A clear problem at Fukushima, he [Heymer] said, was that the tsunami was bigger than what the plant was designed for. If the operators had taken an approach based on specific hazards, he said, “instead of having a meter high barrier, they might have had a 10-meter high barrier,” although the actual tsunami was 14 to 15 meters high. The institute’s approach would be to take some general precautions rather than depend on the commission’s regular approach of determining probability before deciding what steps are needed.

Thus, the FLEX approach allows the industry to more quickly address high-priority safety concerns ahead of NRC regulations, which Heymer said could take time to implement due to the administrative analyses and technical reviews that would be involved:

Eventually there would be, we think, a rulemaking that would go in parallel. But this is a way of installing and achieving additional mitigation contingency in a shorter period of time. So, you get the same benefit, but rather than going through the normal process we try to expedite it by just getting on and installing the equipment and having a rulemaking to go in parallel.

In a blog post yesterday, the NRC acknowledged the industry’s FLEX plan as a step in the right direction:

The NRC staff believes this approach is a reasonable starting point, although more work is needed on defining these strategies. We also must ensure the NRC can inspect how plants put the strategies in place and that we can hold plants accountable for keeping those strategies ready and available.

The bottom line is that we believe these combined developments may enhance the agency’s approach to implementing the recommendations.

The FLEX approach is just one part of a larger industry response to the events at Fukushima. Heymer said that the FLEX strategy would allow for at least three days of keeping the nuclear fuel cool, and that regional response centers are also being pursued as yet another line of defense against a catastrophic event. As the various levels of safety enhancements are added, the industry plans to train and test its plant workers regularly so that they are well-equipped for emergency situations.

The FLEX concept is based on how the industry responded to the events of 9/11, in which additional security precautions—such as portable generators, water pumps, hoses and batteries—were put in place to mitigate against “beyond design-basis events,” or unlikely events that are considered outside the scope of what a plant should be designed or regulated to withstand.

Please note, this story was also cross-posted at NEI's Safety First microsite.

NRC’s Post-Fukushima Review Adds Top Priority

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week released a staff paper that prioritizes the recommendations from the near-term post-Fukushima task force report into three tiers—or categories—of importance based on the potential to enhance safety at U.S. nuclear plants. As part of its Tier 1 recommendation, or actions that “should be started without unnecessary delay,” the NRC elevated the importance of implementing spent fuel pool instrumentation, or monitoring equipment, at U.S. nuclear energy facilities.

Why did the NRC elevate this issue? A Bloomberg article explains:

Improved cooling-pool equipment wasn’t listed as a concern warranting immediate NRC action in a Sept. 9 staff memo. Agency staff made it a priority after determining that resources exist to improve monitoring instruments, which aren’t often designed “to remain functional under accident conditions,” according to the report released today.

Moving the recommendation to the first tier does NOT indicate that current spent fuel pools are unsafe. In fact, the NRC has said that current operating nuclear plants “do not pose an imminent risk to public health and safety.” The re-prioritization of the issue likely comes from early lessons the NRC and industry have learned post-Fukushima on the need for remote monitoring of the pools.

In a September 26 letter to the NRC, which provides the industry’s position on the commission’s post-Fukushima recommendations, the industry shows how important it is for the NRC to act based on the facts from the accident.

The Fukushima spent fuel pools are an example of where facts have invalidated earlier conclusions. Shortly following the initial events, many believed that water levels in the pools—the Unit 4 pool, in particular—had fallen to the point that the spent fuel had overheated, failed and contributed to the accident. Now, with the benefit of visual inspections and samples from the four affected fuel pools, it is evident that the spent fuel rods did not experience major and significant failure.

The industry continues by saying that not having a clear understanding of the situation in a used fuel pool “could result in the diversion of needed resources away from more safety-significant activities.”

In learning this important lesson from Fukushima, the industry believes that:

Remote monitoring would enable operators to know when actions are needed to provide additional water to the pools. This recommendation is consistent with the action already taken by the industry on knowing the time until the pool will reach 200°F.

The industry fully supports the NRC’s decision to add the issue as a tier 1 priority in its near-term actions.

See NEI’s video to learn more about how spent fuel pools are designed and constructed to safely store used nuclear fuel.

USA Today Errs on Condition of Spent Fuel Pools at Fukushima

We've seen a few recent instances of reporters incorrectly stating the fuel in the pools melted. That's incorrect, as the AP reported earlier this year. However, the misconception persists. USA Today included the following in a story published earlier today:

Spent nuclear fuel pools that burned during the crisis are now under control.

The spent nuclear fuel assemblies at Fukushima never burned or melted, and in fact, were always underwater. Here's a more accurate description of the accident from the consultants at Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems. You can find this description on page 9 of the report:

Disablement of spent fuel pool cooling and the possibility of earthquake-induced damage to the pools were the cause of great concern, which spurred one-week-long unconventional cooling efforts with helicopters and water cannons. While it was later established that the fuel assemblies in the pools remained underwater throughout the accident, the Fukushima experience does underscore the importance of reliable long-term cooling and protection of the spent fuel pools at nuclear plants.

We're sending a note to USA Today asking for a correction. Stand by for updates.

UPDATE: USA Today has informed us that they'll run a clarification that the fuel rods didn't burn. The correction should be appended to the online version of the story and run on page 2A or 3A in the newspaper.

Spent Fuel Storage In Pools At Nuclear Energy Plants

Nuclear Energy Institute's Everett Redmond, Director of Nonproliferation and Fuel Cycle Policy, describes the purpose and design of a spent fuel pool to safely store used fuel at nuclear energy plants.

For more information on U.S. plants safely managing used nuclear fuel, visit: http://bit.ly/gPXt7N

For a tutorial video on dry cask storage, watch here: http://bit.ly/idZSVY

Spent Fuel Pools

“Saw your interest on spent fuel pools and thought you would find this video informative” – that’s been on our Twitter feed next store to this column all day. And guess what? It is an informative video. In it, NEI's Everett Redmond, Director of Nonproliferation and Fuel Cycle Policy, describes the purpose and design of a spent fuel pool. More videos at the NEI Network.