Morning Briefing - February 15, 2024
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February 14, 2024

Ex-NRC engineer tells Calif. State government Diablo Canyon Unit 1 is safe

By ExchangeMonitor

The Unit 1 reactor vessel in California’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant should not be too brittle to operate for the five-year life extension the state has proposed for the plant, a consultant reported to a state agency.

The Diablo Canyon Independent Safety Committee commissioned the report by former NRC engineer and current consultant Mark Kirk after environmental groups presented a contrary opinion by an academic researcher who said last year that Unit 1’s reactor pressure vessel could reach an unacceptable level of embrittlement” by the end of 2023.

“Diablo Canyon Unit 1 has been correctly assessed by PG&E [Pacific Gas & Electric, the plant owner] and meets all current NRC requirements to and beyond 60 years of operation,” Kirk, now of Phoenix Engineering Associates, Unity, N.H., wrote in a report dated Jan. 26 and published on the commission’s website.

Diablo Canyon Unit 1 switched on in 1985 and would reach 60 years of operation in 2045, much longer than California wants to keep the plant online. Unit 1’s license will expire on Nov. 2, 2024. Unit 2’s will expire Aug. 26 2025. California has approved a five-year life extension beyond those dates and PG&E in November applied for a 20-year NRC license extension for both reactors.

NRC has said it could take fewer than two years to vet PG&E’s application. The commission is allowing PG&E to keep the reactors online for at least as long as the review takes. Environmental groups have challenged the grace period’s legality in court.

Kirk’s report, published in two parts with supporting documents on the Diablo Canyon Independent Safety Committee’s website, was in response to an analysis of PG&E data published last year by Digby Macdonald, a PhD staff researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

Macdonald claimed that Unit 1’s reactor pressure vessel’s steel had become dangerously embrittled and that PG&E was not relying on the most current data available to determine whether the vessel’s steel was strong enough.

Macdonald specifically pointed to the utility’s decision not to collect samples from one of the small capsules, capsule b, installed with the reactor and loaded with steel specimens that receive the same radiation as the vessel itself.

Kirk said PG&E had not broken any NRC rules by deferring sampling of capsule b, which is now scheduled to be removed from Unit 1 in 2025 during a scheduled refueling outage and inspected before 2028.

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