The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has denied a petition from a retired Department of Energy physicist calling for the agency to mandate increased monitoring of nuclear plants’ spent nuclear fuel pools and reactors to prevent a disaster similar to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi triple-meltdown in Japan.
The regulator said in a Federal Register notice posted Tuesday that its Fukushima lessons learned program has already addressed the issues raised by Alexander DeVolpi in his September 2015 filing. That includes “orders associated with mitigation of beyond-design-basis accidents and spent fuel instrumentation,” Annette Vietti-Cook, secretary to the commission, wrote in a Feb. 14 letter to DeVolpi.
Petition No. “PRM-50-113 provided no sufficient basis to revise the regulations as requested; therefore, the NRC is denying PRM-50-113,” Vietti-Cook wrote.
Three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melted down in the wake of a March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The crises forced authorities to evacuate tens of thousands of nearby residents for fear of radiation exposure, and to initiate a long, expensive effort (price-tagged at $188 billion as of December) to contain and clean up the damage.
In his petition, DeVolpi urged the NRC to issue a regulation that would make mandatory a recommendation from a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report on lessons learned for U.S. nuclear safety from Fukushima: specifically, to “require installation of ex-vessel instrumentation for uninterruptible monitoring of coolant and fuel in reactors and spent fuel pools.”
DeVolpi, a nuclear physicist who worked at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois for 41 years to 1999, said he had developed instrumentation that could provide monitoring capabilities for crucial thermodynamic parameters. Such systems for reactor water-level monitoring could have prevented or slowed one to two of the reactor meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, according to his petition.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff addressed the NAS recommendation in an April 2015 report, finding that the “issues that the petitioner’s proposal would address are being or have already been addressed by NRC actions taken in response to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear accident,” the Federal Register notice says.
In a 2012 order, the NRC established post-Fukushima safety requirements for U.S. nuclear power plant licensees and construction permit holders to prevent a “beyond-design-basis” external event at a facility – generally defined as an event that was not comprehensively considered in designing a site due to the small likelihood of it occurring. The top directive in the order requires licenses holders to prepare, enact, and sustain plans to maintain or re-establish core cooling, containment, and spent fuel pond cooling capabilities after a beyond-design-basis event.
Under the order, site instruments must either remain powered or the plant must have portable gear to provide the same capacity. The NRC noted that another 2012 order requires nuclear site spent fuel pool instruments to remotely report three specific water levels: normal; low, but with sufficient water to protect workers above from radiation; and near the top of spent fuel rods, requiring additional water to prevent possible radiation exposures.
NRC staff subsequently advised the commissioners against establishing further regulatory mandates for augmented reactor and containment instrumentation, the Federal Register notice says.
The NRC has spent roughly $50 million on its Fukushima Lessons Learned program, including for equipment and staffing support over several years. The initiative has included the mandatory deployment of standard, portable cooling gear at U.S. nuclear reactors.
DeVolpi could not be reached for comment.
