NRC Denies More Pilgrim Watch Contentions

The five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted unanimously Friday to uphold the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board's handling the Pilgrim license renewal hearing and reject contentions filed by Pilgrim Watch. The contentions involve post-accident cleanup cost calculations and submerged electrical cables. 

Pilgrim Watch's first contention involved cleanup and the severe accident mitigation alternatives or SAMA.

Pilgrim Watch’s Cleanup Contention read as follows:

Until and unless some third party assumes responsibility for cleanup after a severe nuclear reactor accident to pre-accident conditions, sets a cleanup standard, and identifies a funding source, Entergy should be required to take all of the mitigation steps that would be required by a SAMA analysis based on a conservative source term using release fractions no lower than those specified in NUREG-1465 or used by the NRC in studies such as NUREG-1450, cleanup to a dose rate of not more than 15 millirem a year, and at least the 95th percentile of the total consequences determined by the EARLY and CHRONC modules of the MACCS2 Code, and [that] does not reduce any costs by use of a discount factor or probabilistic analysis.

According to the NRC's ruling, Pilgrim Watch claimed that it had learned from a November 2010 article in "Inside EPA" that “neither the NRC, nor EPA , nor FEMA is responsible for cleanup” of a nuclear reactor accident; that “the cleanup standards that will determine what cleanup is required (and hence its cost) have not been defined”; and further that “no funding source has been identified.” The cited article refers to discussions between the three agencies regarding “which
agency—and with what money, and legal authority—would oversee cleanup in the event of a large-scale accident.”

The NRC rejected the cleanup contention on several grounds.

• One, the Board found that the issues raised in the "Inside EPA" article were “policy matters that are solely within the jurisdiction of the Commission,” and therefore fall outside the scope of the license renewal proceeding.
• Two, the Board found that the technical concerns raised in the contention could and therefore should have been raised earlier in the proceeding.
• And three, the Board found that the contention failed to meet the standards for reopening the evidentiary record.

Pilgrim Watch's second contention involves inaccessible electric cables, claiming are not inspected enough for degradation, as required by Entergy's Aging Management Plan (AMP):

Entergy’s Aging Management Plan (as amended by Entergy on January 7, 2011) for non-environmentally qualified (EQ) inaccessible cables and cable splices at Pilgrim Station is insufficient to provide reasonable assurance that these cables will be in compliance with NRC Regulations and public health and safety will be protected during license renewal.

According to the ruling, "Pilgrim Watch claimed that the amended AMP is deficient" because

• (1) the program “ignores cables carrying less than 400 Volts”;
• (2) inspections of cables, although more frequent than those in the original AMP, “remain too infrequent”;
• (3) the AMP did not specifically address recommendations made in a 1996 Sandia National Laboratories report and a 2010 Brookhaven National Laboratory study;
• (4) Entergy “never commits to . . . replacing non-EQ cables exposed to any submergence”; and
• (5) although the AMP includes a commitment to use a “proven method” for detecting cable degradation, there is no “‘proven’ technology to detect cable and splice degradation due to periodic submergence in a saltwater and otherwise chemically contaminated environment.”

Pilgrim Watch argued that all cables “exposed to any submergence must be replaced with cables designed and qualified for underwater operation.”61 Pilgrim Watch further claimed that, despite Entergy’s amendments to the AMP, the program “remains woefully insufficient.”

The NRC rejected the second contention on the grounds that it is untimely under the board's rule for new and amended contentions.

The Board stressed that 'every single objection' to the amended AMP 'could (and therefore should) have been raised at the outset of this proceeding as an objection to the AMPs set out in the original' license renewal application, submitted in January 2006. The asserted 'shortcomings are not new today,' the Board explained.

Separately, the ASLB panel has been asked to review a contention filed by the Jones River Watershed Association and Pilgrim Watch on potential aquatic impacts of the plant's operation. Click here to read the JRWA's letter.

Thursday, the Plymouth Nuclear Matters Committee and the "Freeze Pilgrim" group held a televised forum to discuss the ballot question that would have the Board of Selectmen ask the NRC to halt all relicensing proceedings for Pilgrim Nuclear Station until questions involving the disaster at Fukushima are answered.

While the forum was unlikely to change anyone's mind about Pilgrim, it did answer questions about the reasoning behind the question, which is not binding.