Nuclear powerU.S. court asked to block restart of aging, damaged Indian Point nuclear reactor
Friends of the Earth and other environmental organizations have filed an emergency petition with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit asking that the court compel the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to prevent Entergy from restarting an aging Indian Point nuclear reactor which was found to have unprecedented parts failure in its critical core cooling system. Entergy, the owner and operator of Indian Point, has repeatedly stated that it intends to start the reactor within days. The Indian Point reactors’ licenses expired in 2013 and 2015, respectively, and the plant is operating beyond its 40-year life span while the NRC considers whether to extend the license for an additional twenty years.
New York's aging Indian Point nuclear power plant // Source: commons.wikimedia.org
Friends of the Earth and other environmental organizations have filed an emergency petition with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit asking that the court compel the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to prevent Entergy from restarting an aging Indian Point nuclear reactor which was found to have unprecedented parts failure in its critical core cooling system. Entergy, the owner and operator of Indian Point, has repeatedly stated that it intends to start the reactor within days.
FOE says that The degradation or disappearance of more than one in three critical bolts in the Indian Point Unit 2 nuclear reactor cooling system was revealed during a refueling outage in March. Despite the unprecedented failure of critical bolts-damage greater than that seen in any reactor before in either the United States or around the globe-Entergy immediately announced plans to restart the reactor in June after simply replacing the bolts.
Previously, on May 24 Friends of the Earth filed an emergency petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) calling for intervention by the commissioners of the agency to prevent restart of the reactor until the Commission had fully diagnosed the root cause of the degradation and determined that the unit was safe to operate despite the failure of more than a third of the bolts. That petition also called for an immediate shutdown of the damaged reactor’s twin, reactor Unit 3, to determine whether the reactor’s bolts have also disintegrated.
Instead of the commissioners ruling on Friends of the Earth’s Emergency Petition, a staff review board sent Friends of the Earth an e-mail on 3 June announcing that the emergency petition had been referred to staff for review under the so-called 2.206 process which normally takes years to complete. The staff board denied Friends of the Earth’s request for emergency action to prevent restart of Unit 2 with no rationale or evidence to support that determination. Without action by a federal court, Indian Point 2 will be restarted, long before the NRC’s 2.206 process is completed.
