Ohio’s nuke with the hole in its head may soon help bury an aging Peaceful Atom. The question is no longer just “Will Davis-Besse reopen?” It’s also “Will what it reveals about deteriorating reactors end atomic power altogether?”
For nuke boosters, the stricken reactor near Toledo has become an endless fount of devastating news. The latest involves a series of newly discovered cracks in the crucial metal lining that may have barely prevented the permanent contamination of Lake Erie and much of northern Ohio. The lining was designed to redirect cooling fluids within the plant, not to protect the public.
The real safety feature was a six-inch-thick metal shroud surrounding Davis-Besse’s super-hot radioactive core. But during an unrelated inspection in February, horrified workers found that boric acid had eaten entirely through the shroud, gouging out a hole as big as a milk jug.
The inspection was prompted by unrelated problems in other reactors of similar design. Staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission worried about the deterioration of certain critical nozzles and demanded immediate shut-downs and evaluations. Some operators complied.
But FirstEnergy, Davis-Besse’s Akron-based owner, strong-armed NRC higher-ups and got the inspection delayed. As it turns out, boric acid had already eaten through the shroud. During that dubious delay, all that protected Cleveland, Toledo and beyond from a catastrophic meltdown and radiation release was a thin piece of metal designed to do something else. It now appears that liner had been eaten down to a mere two-tenths of an inch. According to David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, only one thing saved the region from catastrophe: “Luck.”
Davis-Besse is a sibling to Three Mile Island Unit 2, which melted in 1979. The normally docile, pro-nuclear Cleveland Plain Dealer and Toledo Blade are running major front-page exposes about NRC incompetence and problems at the plant. Mainstream editorials are growing increasingly nervous, and at least two members of Congress from northern Ohio want Davis-Besse to stay shut.
FirstEnergy has not appeared to notice. It has brought in a new reactor head from Midland, Michigan, where citizen activists long ago shut a plant that was, literally, sinking into a wetland. The utility has cut into Davis-Besse’s concrete-and-steel outer containment dome and is trying to replace the old 17-foot-wide reactor head with the one from Midland, which is not an exact fit. Such a transplant has never been tried. But FirstEnergy expects Davis-Besse to be back online by December.
The NRC has been widelu expected to let FirstEnergy do whatever it wants. The commission is infamous for putting the financial interests of reactor owners ahead of public safety. On September 10, NRC chair Richard Meserve told cheering industrialists at a “Nuclear Renaissance” conference in Washington that the future of atomic energy is bright, especially with him as head of regulation. The commission, after all, is supported by fees generated by reactors. Only those reactors actually in operation generate that cash, leaving the commission with a clear incentive to keep them online, even with holes in their heads.
But the stunning extent of Davis-Besse’s internal deterioration makes things dicier. FirstEnergy’s own metallurgists say the inner liner that miraculously prevented disaster is half as thick as originally estimated. The company admits it’s not sure if the acid ate through it more thoroughly than first thought, or if the piece was manufactured thinner than apparently specified.
The company’s uncertainty has itself been poorly received. Additional cracks have now surfaced in the liner. There are also troubling new signs of deterioration around critical nozzles. If duplicated at other reactors around the U.S. (there are about 103) and the world (there are about 435) the implications could be huge. Nozzles with cracks around them cannot be expected to sit firm, and if they don’t—expect the worst.
Such serious deterioration in crucial metals may indeed signal a global reactor fleet that’s aging with lethal speed. Davis-Besse proved that boric acid can eat through very thick safety shrouds. But it may also confirm the widespread belief that older reactors, whose metals have been subjected to decades of extreme heat, radioactivity and corrosive liquids, may simply be falling apart. Massive corrosion in a safety shroud, combined with cracks in and around critical nozzles, added to thinning and cracking in an internal sleeve, all in one small corner of one reactor that has been cited by the NRC as being especially safe, is not an encouraging sample.
Every U.S. reactor now in operation was designed before 1974. Just as the NRC is beginning to hand out licenses to allow these plants to operate deep into the indefinite future, Ohio’s nuke with the hole in its head has issued a critical warning of rampant, internal cancer. In response, a Virginia utility says it will try to fit new caps on four of its reactors. Serious parallel problems have also surfaced in Japan’s aging nuke fleet, where major releases have recently run rampant.
Looming behind it all is the reality that no reactor or waste storage pool could survive the crash of a jet like the one that flew directly over New York’s Indian Point reactors just moments before it crashed into the World Trade Center. A widely published interview with two Al Qaeda leaders has confirmed that the original September 11 targets may have been nuclear facilities. A nuke hit might “get out of control,” they said, but one could still happen.
So could a disaster due to slipshod regulation. “Senior management at the NRC knew the reactor vessel [at Davis-Besse] was leaking, a clear violation of NRC regulations, and did nothing,” says Jim Riccio of Greenpeace. “Eventually, their luck will run out.”
As Davis-Besse shapes up as a test case for a deteriorating industry, a nervous public, in northern Ohio and elsewhere, may be increasingly unwilling to roll the nuclear dice.
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