By JEFF MONTGOMERY, The News Journal
Posted Monday, October 30, 2006 at 9:35 pm
The owners of the Hope Creek nuclear plant hope to squeeze more
production – the equivalent of another small power plant – out of its
reactor next year under a revised proposal now before the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission.
Skip Sindoni, spokesman for PSEG Nuclear,
said the company wants to add 120 megawatts to Hope Creek’s output by
boosting heat levels and steam pressure in the plant, which is located
in Salem, N.J., on the bank of the Delaware River.
The proposed
15 percent heat increase could raise Hope Creek’s regular power
generation by about the equivalent of the output from NRG Energy’s
Dover plant. Company officials are still developing design and cost
details for the major overhaul needed to manage the hotter,
higher-pressure system.
Regulatory commission officials have
approved more than 100 requests for increases, termed “uprates,” around
the nation, with another 27 expected during the next five years that
would produce the equivalent of what two Indian River power plants
would. Salem Units 1 and 2, which stand near Hope Creek, already have
undergone the process.
PSEG Nuclear withdrew an earlier plan to
uprate Hope Creek in February, after commission staffers raised
questions about vibrations and the damage potential at the higher power.
Agency documents note concerns about increased vibration and equipment cracking.
“We
have a number of concerns about things that could go wrong, and we
would prefer to err on the side of safety at this point,” said Neil
Cohen, who directs Unplug Salem, a group opposed to nuclear power.
Stephen
Grot, a Middletown-area resident and president of a fuel cell
manufacturer Ion Power, said he plans to follow the commission’s review
closely.
“I would definitely be concerned about them narrowing
the safety margin,” Grot said. “You keep increasing the temperature and
raising the pressure, it’s going to blow itself to pieces.”
Grot
said he was unsatisfied with PSEG Nuclear’s handling of vibration
problems in a major cooling-water pump in 2004, when a steam leak shut
down the plant. Commission officials eventually allowed the company to
postpone major repairs to the system, but only after installation of
additional monitoring equipment.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear
engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit based in
Washington, said plant operators and regulators don’t yet know enough
about the consequences of higher temperatures and pressures in some
boiling water reactor designs.
The same concerns helped prolong
public debates over a power increase at a smaller, Exelon-operated
plant in Vermont. Public opposition and protests kept that project
under review for more than two years.
“The NRC is shirking its
responsibility to protect the public by allowing clueless plant owners
to crank up … to see what happens,” Lochbaum wrote in a briefing paper
issued in 2004.
A document filed with the regulatory agency
earlier this year showed that regulators had “significant” concerns
about the stress and vibration studies used by PSEG to support its
previous uprate proposal. Company officials committed to additional
analysis of both issues.
Plans for Hope Creek involve the most
elaborate type of uprate, requiring replacement of steam turbines,
pumps, generators and other equipment. Critics of the changes argue
that they also involve the greatest amount of new stresses, and point
to damage that developed in the Dresden and Quad Cities plants in
Illinois after an 18 percent uprate.
“NRC staff have determined
these issues do not pose an immediate safety concern, given the plants’
current operating conditions,” commission officials said in a briefing
paper on uprates. But the agency “continues to examine its regulatory
options based on industry actions and the information available.”
Suzanne
Leta, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit group Environment New Jersey,
said that her organization also viewed power uprates as experimental.
“There’s
a history that provides reasonable cause for concern,” Leta said.
“Uprates in the past have clearly left public safety behind and were
essentially experimental.”
Hope Creek and the twin Salem
reactors rank as the nation’s second-largest nuclear generating
complex, and also among those with the greatest potential for deaths
and casualties in the event of a catastrophic accident, according to
agency records.
