NRC special inspectors arrive at Duke Energy?s Harris plant

photo courtesy PROGRESS ENERGY CAROLINAS

Duke Energy Progress expects the Shearon Harris plant to remain shut down for several weeks while contractors repair a crack in an instrumentation nozzle in the reactor vessel head.

Two special inspectors from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission arrived at the Shearon Harris nuclear plant near Raleigh on Wednesday morning to start the agency?s probe into a quarter-inch crack discovered in an instrumentation nozzle that goes into the reactor vessel.

One key question they want to answer is why Duke Energy Progress took a year to discover the flaw. The ultrasound tests that revealed the problem were performed during Harris? last refueling outage from late April to early June of last year.

The utility, then called Progress Energy Carolinas, immediately spotted and repaired four similar small cracks among the 65 nozzles on the vessel head last year. But this fifth flaw was not noticed until Duke Progress undertook a review of last year?s data in preparation for the next scheduled refueling this fall.

?There was no immediate threat to the public or plant workers, but because the discovery is on the vessel head and was not seen in the original review, we are sending specialists from our Atlanta office to further evaluate the issue,? said Victor McCree, the NRC Region II administrator in Atlanta. ?The special inspection team will work to analyze and understand all the details.?

The team is expected to be at the plant through the end of next week.

The Harris plant was shut down May 15, after the fault was finally discovered. There was no release of any radioactive material and no danger of any imminent release. The vessel head is six inches thick and the crack in the nozzle was about a quarter inch long.

Still, Charlotte-based Duke Energy (NYSE:DUK) officials have said it was disturbing that it did not notice the flaw when it reviewed the data a year ago. The company has commissioned its own reviews by three independent industry groups to determine what went wrong and what the utility can do in the future to make sure that testing data is properly interpreted when tests are performed.

John Downey covers the energy industry and public companies for the Charlotte Business Journal.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bizj_charlotte/~3/vC-8yg9dUqQ/nrc-special-inspectors-arrive-at-duke.html

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