Nuclear plant workers exposed to unplanned radiation

Workers at Entergy’s Waterford 3 nuclear power plant were exposed to unplanned doses of radiation during a 2009 refueling outage, according to a final determination issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week.

However, the commission says that the radiation exposure to workers was of the “white” or low to moderate safety significance. The NRC evaluates nuclear plant performance on a color scale that uses green, white, yellow or red in order of increasing significance.

“This finding was caused by the licensee’s failure to use effective engineering controls prior to conducting work during a refueling outage,” Elmo Collins, a region administrator for the NRC said. “The NRC will determine the appropriate follow-up actions to ensure this issue is being addressed; including additional inspections.”

The incident occurred in 2009 when officials failed to properly contain highly radioactive cooling water from leaking onto work areas resulting in unplanned radiation doses to workers, the NRC said. Although the radiological doses the workers received were below regulatory limits, NRC regulations require that radiation exposures be limited to “As Low As Reasonably Achievable.”

The NRC discovered the incident in 2010 while they were reviewing the effectiveness of radiological control practices during Entergy’s previous refueling outage.

Waterford 3 spokesman Carl Rhode said that it is important to remember that at no time were workers in any danger and that they never received more than the limit of exposure as determined by the NRC.

“The NRC’s report was limited to one job under very specific circumstances during our 2009 outage,” he said. “They have no issues with our radiation program but felt that under the specific circumstances of the job in question that we could have done more to protect the workers than we already had done.”

According to the NRC, Entergy later installed a trough system underneath the seals to channel water into a drainage system inside the plant.

“We always seek to learn and strengthen our performance and indeed we significantly improved our dose performance in the spring of 2010 outage,” Rhode said. “The safety of the public and our workers is always our No. 1 priority.”