San Onofre special or AIT

Here come another special inspection or AIT...

Emergency procedure for a tube rupture can't be good and fast shutdown....

They are suppose to scram BEFORE the 75 gpm limit...

MANUAL TRIP DUE TO A PRIMARY TO SECONDARY LEAK GREATER THAN 30 GAL/HR

"At 1505 PST, Unit 3 entered Abnormal Operation Instruction S023-13-14 'Reactor Coolant Leak' for a steam generator leak exceeding 5 gallons per day.

"At 1549 PST, the leak rate was determined to be 82 gallons per day. At 1610 PST, a leak rate greater than 75 gallons per day with an increasing rate of leakage exceeding 30 gallons per hour was established and entry into S023-13-28 'Rapid Power Reduction' was performed.

"At 1630 PST, commenced rapid power reduction per S023-13-28 'Rapid Power Reduction'. At 1731 PST, with reactor power at 35% the Unit was manually tripped. At 1738 PST, Unit 3 entered Emergency Operation Instruction S023-12-4 'Steam Generator Tube Rupture'.

"At 1800 PST the affected steam generator was isolated."

All control rods fully inserted on the trip. Decay heat is being removed thru the main steam bypass valves into the main condenser. Main feedwater is maintaining steam generator level. No relief valves lifted during the manual trip. The plant is in normal shutdown electrical lineup.

Unit 2 is presently in a refueling outage and was not affected by this event.

They still under warranty?

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/steam-2186...

Published: Feb. 16, 2011 Updated: 1:16 p.m

San Onofre reactor begins start-up

Southern California’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station completed the replacement of two steam generators in its Unit 3 reactor and resumed operation Friday.

Repairs began in early October, according to CNBC. They follow similar steam generator replacement at San Onofre Unit 2 last year that took nearly seven months.

A Southern California Edison spokesman quoted in the San Diego Union-Tribune pegged the cost to replace all four steam generators at $671 million.

The steam-generator replacements took 10 years of planning, and a cost-benefit analysis through 2022 indicated they will save ratepayers $1 billion, SCE’s new chief nuclear officer Pete Dietrich told the San Clemente City Council last week, according to the Orange County Register.

According to the Union-Tribune, San Onofre generates about 20 percent of San Diego’s power and is Southern California’s largest power plant.

Have they been reversed engineered from high tech Turkey?

OMG, there aren't even a year old...

what freakin junk!

The is a significant industry event....

So these utilities are recklessly wrecking containment...the $2 billion dollar cracks in containment over a SG job in Crystal River, don't forget the same thing in Davis Besse, now they are putting junk SG's in San Onofre.

Their engineering expertise on doing SG sucks?

Their engineering expertise on doing SG jobs sucks?

NRC: "The damage that they have found to many other tubes is unusual, and they are attempting to identify the reason," Dricks said.

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/20...

Three Mile Island nuclear plant finds unexpected flaws in new steam generators
Published: Thursday, January 26, 2012, 6:33 PM Updated: Friday, January 27, 2012, 8:54 AM

After just one operating cycle, inspectors at Three Mile Island nuclear facility have detected unexpected flaws in the facility’s new steam generators.
There’s no indication radiation was released.
Officials say the flaws are well below regulatory thresholds, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a meeting Thursday morning to get more information.
The two 70-foot, 510-ton “once-through” generators sit on either side of the nuclear core, and were installed at TMI in 2009.
Each cost more than $140 million.
Each is filled with more than 15,000 high-chromium nickel alloy tubes, through which flows hot radioactive water from the core. The radioactive water in the tubes is under high pressure to keep it from boiling. It heats nonradioactive water outside the tubes, turning it to steam that powers the plant’s turbines.
The tubes are one of the primary barriers between the radioactive and nonradioactive sides of the facility. If one were to break, radioactive water from the reactor core could pass into the steam mechanism and escape as steam into the atmosphere.
When TMI shut down in October to change fuel, inspectors discovered some of the tubes had unexpected wear marks — from rubbing against each other.
An eighth-inch of space separates each tube. They aren’t supposed to touch.
The generators had been in operation only 22 months; they are supposed to give the plant another 25 years of life.
Eric Epstein, leader of the watchdog group Three Mile Island Alert, said he hoped TMI’s multi-million “investment in French technology came with an American waranty.”
An official from AREVA, Inc., the French company that manufactured the generators, told a meeting of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Thursday morning,“We did not expect a tube touching another tube.”

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) has delivered two replacement steam generators for the third unit of Southern California Edison's (SCE's) San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS).

Maybe the NRC and industry engineering codes for the SGs suck?

WHY?

Why is all this nuclear incompetence crap hitting the fan at the same time?

We desperately need the world famous spell checker @ google expert to make everything right in the world .

Or at least distract us from these depressing issues at hand with inane , irrelevant observations .

Candidly his observations and distractions don't work anymore . How many unusual events can the world tolerate ?

mike mulligan wrote:

So these utilities are recklessly wrecking containment...the $2 billion dollar cracks in containment over a SG job in Crystal River, don't forget the same thing in Davis Besse, now they are putting junk SG's in San Onofre.
Their engineering expertise on doing SG sucks?

Seriously do you have a clue what you’re talking about? Yes CR-3 has containment issues, from an improperly executed de tensioning process. Not from faulty material, the unit is defueled and sitting idle, so with that in mind who cares if it’s cracked.
As for DB there was no cracking in the concrete, a worker thought he had spotted a crack. Experts were flown in and analyzed the situation. Nothing was there; FENOC did the right thing in this case.
SONGS does have generator issue but nothing to the degree of panic you’re posting about. Things are still in the very early stages of inspection, hell the unit at this point hasn’t even fully cooled. This will not be solved in days, or even weeks. I wouldn’t look for unit 3 to be on line for several months.
As for the most resent SONGS news, a worker fell in the Containment pool. Yeah it happened; the guy was an idiot, no way around that. The difference is he’s an employee; a contractor would have been fired on the spot and escorted out the gate. It was even covered up/ pushed under the rug at SCE. The incident was labeled a “Near Miss”, near miss my ass. He fully fell in the pool. The fact that SCE made such a joke about, prompted an enterprising local to make a shirt about it “Contaminated, Swim at own risk”.
Don’t believe the SCE hype, retaliation is alive and well at SONGS. Any worker who had any sort of issue or injury on the previous project, or spoke aloud about problems. Was individually excluded from employment on this project. So yes retaliation is very much alive at SONGS

"a worker fell in the Containment pool. Yeah it happened; the guy was an idiot, no way around that."
-except it was supposed to be reported to the NRC and it wasn't.
No problem tho, since according to nuclear experts like Ann Coulter etc. the idiot worker is healthier now for it!
'Unusual Wear' On Many New Pipes At San Onofre
Feb 2
Washingtonpost.com/national/inspectors-find-h...
Both San Onofre Reactors Damaged?
Multiple Pipes Broken?
Feb 2
Oocregister.com/news/unit-338565-reactor-plan...
Radiation Leak Likely, Rotten Pipes At San Onofre
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/01/radi...
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Bird Numbers Plummet Around Wrecked Fukushima Plant
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/...

What makes this wear unusual is beyond me, its wear. During the beginning life cycles of a generator (like many pieces of equipment) it has a break in period. During this break in period thinning of tubes does accrue. But I will agree this is excessive, is it too much? That’s up to the experts, to analyze the eddy current data and decide for themselves. Unit 2’s tube data is just being reviewed and scrutinized. Unit3 the unit that just came down, will have its tubes inspected and analyzed soon.
I’m sure SCE is on the phone morning noon and night with MHI to get this resolved. In the end I’d think new generators are in order, but sleeving them is a sort term fix that is widely utilized. The down side is it reduces efficiency. But so does plugging the tubes.
Is it possible radiation escaped, maybe? But in that area it would be nothing more dangerous than what guys get crapped up with here or at any other plant in the system. But I love how the news channels focus there cameras on steam at the plant and start talking about gas leaving, or call the steam smoke. Gotta keep those ratings.

Nukeworker wrote:

<quoted text>
Seriously do you have a clue what you’re talking about? Yes CR-3 has containment issues, from an improperly executed de tensioning process. Not from faulty material, the unit is defueled and sitting idle, so with that in mind who cares if it’s cracked.
As for DB there was no cracking in the concrete, a worker thought he had spotted a crack. Experts were flown in and analyzed the situation. Nothing was there; FENOC did the right thing in this case.
SONGS does have generator issue but nothing to the degree of panic you’re posting about. Things are still in the very early stages of inspection, hell the unit at this point hasn’t even fully cooled. This will not be solved in days, or even weeks. I wouldn’t look for unit 3 to be on line for several months.
As for the most resent SONGS news, a worker fell in the Containment pool. Yeah it happened; the guy was an idiot, no way around that. The difference is he’s an employee; a contractor would have been fired on the spot and escorted out the gate. It was even covered up/ pushed under the rug at SCE. The incident was labeled a “Near Miss”, near miss my ass. He fully fell in the pool. The fact that SCE made such a joke about, prompted an enterprising local to make a shirt about it “Contaminated, Swim at own risk”.
Don’t believe the SCE hype, retaliation is alive and well at SONGS. Any worker who had any sort of issue or injury on the previous project, or spoke aloud about problems. Was individually excluded from employment on this project. So yes retaliation is very much alive at SONGS

SONGNs in the recent past was very troubled and treated their people very poorly over safety issues...one of the worst plants.

"on steam at the plant and start talking about gas leaving, or call the steam smoke."

They think we are too stupid to talk about the bigger issues and are only interested in pretty pictures that draw ratings.

I am thinking it rust falling off something or dibris...

But that would affect the fuel cladding...

I think the media has become so not "well rounded" about the world...all they can report about is the simple stories.