Browns Ferry Video
Figure 1.The Browns Ferry Plant
Stumbled on a fascinating
video. A blogger, Destin, talked TVA into letting him film the refueling process at Browns Ferry in Alabama. Browns Ferry is a three unit boiling water reactor plant. The design is essentially the same as the reactors at Fukushima. The hour and 45 minute video is overly long; and Destin’s narration can be a little grating at times; but overall he does a great job. It’s worth your time.
We also get a pretty good feeling for the plant’s safety culture. Despite Destin’s not being allowed to film most of the security, much of the video is taken up by Destin’s going through various check points, each manned by 3 or 4 people sitting around watching screens. While there are scores of people on the refueling floor, only a handful seem to be actually doing something to the plant. The actual shifting of the fuel bundles is done by a three person team, and is largely automated. At one point, a lady berates Destin’s guide who outranks her for letting Destin walk down a stairs facing forward. The stairs were narrower and steeper than normal. The rule is you have to treat it like a ladder.
Destin is told not to step on the floor drains. The problem is the moisture might contaminate his shoes, and set off alarms. The radiation in the drain is not from the plant. It’s normal background, naturally occurring radon and daughters. Nuclear plants don’t produce radon. On the way out, Destin’s camera fails to clear a check. So they disassemble the camera and put each piece into the detector separately, to allow the pieces out of the plant. Once again the source is background radon.
The irony is that Browns Ferry uses dense-packing. The video gives us an excellent look at a dense packed spent fuel pool. So while people worry about stepping down a stairs the wrong way and background radioactivity on a camera, we’ve got 4 or 5 fuel loads of cesium per reactor sitting around waiting for a Station Black Out.
On a positive note, TVA should be congratulated for allowing this visit. It should be commonplace. If I were king of the world, I’d have a glassed in viewing gallery, high in every reactor’s refueling space. During outages, I would invite everybody to walk through and get a look at what’s going on. Most of the people will come out as enthusiastic about nuclear as Destin.
That's a great find.
This excessive and engrained safety fascism is one of the things that makes me quite skeptical about SMRs. They will have the same circus attached, but only 5 or 10% the revenue to pay for the clowns.
The 'contaminated' water drains contain basically drinking quality water.
A work permit needed to talk a walk. There can't be very many people that are defending this stuff. Is everyone just happy to have a nice cosy job with benefits and no hard work ever and a nice clean plant environment, that they just run with this nonsense?
I did like the post-it data transfer guy. I used the same data transfer system when I worked for nuclear companies between the thermalhydraulic simulations and the reactor physics team. When questioned, I always used in my defence that it is fully cyber-proof. No hacker is going to get access to my post-it notes!
Automation is clearly the way forward. Keep the monkeys out, no circus.
She was right to focus on safe ladder usage. Ladders and stairs have killed and seriously injured far more people in the US than a nuclear power plant. It might even be more than nuclear weapons.
I have worked with all of the major defense contractors. Everytime I went on site, I would feel anxious from seeing how little everyone was doing. When Destin's video came out, it looked even worse. They are some of the few people that could learn efficiency from the DMV.