Executives from Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, owner and operator of the nation’s largest fleet of nuclear power plants, will face a grilling from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission over a serious, long-running coverup of a mishap at the two-unit, 1,819-MW Quad Cities nuclear plant in northwestern Illinois.
An April inspection of the plant by the NRC’s Region III office in Naperville, Ill. found that operators during a refueling on March 28, 2023, while manually shutting down the reactor failed to close 177 pressure vessel valves, leading to “an unintended RPV [reactor pressure vessel] drain down.” Water poured out of the giant vessel of the boiling water reactor.
Just as the NRC was focused on the two-year-old incident, the agency June 3 announced a special inspection at the plant “to review two events caused by battery issues.” The events occurred May 19. The NRC said, “The first event involved a Unit 1 scram [unscheduled shut down] caused by a degraded condition on a Unit 2 battery. The second event involved a Notice of Unusual Event, the lowest of the NRC’s emergency level classifications, due to a brief fire on the same Unit 2 battery. The events did not impact public health or plant workers.”
The NRC said in its assessment of the 2023 incident that a “licensed RO [reactor operator] demonstrated careless disregard for procedure by directing equipment operators to perform valve manipulations without using the required procedure attachment.”
The water level in the giant vessel rapidly dropped “5-6 inches” over six minutes, some 1,200 gallons, and sprayed “at least two individuals…with reactor coolant water alarmed the [radiation control] exit monitors.” Ultimately, the NRC determined that the radiation exposures were within safety limits.
The NRC found that the “licensee failed to assess and quantify contamination levels on the affected individuals. The workers were sprayed with reactor coolant water over large portions of their bodies, including the face, and were instructed to wash off the contamination before any measurements were taken using a frisker. One individual reported being sprayed in the ear, eye, and mouth. Despite these exposures, the licensee did not perform whole-body counts to evaluate potential internal dose and did not seek medical assistance for decontaminating the individual who experienced contamination involving the eye.”
In its April report of the 2023 incident, the NRC noted that it “was initially unaware of the event. The event was not documented in operating logs, not discussed during daily plant status meetings regularly attended by NRC inspectors, and not accurately documented in the Corrective Action Program [CAP]. The only CAP report referred to a generic water spill, without identifying the source or addressing potential radiological contamination.”
According to the NRC, a reactor operator “knowingly provided inaccurate and incomplete information about the event.” The operator admitted falsifying reports about the incident because he feared retaliation from a senior manager.
The NRC’s April investigation said that “six apparent violations of NRC requirements were identified and are being considered for escalated enforcement action.”
Constellation provided TV station KWQC, serving Davenport-Bettendorf in Iowa, and Rock Island-Moline, Ill., with a statement. The company said, “Constellation holds its employees and contractors to the highest standards of ethical conduct while promoting a culture of transparency, accountability and continuous learning.” The company told KWOC that the operators involved have been fired and the company is taking steps to prevent similar incidents.
Edwin Lyman, the nuclear physicist who heads the nuclear safety program for the Union of Concerned Scientist, told KWQC the incident was a “near miss,” exposing deficiencies in Constellation’s management of the plant. He said, “Not only was this a serious event, but also there was a coverup. There was an attempt to lie about the actual cause of the event to management. And so this was a cascading series of failures and coverups, which you just don’t want to happen in a nuclear power plant.”
Quad Cities is one of the oldest operating reactors in the U.S. and the second oldest boiling water reactor. It got construction permits for both units from the Atomic Energy Commission, the NRC’s predecessor, in February 1967, and operating licenses in December 1972. Together, the two units cost $250 million in 1970 dollars. The oldest operating BWR is Constellation’s 644-MW Nine Mile Point 1 in upstate New York, which got an AEC “provisional” license in 1969 and a full-scale commercial license in 1974.
Exelon, which built and owned the plant until it turned over all its nukes to its Constellation Energy subsidiary in 2012, announced plans in 2016 to shut the plant 2018 as well as its Clinton nuclear plant as uneconomic. In 2017, Illinois passed the Future Energy Jobs Bill, which provided subsidies some $1.2 billion in annual subsidies for “clean energy” production, including nuclear power plants. Exelon abandoned its plans to close the plants.
The Quad Cities NRC operating license expires at the end of 2032, after a 2004 license extension.
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