Refueling outage at Fermi 2 complicated, delayed due to coronavirus cases among workers

NRC file photo of the Fermi 2 atomic reactor, on the Lake Erie shore in Frenchtown Township, Monroe County, MichiganAs reported by Tom Henry in the the Toledo Blade.

The article quotes David Lochbaum, who currently serves Beyond Nuclear as an expert witness, and has served as a technical advisor to Don't Waste Michigan in a recent emergency enforcement petition to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission regarding Fermi 2:

David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety consultant who previously spent years with the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists as a nuclear safety engineer, said the NRC stated in an August, 2000 report that “risk spikes” during outages at boiling-water reactors like Fermi 2 “are primarily the result of human errors during these processes.”

Mr. Lochbaum, who lives in Tennessee and also worked in the nuclear industry for 14 years, said the NRC “knows that risks during BWR refueling outages can spike to levels higher than during reactor operation.”

“The NRC knows that the risk spikes are due primarily to human error,” he said. “The NRC knows that long hours degrade human performance. The NRC knows that it relaxed the limits established to guard against worker fatigue. The NRC is not clueless about risk during refueling. The NRC is spineless about properly managing that risk.”

The article also quotes Terry Lodge, an attorney in Toledo, Ohio who has served Beyond Nuclear as legal counsel numerous times in reactor and radioactive waste legal interventions:

Terry Lodge, a Toledo-based nuclear activist and lawyer, said he wonders “how much hemorrhaging of their work plan took place before they suspended most operations.”