Around 185 Entergy Palisades workers exposed to 2.8 R in month-long job

Workers pictured at Palisades last spring doing repair work on top of the reactor vessel head. Entergy provided this and other photos of the work to the NRC.As reported by Lindsey Smith at Michigan Radio, around 185 workers at Entergy's Palisades atomic reactor in Michigan were exposed to 2.8 Rem of radioactivity exposure on a single project last year. From Feb. to March, 2014, the Control Rod Drive Mechanisms at Palisades were replaced, due to chronic seal and through-wall leakage that dates back to 1972.

2.8 Rem of exposure violates Entergy's self-imposed ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) limits of 2 Rem/year for workers. 2 Rem/year for nuclear workers is the national standard in Germany, which will completely phase out reactor operations by 2022 as a direct response to the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe.

However, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows, or permits, up to 5 Rem/year of exposure to nuclear workers. Members of the general public, by comparison, are only allowed to receive 100 milliRem, or 0.1 Rem, per year of exposure to artificial radioactivity from the nuclear power industry. Thus, in a single month, 185 workers at Palisades were exposed to 28 times the amount of harmful radioactivity allowed for members of the general public in an entire year.

Update on January 13, 2015 by admin

Note that while MI Radio initially reported that 185 workers were involved in the incident, Entergy Nuclear's Site Vice President, Anthony Vitale, confirmed at the Jan. 13th regulatory conference that 192 workers were involved.

Update on February 12, 2015 by admin

NRC has just released it meeting summary of the Jan. 13th regulatory conference. However, a month after the regulatory conference, and a full year after the over-exposure of 192 Palisades' workers, NRC has still not determined the severity level of the violations. NRC preliminarily had determined the violations to be a White Finding, but Entergy Nuclear has urged NRC to lower the violations to a Green Finding.

A White Finding could put Palisades back on NRC's degraded performance, increased oversight, short list, something Entergy would very much like to avoid.

Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer of Fairewinds Associates, and the expert witness in the reactor pressure vessel embrittlement/pressurized thermal shock intervention filed by a coalition of environmental groups, including Beyond Nuclear, at Palisades, prepared a statement for the Jan. 13 regulatory conference. However, after listening in by phone, and waiting through, the 3.5 hour long regulatory conference (which was only supposed to last 1.5 hours), when Arnie went to read his prepared statement out loud, via phone, NRC cut him off. They wouldn't let him.

NRC announced that questions only would be allowed, but no comments (an arbitrary rule they hadn't announced before that very moment!). So Arnie asked, why isn't this violation being elevated to a more serious Yellow Finding? (In increasing order of severity, NRC's color coded violation designations go from Green, to White, to Yellow, to Red.)

The NRC's summary list of questions and NRC's "answers," does not even list Arnie's question, much less address it.

Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps, who attended the regulatory conference in person, also asked questions not listed there, let alone addressed. Kevin asked, for example, why NRC allowed 192 Palisades' workers to receive 2.8 Rem each, on average, in a month-long job, when Germany's nuclear workers are only allowed to receive 2 Rem in an entire year.

NRC also censored other questions that day. One public listener had emailed questions to the NRC point of contact for the meeting, as instructed, only to be told that Kevin had already asked that question, so it wouldn't be asked again. However, the person's questions had included a number Kevin had not asked.

Another member of the public tried to ask a question by phone, but was never allowed to.

So it seems NRC only acknowledges certain questions, ones it wants to deal with, and ignores the ones it doesn't want to deal with.

In over two decades of interacting with NRC, Kevin has stated this was one of the worst, most disrespectful, most upsetting treatments of the public he has ever experienced, which is really saying something. He considers NRC a rogue agency colluding with the industry it is supposed to be regulating. This entire episode is a real case in point.

But the worst part is, 192 Palisades workers were exposed to large, harmful radiation doses in just this single, month-long job.

As the U.S. National Academy of Science has affirmed, over and over again for decades now, in its seven Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) reports, any exposure to ionizing radiation, no matter how small the dose, carries a health risk for cancer. And these risks accumulate for a lifetime.

(Of course, genetic damage is also a distinct possibility -- and in this incident, workers' reproductive organs were exposed.)

Update on February 23, 2015 by admin

On Feb. 23, 2015, NRC officially concluded that the Feb.-March, 2014 over-exposure of 192 workers at Palisades to an average dose of 2.8 Rem constituted a White Finding. See the NRC's Final Significance Determination, here.