Claim Raises Questions About Nuclear Plant
Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 8:48 amWASHINGTON, April 5 — The owner of an Ohio nuclear plant has asked its insurance company to pay for two years of lost production after a corrosion problem that it called “unexpected and unforeseeable,” even though it had resisted government pressure to inspect for acid leaks just before the problem was uncovered in 2002.
The corrosion in the lid of the reactor vessel at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant near Toledo ate nearly all the way through the steel, with a chunk of metal the size of a football missing and nothing holding in the cooling water that surrounded the radioactive core but a thin liner of stainless steel.
Before the power plant’s owner, the First Energy Nuclear Operating Company, discovered the problem during routine maintenance, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had ordered inspections of all reactors of that type to see if there was any damage around the vessel head. The company had petitioned for a delay, which the agency granted. Click here to read the rest of this article.