Registered: Aug 2000
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Nuclear Agency Changes Its Stance on a Fire Safety Proposal

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 — After 10 years of struggling to make reactor owners modify their plants to protect electrical cables from fire, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now proposing to amend its own rules, retroactively legalizing an alternate strategy used by many plants but never formally approved.

The change involves the cables that connect the control room with pumps, valves and other equipment needed to shut down a plant safely.

Previously, the commission wanted the reactors to separate the control cables for redundant equipment, or install fire detection and suppression equipment or fire barriers, so a single fire could not disable all the cables. It now proposes to accept letting the plants designate technicians who would run through the plant and operate equipment by hand if the control cables had burned away.

Among the questions raised by the new strategy is whether workers could get to the equipment, through the heat, smoke, radiation, and steam that might be present in a fire.

Fire has been a concern since March 1975, when a worker at one of the Tennessee Valley Authority's three Brown's Ferry reactors, in northern Alabama, accidentally set a fire with a candle that he was using to search for an air leak. The fire made it difficult to operate the equipment needed to shut down the plant and to monitor its condition.

....relying on manual actions would mean that plant workers would be counted on to perform heroic, or even suicidal, tasks.


(The whole story is here; application for free membership may be required.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/politics/29NUKE.html

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