newjerseynewsroom.com

BY ROGER WITHERSPOON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Robert Aleksick was emphatic.

“FAC is like roaches,” he said, spreading his arms wide in a gesture of exasperation. “Where you see one, there are bound to be more hidden away.”

Aleksick should know about these hidden pests. As president of CSI Technologies, Inc., he is one of the nation’s foremost experts on FACs, or Flow Assisted Corrosion, a condition of degradation on the inside of pipes carrying superheated, radioactive water under high pressure conditions. If undetected, FACs could lead to pipe ruptures and, in a worse case, loss of coolant to a nuclear reactor.

Whether or not technicians at the Indian Point nuclear power plants could spot where those roaches or FACs could be hiding, or predict where they might try to hide over the next 20 years was the subject of an intense dispute at the opening of months of judicial hearings last week. A three judge panel of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, meeting in Tarrytown, is wading through arguments over a dozen challenges to applications from Entergy Nuclear to renew the licenses of its twin plants, Indian Point 2 and 3, for another 20 years. Entergy purchased Indian Point 2 from Consolidated Edison and Indian Point 3 from the New York Power Authority in 2000, and their current 40-year licenses expire in 2013 and 2015, respectively. The board’s findings will be presented to the five members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who can accept or reject their ruling.

The challenges, buttressed by more than 1,400 exhibits, were filed by the New York Attorney General’s office, and the non-profit environmental groups Clearwater and Riverkeeper. New York’s challenges, or contentions, are backed up by Connecticut Attorney General Robert Snook, whose office is also represented at the legal proceeding.

Collectively, the contentions challenge different aspects of Entergy’s plans for ensuring the safe operation of the twin nuclear reactors over the next 20 years and the maintenance of the spent fuel pool for decades after the plants finally retire. Under current NRC rules, the highly radioactive fuel rods could sit at the plant site for a century after the plants shut down, whether or not Entergy, as a company, is still in existence and capable of taking care of them.

The opening arguments presented a sharp contrast between the confidence Entergy has in its approach to long term management of ageing pipes and wiring, and the skepticism the state of New York and the environmental groups have in those monitoring systems.

Aleksick, an expert witness for Entergy, dueled with Joram Hopenfeld, who testified for Riverkeeper and Clearwater that the primary system for predicting and detecting deterioration in the wall thickness in critical pipe systems was flawed. Hopenfeld a specialist in pipe corrosion, who once worked for the NRC, pointed to the results of sonic tests by Entergy showing wall thickness readings of 1.3 inches and .5 inches in a curve in a 1.5-inch thick pipe.

Hopenfeld said the data supplied by Entergy showed that “the tests Entergy is relying on are designed to show overall averages. But the actual sonic tests show there is uneven wear due to FAC and the pipe is not going to hold.”

But Aleksick said the uneven readings were due to lamination, or flaws in the metal, which caused the sonic probe to bounce back prematurely. “When you come across lamination,” Aleksick said, “it will give an erroneous reading. The example here of different thicknesses is due to lamination, not to actual wall thinning.

“I completely reject the assertion that this data set represents huge variations in the thickness and strength of the pipe wall.”

Whenever Entergy’s ultrasound probes find apparent variation, Aleksick explained, the company proceeds with a series of more extensive tests to determine for certain if the pipe wall has been corroded or if the metal has flaws that are similar to the way knots in a tree trunk would mar the symmetry of the wood.

The argument seemed to resonate with Judge Richard Wardwell, who holds a doctorate in civil engineering from Colorado State University and has served as Maine’s Chair of the Board of Environmental Protection.

“It seems to me that this is an anomaly,” said Wardwell to Hopenfeld. “I’m thinking that what we heard from Entergy was that they took the data, looked at the anomaly, and they don’t believe that it measures wall thickness. I am struggling to see how you arrive at the different conclusion.”

Undeterred, Hopenfeld asked “supposed you were buying a new piping system for your home, Judge, and the plumbing company said they have this pipe system, but there were anomalies in the metal pipes wall and the probes could not be relied upon to tell you how they were holding up over time. Would you buy it?”