NRC Event Reports

FERMI -  HIGH PRESSURE COOLANT INJECTION SYSTEM INOPERABLE - Retracted

ABB INC. - PART 21 NOTIFICATION - DEFECTIVE HK AND K-LINE CIRCUIT BREAKER TENSION SPRINGS

MiamiHerald.com - Miami,FL,USA

Licensed nuclear operators at Turkey Point sit at control panels staring at meters that generally don't do much. For this, they can earn up to $150,000 a year, including plentiful overtime, plus another $50,000 or so in bonuses. So why complain about their bosses at Florida Power & Light?

''The work atmosphere there is horrible,'' says Thomas Saporito, a Turkey Point worker who was fired in 1988 but has stayed in touch with many workers since then. ``No one wants to work at the plant because of the retaliatory atmosphere there. People are afraid to make complaints about safety.''

MiamiHerald.com - Miami,FL,USA

In Miami federal court, 20 nuclear operators are suing Florida Power & Light, claiming that the company is improperly calculating their overtime.

FPL says the claims are ''without merit,'' and on the surface the legal issues may seem arcane. But the underlying situation explains a lot about what has been happening with the workforce at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant.

The core issue involves bonuses in which operators can get $40,000 or $50,000 a year in addition to their regular salaries, which can easily run over $100,000 with overtime.

Overtime is important at Turkey Point because there is so much of it. The lawsuit says that for most operators ``an average work week is 60 or 70 hours or more.''

Huge amounts of overtime is an industry-wide issue, because of a long-time shortage of nuclear operators that companies are still struggling to address, although if the lawsuit's numbers are correct, FPL appears to have more overtime than most nuclear utilities.

If the operators work an average of 60 hours a week with two weeks of vacation a year, that works out to 1,000 hours of overtime a year.

MiamiHerald.com - Miami,FL,USAT

he top nuclear operator at Turkey Point resigned after a huge outage because he felt his bosses were demanding an unsafe restart.

At 1:09 one afternoon last year, 90 metal rods slid into the cores of the two nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, part of an automatic shutdown that had been triggered by a utility worker's blunder moments earlier at a substation miles away. A million customers lost power.

Florida Power & Light executives ordered that the reactors be back online within 12 hours, according to court documents. The plant's top nuclear operator, David Hoffman, said that would be dangerous. When FPL executives disagreed with him, he walked out at 8 p.m., refusing to participate in actions he felt were unsafe.

At 11:49 that night, Feb. 26, 2008, he submitted a heated resignation letter, blasting FPL for constantly putting cost savings ahead of safety and creating a horrible morale problem. ''People are not valued and are treated like equipment and numbers,'' Hoffman wrote.

Hoffman's charge offers a rare insight into safety complaints made by nuclear workers, who are often forbidden by contract from saying anything negative about their bosses. The information came to light because FPL is suing him for the return of a bonus, and he's charging in a countersuit that the utility is improperly trying to silence his complaints about safety.

MiamiHerald.com - Miami,FL,USA

Five times since 2000, operators of U.S. nuclear power plants have been found slumped over their controls asleep, according to federal documents.

Hanford News     Senate approval of a new federal spending bill means Hanford is likely to receive $146.5 million more for cleanup projects this year than was proposed by the Bush administration.

The 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Bill approved Tuesday also includes money for other Mid-Columbia projects planned by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Kadlec Medical Center, Ben Franklin Transit, the Port of Benton and Hanford's historic B Reactor.

NOVINITE.com - Sofia News Agency   Interview with Bulgarian MEP Atanas Paparizov  -  From The New Europe (European weekly)    The Russian-Ukraine gas crisis in the middle of the heavy winter put Bulgaria in the worse possible position.

The Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) -

Energy Secretary Steven Chu sought Wednesday to assure skeptical senators that the Obama administration supports continued development of nuclear energy, even as it backs away from building a nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

Monroenews.com - Monroe,MI,USA

TE Energy officials defended their federal application, saying it would be a prudent investment in Michigan's energy future.