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Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Lots of unfortunate "could have"s

 Whoops

Improperly calibrated monitoring equipment at Entergy’s Waterford 3 nuclear power plant could have low-balled the public health threat of radioactive gases released had there been an accident during three months in 2022, according to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Entergy officials notified NRC inspectors of the problem during an Oct. 23 to Dec. 7 inspection of Waterford’s emergency preparedness programs. Incorrect engineering conversion factors for measuring gases were loaded into the radiological dose assessment modeling software of two “wide range gas monitors” at the plant that are used in emergency responses, according to a Jan. 12 NRC letter.

The letter — from Mary Muessle, director of NRC’s division of radiological safety and security, to John Ferrick, a vice president with Entergy Operations Inc. — said the errors resulted in readings that were 30.5% lower than the actual radiological conditions, which would have made public health and on-site dose calculations inaccurate

The thingy that measures how hot the radioactive gasses *could have* been *if* any such gasses were to escape has since been fixed.  One wonders if it had been turned down too far to overcompensate for this. 

Waterford 3 was actually placed under increased oversight by the NRC in September because of another incident involving improper calibration of radiation monitors that could have triggered unnecessary evacuations.

It’s unclear whether last year's inspection was added as a result of the earlier problem, where NRC found radiation monitors at the plant were being calibrated improperly between January 2011 and February 2022.

Anyway this is why I always say it's a good idea to get one of those hanging oven thermometers so you can watch whatever it is you are baking instead of just relying on what the display says. Who knows what's really going on in there.

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