Doug Fabrizio
The devastation wrought in Mexico City by a recent massive earthquake may have rattled more than a few nerves along the Wasatch Front. Salt Lake City is, of course, overdue for a significant seismic event. So are other places in the United States, such as Los Angeles, the Pacific Northwest, even New York City. In a new book, science writer Kathryn Miles tours the country in search of the latest research on America’s next big earthquake and what’s being done to address the threat. She joins us Wednesday to talk about it.
Kathryn Miles is the author of several books, including her newest, Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake [Independent bookstores|Amazon|Audible].
Learn more about predicting earthquakes in Utah and how well the state’s buildings could stand-up to a great shake from KUER’s news team.
Friday, February 27, 2026
USGS Evidence Shows Power of the Sixth Seal (March 3, 2026)
New Evidence Shows Power of East Coast Earthquakes
Virginia Earthquake Triggered Landslides at Great Distances
Released: 11/6/2012 8:30:00 AM USGS.gov
Earthquake shaking in the eastern United States can travel much farther and cause damage over larger areas than previously thought.
“We used landslides as an example and direct physical evidence to see how far-reaching shaking from east coast earthquakes could be,” said Randall Jibson, USGS scientist and lead author of this study. “Not every earthquake will trigger landslides, but we can use landslide distributions to estimate characteristics of earthquake energy and how far regional ground shaking could occur.”
“Scientists are confirming with empirical data what more than 50 million people in the eastern U.S. experienced firsthand: this was one powerful earthquake,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. “Calibrating the distance over which landslides occur may also help us reach back into the geologic record to look for evidence of past history of major earthquakes from the Virginia seismic zone.”
This study will help inform earthquake hazard and risk assessments as well as emergency preparedness, whether for landslides or other earthquake effects.
The research is being presented today at the Geological Society of America conference, and will be published in the December 2012 issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
The USGS found that the farthest landslide from the 2011 Virginia earthquake was 245 km (150 miles) from the epicenter. This is by far the greatest landslide distance recorded from any other earthquake of similar magnitude. Previous studies of worldwide earthquakes indicated that landslides occurred no farther than 60 km (36 miles) from the epicenter of a magnitude 5.8 earthquake.
“What makes this new study so unique is that it provides direct observational evidence from the largest earthquake to occur in more than 100 years in the eastern U.S,” said Jibson. “Now that we know more about the power of East Coast earthquakes, equations that predict ground shaking might need to be revised.”
It is estimated that approximately one-third of the U.S. population could have felt last year’s earthquake in Virginia, more than any earthquake in U.S. history. About 148,000 people reported their ground-shaking experiences caused by the earthquake on the USGS “Did You Feel It?” website. Shaking reports came from southeastern Canada to Florida and as far west as Texas.
In addition to the great landslide distances recorded, the landslides from the 2011 Virginia earthquake occurred in an area 20 times larger than expected from studies of worldwide earthquakes. Scientists plotted the landslide locations that were farthest out and then calculated the area enclosed by those landslides. The observed landslides from last year’s Virginia earthquake enclose an area of about 33,400 km2, while previous studies indicated an expected area of about 1,500 km2from an earthquake of similar magnitude.
“The landslide distances from last year’s Virginia earthquake are remarkable compared to historical landslides across the world and represent the largest distance limit ever recorded,” said Edwin Harp, USGS scientist and co-author of this study. “There are limitations to our research, but the bottom line is that we now have a better understanding of the power of East Coast earthquakes and potential damage scenarios.”
Learn more about the 2011 central Virginia earthquake.A Closer Look At The Sixth Seal of NYC (March 3, 2026)
A Look at the Tri-State’s Active Fault Line
Monday, March 14, 2011
The Ramapo Fault is the longest fault in the Northeast that occasionally makes local headlines when minor tremors cause rock the Tri-State region. It begins in Pennsylvania, crosses the Delaware River and continues through Hunterdon, Somerset, Morris, Passaic and Bergen counties before crossing the Hudson River near Indian Point nuclear facility.
In the past, it has generated occasional activity that generated a 2.6 magnitude quake in New Jersey’s Peakpack/Gladstone area and 3.0 magnitude quake in Mendham.
But the New Jersey-New York region is relatively seismically stable according to Dr. Dave Robinson, Professor of Geography at Rutgers. Although it does have activity.
“There is occasional seismic activity in New Jersey,” said Robinson. “There have been a few quakes locally that have been felt and done a little bit of damage over the time since colonial settlement — some chimneys knocked down in Manhattan with a quake back in the 18th century, but nothing of a significant magnitude.”
Robinson said the Ramapo has on occasion registered a measurable quake but has not caused damage: “The Ramapo fault is associated with geological activities back 200 million years ago, but it’s still a little creaky now and again,” he said.
“More recently, in the 1970s and early 1980s, earthquake risk along the Ramapo Fault received attention because of its proximity to Indian Point,” according to the New Jersey Geological Survey website.
Historically, critics of the Indian Point Nuclear facility in Westchester County, New York, did cite its proximity to the Ramapo fault line as a significant risk.
“Subsequent investigations have shown the 1884 Earthquake epicenter was actually located in Brooklyn, New York, at least 25 miles from the Ramapo Fault,” according to the New Jersey Geological Survey website.Errors Leading to the Sixth Seal in NYC (March 3, 2026)
Independent pipeline study needed
Riverkeeper has joined calls for an independent study to assess the risk to the Indian Point nuclear power plant from the Algonquin pipeline expansion.
In a Jan. 16 letter the Ossining-based environmental group said a safety evaluation prepared by Entergy, the company that operates Indian Point, didn’t adequately account for the effects of a natural gas pipeline rupture. The Algonquin pipeline runs through the power plant’s Buchanan property and it would lie more than 1,600 feet from the power plant structures.
Riverkeeper’s letter to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission echoed an assessment made by Accufacts, a public records research company that called Entergy’s analysis “seriously incomplete, even dismissive.”
On Tuesday Entergy defended its safety study.
“Entergy places plant and community safety first and foremost and is required by federal regulation to analyze new potential safety impacts, such as potential impacts of the proposed AIM pipeline project,” Entergy spokesman Jerry Nappi wrote in an email. “Entergy engineers spent hundreds of hours analyzing data provided by Spectra Energy and concluded the project, if built, would pose no increased risks to safety at the plant. Experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducted their own independent analysis and reached the same conclusion. Entergy takes no position on the pipeline project itself.”
Spectra Energy needs New York and federal permits to expand a pipeline that runs through Putnam, Rockland and Westchester counties. More than 15 miles of the pipeline would be dug up in New York.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation will hold public hearings this week on the pipeline expansion.
The Jan. 21 meeting at 6 p.m. will be held in the auditorium of the Henry H. Wells Middle School, 570 Route 312, Brewster. The 6 p.m. hearing on Jan. 22 at the Stony Point Community Center, 5 Clubhouse Lane, Stony Point.
Twitter: @ErnieJourno
Thursday, February 26, 2026
On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake NYC: March 3, 2026
Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake
Roger BilhamQuakeland: New York and the Sixth Seal (Revelation 6:12)
Given recent seismic activity — political as well as geological — it’s perhaps unsurprising that two books on earthquakes have arrived this season. One is as elegant as the score of a Beethoven symphony; the other resembles a diary of conversations overheard during a rock concert. Both are interesting, and both relate recent history to a shaky future.
Journalist Kathryn Miles’s Quakeland is a litany of bad things that happen when you provoke Earth to release its invisible but ubiquitous store of seismic-strain energy, either by removing fluids (oil, water, gas) or by adding them in copious quantities (when extracting shale gas in hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, or when injecting contaminated water or building reservoirs). To complete the picture, she describes at length the bad things that happen during unprovoked natural earthquakes. As its subtitle hints, the book takes the form of a road trip to visit seismic disasters both past and potential, and seismologists and earthquake engineers who have first-hand knowledge of them. Their colourful personalities, opinions and prejudices tell a story of scientific discovery and engineering remedy.
Miles poses some important societal questions. Aside from human intervention potentially triggering a really damaging earthquake, what is it actually like to live in neighbourhoods jolted daily by magnitude 1–3 earthquakes, or the occasional magnitude 5? Are these bumps in the night acceptable? And how can industries that perturb the highly stressed rocks beneath our feet deny obvious cause and effect? In 2015, the Oklahoma Geological Survey conceded that a quadrupling of the rate of magnitude-3 or more earthquakes in recent years, coinciding with a rise in fracking, was unlikely to represent a natural process. Miles does not take sides, but it’s difficult for the reader not to.
She visits New York City, marvelling at subway tunnels and unreinforced masonry almost certainly scheduled for destruction by the next moderate earthquake in the vicinity. She considers the perils of nuclear-waste storage in Nevada and Texas, and ponders the risks to Idaho miners of rock bursts — spontaneous fracture of the working face when the restraints of many million years of confinement are mined away. She contemplates the ups and downs of the Yellowstone Caldera — North America’s very own mid-continent supervolcano — and its magnificently uncertain future. Miles also touches on geothermal power plants in southern California’s Salton Sea and elsewhere; the vast US network of crumbling bridges, dams and oil-storage farms; and the magnitude 7–9 earthquakes that could hit California and the Cascadia coastline of Oregon and Washington state this century. Amid all this doom, a new elementary school on the coast near Westport, Washington, vulnerable to inbound tsunamis, is offered as a note of optimism. With foresight and much persuasion from its head teacher, it was engineered to become an elevated safe haven.
Miles briefly discusses earthquake prediction and the perils of getting it wrong (embarrassment in New Madrid, Missouri, where a quake was predicted but never materialized; prison in L’Aquila, Italy, where scientists failed to foresee a devastating seismic event) and the successes of early-warning systems, with which electronic alerts can be issued ahead of damaging seismic waves. Yes, it’s a lot to digest, but most of the book obeys the laws of physics, and it is a engaging read. One just can’t help wishing that Miles’s road trips had taken her somewhere that wasn’t a disaster waiting to happen.
Catastrophic damage in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1964, caused by the second-largest earthquake in the global instrumental record.
In The Great Quake, journalist Henry Fountain provides us with a forthright and timely reminder of the startling historical consequences of North America’s largest known earthquake, which more than half a century ago devastated southern Alaska. With its epicentre in Prince William Sound, the 1964 quake reached magnitude 9.2, the second largest in the global instrumental record. It released more energy than either the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake or the 2011 Tohoku earthquake off Japan; and it generated almost as many pages of scientific commentary and description as aftershocks. Yet it has been forgotten by many.
The quake was scientifically important because it occurred at a time when plate tectonics was in transition from hypothesis to theory. Fountain expertly traces the theory’s historical development, and how the Alaska earthquake was pivotal in nailing down one of the most important predictions. The earthquake caused a fjordland region larger than England to subside, and a similarly huge region of islands offshore to rise by many metres; but its scientific implications were not obvious at the time. Eminent seismologists thought that a vertical fault had slipped, drowning forests and coastlines to its north and raising beaches and islands to its south. But this kind of fault should have reached the surface, and extended deep into Earth’s mantle. There was no geological evidence of a monster surface fault separating these two regions, nor any evidence for excessively deep aftershocks. The landslides and liquefied soils that collapsed houses, and the tsunami that severely damaged ports and infrastructure, offered no clues to the cause.
“Previous earthquakes provide clear guidance about present-day vulnerability.” The hero of The Great Quake is the geologist George Plafker, who painstakingly mapped the height reached by barnacles lifted out of the intertidal zone along shorelines raised by the earthquake, and documented the depths of drowned forests. He deduced that the region of subsidence was the surface manifestation of previously compressed rocks springing apart, driving parts of Alaska up and southwards over the Pacific Plate. His finding confirmed a prediction of plate tectonics, that the leading edge of the Pacific Plate plunged beneath the southern edge of Alaska along a gently dipping thrust fault. That observation, once fully appreciated, was applauded by the geophysics community.
Fountain tells this story through the testimony of survivors, engineers and scientists, interweaving it with the fascinating history of Alaska, from early discovery by Europeans to purchase from Russia by the United States in 1867, and its recent development. Were the quake to occur now, it is not difficult to envisage that with increased infrastructure and larger populations, the death toll and price tag would be two orders of magnitude larger than the 139 fatalities and US$300-million economic cost recorded in 1964.
What is clear from these two books is that seismicity on the North American continent is guaranteed to deliver surprises, along with unprecedented economic and human losses. Previous earthquakes provide clear guidance about the present-day vulnerability of US infrastructure and populations. Engineers and seismologists know how to mitigate the effects of future earthquakes (and, in mid-continent, would advise against the reckless injection of waste fluids known to trigger earthquakes). It is merely a matter of persuading city planners and politicians that if they are tempted to ignore the certainty of the continent’s seismic past, they should err on the side of caution when considering its seismic future.
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
Too Late To Evacuate New York City (Revelation 6)
Is It Time to Move Our Cities? | The Tyee
The end of this wretched summer will go unlamented by all North Americans: raging wildfires from B.C. to California, no fewer than three catastrophic hurricanes (so far), and two disastrous earthquakes in southern and central Mexico.
Having grown up in Mexico City when it was a sleepy pueblo of just three million under clear blue skies, I’ve taken its latest earthquake very personally. I went through a couple of minor quakes there, and a big one in July 1957. Even then, everyone knew the Valley of Mexico was a terrible place to build even a pueblo, let alone a huge national capital.
Much of the valley used to be a lake, and the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán was built on islands in it. The conquering Spaniards drained the lake looking for treasure (no luck), and then built a new city on the lake bed. The water kept seeping back. I recall a huge excavation across the street from our house, the intended foundation of a large building; it was a vast rectangular lake, supporting billions of mosquitos.
Downtown, the Palace of Fine Arts had been started circa 1910; it sank into the lake bed, and wasn’t finished until the 1930s. In the 1950s, you had to go down a long flight of stairs from street level to enter it.
Mexico City’s spongy soil, like the Fraser Delta’s, tends to liquefy in severe earthquakes. That made the quakes of 1957 and 1985 notably bad, and led to tougher building codes. But corruption, like love, will always find a way, and almost 50 buildings collapsed in the Sept. 19 quake. Hundreds more will have to be abandoned and demolished.
The quake brought out the very best in the Mexican national character, with neighbours struggling to rescue neighbours. But it’s been a struggle they should not have had to make.
Move Mexico City?
That thought sank in with me when I read a comment on a New York Times report about the quake. The commenter was Jonathan Katz, who was a reporter in Port-au-Prince when the 2010 Haitian earthquake hit, and who stayed on to report the cholera outbreak. He also wrote a superb book about the disasters and our response, which only made them worse.
Katz suggested that the government: “... gradually move Mexico City to somewhere else in Mexico. Mexico City sits on a dried lake bed, terrible seismically because it amplifies earth movements. Buildings also settle (in some cases by a whole storey) and it's in a basin that traps air pollution. Plan a new city on a ridge (good bedrock, fresh breezes) not too far away, and gradually move government offices there. The rest of the city will follow, especially if new building in the old Mexico City is forbidden by zoning.
“Costa Rica did something like this after Cartago was largely destroyed by an earthquake. The capital is now San Jose.”
That’s not the only example Katz could have cited. The capital of colonial Guatemala, now known as Antigua, suffered repeated earthquakes until the capital was moved to what is now Guatemala City. Brazil moved its capital in the early 1960s from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia simply to move both population and national attention away from the coast and into the country’s vast interior. For that matter, Washington, D.C. was a politically chosen capital for the U.S., as was Ottawa.
So Katz’s idea isn’t entirely farfetched. Granted, 21.3 million Mexico City residents aren’t likely to pack up their belongings and move next week. But that population has grown sevenfold since the 1950s because the city was where the money and jobs were. Move the money and jobs elsewhere, and the people will follow.
Megathrust quakes and tsunamis
Those of us on the coasts of North America might start seriously thinking about relocation as well — especially here in B.C. We have focused most of our population in the southwest corner of the province. That’s like most of the population of California, Oregon, Idaho and Washington state choosing to live in San Diego. Our choice has put us at risk of earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires and floods.
We might therefore begin to think where to house ourselves (and likely millions of refugees from the south) in places that would be somewhat safer and more sustainable.
It wouldn’t be easy. Geologically, our whole province is a multi-vehicle crash site of ancient island chains piled up against the Rocky Mountains. We’ll always have earthquakes, large and small.
But we might find some good sites in the Cariboo or Chilcotin. By “mining” our existing coastal cities, we could build new cities relatively cheaply before the coasts go under water. Dams on the Fraser, Skeena and other rivers could preserve glacier meltwater otherwise lost to the rising sea. Genetic engineering could help develop new forests resistant to drought, fire and beetles.
It may seem like a bizarre proposal, but history and prehistory are full of civilizations that stayed put and disappeared, like the Mound Builders of the American Middle West. Over 3,000 years ago, a flourishing civilization in the eastern Mediterranean collapsed under the impact of climate change and invasions.
Other societies moved and changed. The Maya recurrently abandoned their great cities (and their overlords) and went back to small-village farming when serious drought ruined the corn harvests. In New Mexico, the “great house” civilization of the Anasazi deserted its old sites in an 11th-century drought and built a new society — after a dark age of violence and starvation.
We know why those civilizations changed or died, but if we think we’re somehow smarter than they were, we’re the greater fools. We should try to learn from their fate, and act accordingly. Whatever the short-term cost, we might just manage to survive the worst time in humanity’s 300,000-year history. That time has already begun. [Tyee]
The end of this wretched summer will go unlamented by all North Americans: raging wildfires from B.C. to California, no fewer than three catastrophic hurricanes (so far), and two disastrous earthquakes in southern and central Mexico.
Having grown up in Mexico City when it was a sleepy pueblo of just three million under clear blue skies, I’ve taken its latest earthquake very personally. I went through a couple of minor quakes there, and a big one in July 1957. Even then, everyone knew the Valley of Mexico was a terrible place to build even a pueblo, let alone a huge national capital.
Much of the valley used to be a lake, and the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán was built on islands in it. The conquering Spaniards drained the lake looking for treasure (no luck), and then built a new city on the lake bed. The water kept seeping back. I recall a huge excavation across the street from our house, the intended foundation of a large building; it was a vast rectangular lake, supporting billions of mosquitos.
Downtown, the Palace of Fine Arts had been started circa 1910; it sank into the lake bed, and wasn’t finished until the 1930s. In the 1950s, you had to go down a long flight of stairs from street level to enter it.
Mexico City’s spongy soil, like the Fraser Delta’s, tends to liquefy in severe earthquakes. That made the quakes of 1957 and 1985 notably bad, and led to tougher building codes. But corruption, like love, will always find a way, and almost 50 buildings collapsed in the Sept. 19 quake. Hundreds more will have to be abandoned and demolished.
The quake brought out the very best in the Mexican national character, with neighbours struggling to rescue neighbours. But it’s been a struggle they should not have had to make.
Move Mexico City?
That thought sank in with me when I read a comment on a New York Times report about the quake. The commenter was Jonathan Katz, who was a reporter in Port-au-Prince when the 2010 Haitian earthquake hit, and who stayed on to report the cholera outbreak. He also wrote a superb book about the disasters and our response, which only made them worse.
Katz suggested that the government: “... gradually move Mexico City to somewhere else in Mexico. Mexico City sits on a dried lake bed, terrible seismically because it amplifies earth movements. Buildings also settle (in some cases by a whole storey) and it's in a basin that traps air pollution. Plan a new city on a ridge (good bedrock, fresh breezes) not too far away, and gradually move government offices there. The rest of the city will follow, especially if new building in the old Mexico City is forbidden by zoning.
“Costa Rica did something like this after Cartago was largely destroyed by an earthquake. The capital is now San Jose.”
That’s not the only example Katz could have cited. The capital of colonial Guatemala, now known as Antigua, suffered repeated earthquakes until the capital was moved to what is now Guatemala City. Brazil moved its capital in the early 1960s from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia simply to move both population and national attention away from the coast and into the country’s vast interior. For that matter, Washington, D.C. was a politically chosen capital for the U.S., as was Ottawa.
So Katz’s idea isn’t entirely farfetched. Granted, 21.3 million Mexico City residents aren’t likely to pack up their belongings and move next week. But that population has grown sevenfold since the 1950s because the city was where the money and jobs were. Move the money and jobs elsewhere, and the people will follow.
Megathrust quakes and tsunamis
Those of us on the coasts of North America might start seriously thinking about relocation as well — especially here in B.C. We have focused most of our population in the southwest corner of the province. That’s like most of the population of California, Oregon, Idaho and Washington state choosing to live in San Diego. Our choice has put us at risk of earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires and floods.
We might therefore begin to think where to house ourselves (and likely millions of refugees from the south) in places that would be somewhat safer and more sustainable.
It wouldn’t be easy. Geologically, our whole province is a multi-vehicle crash site of ancient island chains piled up against the Rocky Mountains. We’ll always have earthquakes, large and small.
But we might find some good sites in the Cariboo or Chilcotin. By “mining” our existing coastal cities, we could build new cities relatively cheaply before the coasts go under water. Dams on the Fraser, Skeena and other rivers could preserve glacier meltwater otherwise lost to the rising sea. Genetic engineering could help develop new forests resistant to drought, fire and beetles.
It may seem like a bizarre proposal, but history and prehistory are full of civilizations that stayed put and disappeared, like the Mound Builders of the American Middle West. Over 3,000 years ago, a flourishing civilization in the eastern Mediterranean collapsed under the impact of climate change and invasions.
Other societies moved and changed. The Maya recurrently abandoned their great cities (and their overlords) and went back to small-village farming when serious drought ruined the corn harvests. In New Mexico, the “great house” civilization of the Anasazi deserted its old sites in an 11th-century drought and built a new society — after a dark age of violence and starvation.
We know why those civilizations changed or died, but if we think we’re somehow smarter than they were, we’re the greater fools. We should try to learn from their fate, and act accordingly. Whatever the short-term cost, we might just manage to survive the worst time in humanity’s 300,000-year history. That time has already begun. [Tyee]
Monday, February 23, 2026
Why We Are In Trouble At The Sixth Seal in NYC (Revelation 6:12)
Dave Lochbaum
This is the second in a series of commentaries about the vital role nuclear safety inspections conducted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) play in protecting the public. The initial commentary described how NRC inspectors discovered that limits on the maximum allowable control room air temperature at the Columbia Generating Station in Washington had been improperly relaxed by the plant’s owner. This commentary describes a more recent finding by NRC inspectors about animproper safety assessment of a leaking cooling water system pipe on Entergy’s Unit 3 reactor at Indian Point outside New York City.
Indian Point Unit 3: Leak Before Break
On February 3, 2017, the NRC issued Indian Point a Green finding for a violation of Appendix B to 10 CFR Part 50. Specifically, the owner failed to perform an adequate operability review per its procedures after workers discovered water leaking from a service water system pipe.
On April 27, 2016, workers found water leaking from the pipe downstream of the strainer for service water (SW) pump 31. As shown in Figure 1, SW pump 31 is one of six service water pumps located within the intake structure alongside the Hudson River. The six SW pumps are arranged in two sets of three pumps. Figure 1 shows SW pumps 31, 32, and 33 aligned to provide water drawn from the Hudson River to essential (i.e, safety and emergency) components within Unit 3. SW pumps 34, 35, and 36 are aligned to provide cooling water to non-essential equipment within Unit 3.
Fig. 1 (Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Plant Information Book) (click to enlarge)
Each SW pump is designed to deliver 6,000 gallons of flow. During normal operation, one SW pump can handle the essential loads while two SW pumps are needed for the non-essential loads. Under accident conditions, two SW pumps are needed to cool the essential equipment. The onsite emergency diesel generators can power either of the sets of three pumps, but not both simultaneously. If the set of SW pumps aligned to the essential equipment aren’t getting the job done, workers can open/close valves and electrical breakers to reconfigure the second set of three SW pumps to the essential equipment loops.
Because river water can have stuff in it that could clog some of the coolers for essential equipment, each SW pump has a strainer that attempts to remove as much debris as possible from the water. The leak discovered on April 27, 2016, was in the piping between the discharge check valve for SW pump 31 and its strainer. An arrow points to this piping section in Figure 1. The strainers were installed in openings called pits in the thick concrete floor of the intake structure. Water from the leaking pipe flowed into the pit housing the strainer for SW pump 31.
The initial leak rate was modest—estimated to be about one-eighth of a gallon per minute. The leak was similar to other pinhole leaks that had occurred in the concrete-lined, carbon steel SW pipes. The owner began daily checks on the leakage and prepared an operability determination. Basically, “operability determinations” are used within the nuclear industry when safety equipment is found to be impaired or degraded. The operability determination for the service water pipe leak concluded that the impairment did not prevent the SW pumps from fulfilling their required safety function. The operability determination relied on a sump pump located at the bottom of the strainer pit transferring the leaking water out of the pit before the water flooded and submerged safety components.
The daily checks instituted by the owner included workers recording the leak rate and assessing whether it had significantly increased. But the checks were against the previous day’s leak rate rather than the initial leak rate. By September 18, 2016, the leakage had steadily increased by a factor of 64 to 8 gallons per minute. But the daily incremental increases were small enough that they kept workers from finding the overall increase to be significant.
The daily check on October 15, 2016, found the pump room flooded to a depth of several inches. The leak rate was now estimated to be 20 gallons per minute. And the floor drain in the strainer pit was clogged (ironic, huh?) impairing the ability of its sump pump to remove the water. Workers placed temporary sump pumps in the room to remove the flood water and cope with the insignificantly higher leak rate. On October 17, workers installed a clamp on the pipe that reduced the leakage to less than one gallon per minute.
The operability determination was revised in response to concerns expressed by the NRC inspectors. The NRC inspectors were not satisfied by the revised operability determination. It continued to rely on the strainer pit sump pump removing the leaking water. But that sump pump was not powered from the emergency diesel generator and thus would not remove water should offsite power become unavailable. Step 5.6.4 of procedure EN-OP-14, “Operability Determination Process,” stated “If the Operability is based on the use or availability of other equipment, it must be verified that the equipment is capable of performing the function utilized in the evaluation.”
The operability determination explicitly stated that no compensatory measures or operator manual actions were needed to handle the leak, but the situation clearly required both compensatory measures and operator manual actions.
The NRC inspectors found additional deficiencies in the revised operability determination. The NRC inspectors calculated that a 20 gallon per minute leak rate coupled with an unavailable strainer pit sump pump would flood the room to a depth of three feet in three hours. There are no flood alarms in the room and the daily checks might not detect flooding until the level rose to three feet. At that level, water would submerge and potentially disable the vacuum breakers for the SW pumps. Proper vacuum breaker operation could be needed to successfully restart the SW pumps.
The NRC inspectors calculated that the 20 gallon per minute leak rate without remediation would flood the room to the level of the control cabinets for the strainers in 10 hours. The submerged control cabinets could disable the strainers, leading to blocked cooling water flow to essential equipment.
The NRC inspects calculated that the 20 gallon per minute leak rate without remediation would completely fill the room in about 29 hours, or only slightly longer than the daily check interval.
Flooding to depths of 3 feet, 10 feet, and the room’s ceiling affected all six SW pumps. Thus, the flooding represented a common mode threat that could disable the entire service water system. In turn, all safety equipment shown in Figure 2 no longer cooled by the disabled service water system could also be disabled. The NRC estimated that the flooding risk was about 5×10-6 per reactor year, solidly in the Green finding band.
Fig. 2 (Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Plant Information Book) (click to enlarge)
UCS Perspective
“Leak before break” is a longstanding nuclear safety philosophy. Books have been written about it (well, at least one report has been written and may even have been read.) The NRC’s approval of a leak before break analysis can allow the owner of an existing nuclear power reactor to remove pipe whip restraints and jet impingement barriers. Such hardware guarded against the sudden rupture of a pipe filled with high pressure fluid from damaging safety equipment in the area. The leak before break analyses can provide the NRC with sufficient confidence that piping degradation will be detected by observed leakage with remedial actions taken before the pipe fails catastrophically. More than a decade ago, the NRC issued a Knowledge Management document on the leak before break philosophy and acceptable methods of analyzing, monitoring, and responding to piping degradation.
This incident at Indian Point illustrated an equally longstanding nuclear safety practice of “leak before break.” In this case, the leak was indeed followed by a break. But the break was not the failure of the piping but failure of the owner to comply with federal safety regulations. Pipe breaks are bad. Regulation breaks are bad. Deciding which is worse is like trying to decide which eye one wants to be poked in. None is far better than either.
As with the prior Columbia Generating Station case study, this Indian Point case study illustrates the vital role that NRC’s enforcement efforts plays in nuclear safety. Even after NRC inspectors voiced clear concerns about the improperly evaluated service water system pipe leak, Entergy failed to properly evaluate the situation, thus violating federal safety regulations. To be fair to Entergy, the company was probably doing its best, but in recent years, Entergy’s best has been far below nuclear industry average performance levels.
The NRC’s ROP is the public’s best protection against hazards caused by aging nuclear power reactors, shrinking maintenance budgets, emerging sabotage threats, and Entergy.Replacing the NRC’s engineering inspections with self-assessments by Entergy would lessen the effectiveness of that protective shield.
The NRC must continue to protect the public to the best of its ability. Delegating safety checks to owners like Entergy is inconsistent with that important mission.
Support from UCS members make work like this possible. Will you join us? Help UCS advance independent science for a healthy environment and a safer world.he Hudson River. The six SW pumps are arranged in two sets of three pumps. Figure 1 shows SW pumps 31, 32, and 33 aligned to provide water drawn from the Hudson River to essential (i.e, safety and emergency) components within Unit 3. SW pumps 34, 35, and 36 are aligned to provide cooling water to non-essential equipment within Unit 3. Fig. 1 (Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Plant Information Book) (click to enlarge) Each SW pump is designed to deliver 6,000 gallons of flow. During normal operation, one SW pump can handle the essential loads while two SW pumps are needed for the non-essential loads. Under accident conditions, two SW pumps are needed to cool the essential equipment. The onsite emergency diesel generators can power either of the sets of three pumps, but not both simultaneously. If the set of SW pumps aligned to the essential equipment aren’t getting the job done, workers can open/close valves and electrical breakers to reconfigure the second set of three SW pumps to the essential equipment loops. Because river water can have stuff in it that could clog some of the coolers for essential equipment, each SW pump has a strainer that attempts to remove as much debris as possible from the water. The leak discovered on April 27, 2016, was in the piping between the discharge check valve for SW pump 31 and its strainer. An arrow points to this piping section in Figure 1. The strainers were installed in openings called pits in the thick concrete floor of the intake structure. Water from the leaking pipe flowed into the pit housing the strainer for SW pump 31. The initial leak rate was modest—estimated to be about one-eighth of a gallon per minute. The leak was similar to other pinhole leaks that had occurred in the concrete-lined, carbon steel SW pipes. The owner began daily checks on the leakage and prepared an operability determination. Basically, “operability determinations” are used within the nuclear industry when safety equipment is found to be impaired or degraded. The operability determination for the service water pipe leak concluded that the impairment did not prevent the SW pumps from fulfilling their required safety function. The operability determination relied on a sump pump located at the bottom of the strainer pit transferring the leaking water out of the pit before the water flooded and submerged safety components. The daily checks instituted by the owner included workers recording the leak rate and assessing whether it had significantly increased. But the checks were against the previous day’s leak rate rather than the initial leak rate. By September 18, 2016, the leakage had steadily increased by a factor of 64 to 8 gallons per minute. But the daily incremental increases were small enough that they kept workers from finding the overall increase to be significant. The daily check on October 15, 2016, found the pump room flooded to a depth of several inches. The leak rate was now estimated to be 20 gallons per minute. And the floor drain in the strainer pit was clogged (ironic, huh?) impairing the ability of its sump pump to remove the water. Workers placed temporary sump pumps in the room to remove the flood water and cope with the insignificantly higher leak rate. On October 17, workers installed a clamp on the pipe that reduced the leakage to less than one gallon per minute. The operability determination was revised in response to concerns expressed by the NRC inspectors. The NRC inspectors were not satisfied by the revised operability determination. It continued to rely on the strainer pit sump pump removing the leaking water. But that sump pump was not powered from the emergency diesel generator and thus would not remove water should offsite power become unavailable. Step 5.6.4 of procedure EN-OP-14, “Operability Determination Process,” stated “If the Operability is based on the use or availability of other equipment, it must be verified that the equipment is capable of performing the function utilized in the evaluation.” The operability determination explicitly stated that no compensatory measures or operator manual actions were needed to handle the leak, but the situation clearly required both compensatory measures and operator manual actions. The NRC inspectors found additional deficiencies in the revised operability determination. The NRC inspectors calculated that a 20 gallon per minute leak rate coupled with an unavailable strainer pit sump pump would flood the room to a depth of three feet in three hours. There are no flood alarms in the room and the daily checks might not detect flooding until the level rose to three feet. At that level, water would submerge and potentially disable the vacuum breakers for the SW pumps. Proper vacuum breaker operation could be needed to successfully restart the SW pumps. The NRC inspectors calculated that the 20 gallon per minute leak rate without remediation would flood the room to the level of the control cabinets for the strainers in 10 hours. The submerged control cabinets could disable the strainers, leading to blocked cooling water flow to essential equipment. The NRC inspects calculated that the 20 gallon per minute leak rate without remediation would completely fill the room in about 29 hours, or only slightly longer than the daily check interval. Flooding to depths of 3 feet, 10 feet, and the room’s ceiling affected all six SW pumps. Thus, the flooding represented a common mode threat that could disable the entire service water system. In turn, all safety equipment shown in Figure 2 no longer cooled by the disabled service water system could also be disabled. The NRC estimated that the flooding risk was about 5×10-6 per reactor year, solidly in the Green finding band. Fig. 2 (Source: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Plant Information Book) (click to enlarge) UCS Perspective “Leak before break” is a longstanding nuclear safety philosophy. Books have been written about it (well, at least one report has been written and may even have been read.) The NRC’s approval of a leak before break analysis can allow the owner of an existing nuclear power reactor to remove pipe whip restraints and jet impingement barriers. Such hardware guarded against the sudden rupture of a pipe filled with high pressure fluid from damaging safety equipment in the area. The leak before break analyses can provide the NRC with sufficient confidence that piping degradation will be detected by observed leakage with remedial actions taken before the pipe fails catastrophically. More than a decade ago, the NRC issued a Knowledge Management document on the leak before break philosophy and acceptable methods of analyzing, monitoring, and responding to piping degradation. This incident at Indian Point illustrated an equally longstanding nuclear safety practice of “leak before break.” In this case, the leak was indeed followed by a break. But the break was not the failure of the piping but failure of the owner to comply with federal safety regulations. Pipe breaks are bad. Regulation breaks are bad. Deciding which is worse is like trying to decide which eye one wants to be poked in. None is far better than either. As with the prior Columbia Generating Station case study, this Indian Point case study illustrates the vital role that NRC’s enforcement efforts plays in nuclear safety. Even after NRC inspectors voiced clear concerns about the improperly evaluated service water system pipe leak, Entergy failed to properly evaluate the situation, thus violating federal safety regulations. To be fair to Entergy, the company was probably doing its best, but in recent years, Entergy’s best has been far below nuclear industry average performance levels. The NRC’s ROP is the public’s best protection against hazards caused by aging nuclear power reactors, shrinking maintenance budgets, emerging sabotage threats, and Entergy.Replacing the NRC’s engineering inspections with self-assessments by Entergy would lessen the effectiveness of that protective shield. The NRC must continue to protect the public to the best of its ability. Delegating safety checks to owners like Entergy is inconsistent with that important mission. Support from UCS members make work like this possible. Will you join us? Help UCS advance independent science for a healthy environment and a safer world.
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