Platts - Thursday, October 09, 2003 
http://www.platts.com

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Washington (Nuclear News Flashes)--9Oct2003

Entergy required to pay $51,000 to antinuclear group

Vermont regulators ordered Entergy to pay $51,000 to
antinuclear group New England Coalition and its
consultants as compensation for failing to make
accessible certain discovery materials. The Vermont
Public Service Board also extended by several months a
proceeding on Entergy's request for an extended uprate
at Vermont Yankee. Although NRC is responsible for
making a decision on the technical merits of the uprate,
Entergy had agreed when it bought the unit to allow the
state to conduct a review of the proposal. The original
schedule had called for a final decision by Oct. 31.
Hearings are now set for Jan. 12-15, and a final
decision by March 15, 2004. The schedule bumps up
against a scheduled spring refueling outage, when some
of the modifications were to be performed. Plant
spokesman Rob Williams said the company is still
reviewing the decision, which it received late Oct. 8,
and added it "has always been our intent to be
responsive" in the hearing process.

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Washington (Nuclear News Flashes)--9Oct2003

Leaking CRDM housing at Seabrook being repaired

Crews are repairing a small leak found on a Seabrook
control rod drive mechanism (CRDM) housing, said FPL
Energy spokesman Alan Griffith. He said the leak,
discovered Oct. 7 during an inspection conducted while
the unit was down for refueling, is to be repaired with
an "off-the-shelf" Westinghouse clamp that will be
placed around the problematic weld. Griffith said the
leak was caught and repaired early and is not expected
to prolong the scheduled monthlong outage. Tests of the
boric acid deposits, which were still wet, indicated the
leak probably started two or three weeks ago, he said.
Griffith didn't know the leak rate but said it was "well
below" the technical specifications and so small that
workers described it as "leaching." Unlike at
FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co.'s Davis-Besse, the
Seabrook leak was not on the reactor vessel head but on
one of the CRDM housing pipes. He said there are 70
CRDMs, 58 of them containing control rods and 12
containing "dummy" rods. The leak detected was on one of
the latter.

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Port Clinton, Ohio (Nuclear News Flashes)--8Oct2003

Davis-Besse restart projections shift

FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co. (Fenoc) now says it
will be ready to restart Davis-Besse in mid-November at
the earliest. The company has said for several weeks it
plans to be ready for restart by Dec. 21. At an Oct. 7
meeting of the NRC committee overseeing the plant's
restart, Fenoc officials told the panel that equipment
repairs should be finished "the end of the second week
in November." NRC has previously said its final
inspections will take a week or two after those repairs
are completed. Panel chair John Grobe hinted at this
week's meeting of an even longer delay. "At this point
in a recovery, it's easy to see the light at the end of
the tunnel from a hardware [equipment] perspective" but
"more challenging" to see it from a human performance
perspective, he said, referring to the latter issue as a
"software" matter. "I haven't seen any software actions
necessarily" to match Davis-Besse's hardware actions, he
said. 

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Paris (Nuclear News Flashes)--8Oct2003

French official favors building an EPR demo unit

France edged closer to construction of an EPR Oct. 8 as
Industry Minister Nicole Fontaine said she would
recommend that Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin
"choose" the 1,600-MW Framatome ANP advanced PWR design
for construction of a demonstration unit. She said she
came to the conclusion after learning in a recent
national energy policy debate that fourth-generation
models wouldn't be ready in time to start replacing
existing reactors in 2020. Plus, she said, the EPR is
"10 times safer than existing nuclear power plants,"
"10% more competitive," and produces less waste.
Fontaine said the EPR demonstration unit will cost 3-
billion euros (U.S.$3.5-billion), "identical to that of
the previous (N4 reactor) model." She says the EPR "will
not be subsidized." If Raffarin follows Fontaine's
advice, which is likely, Electricite de France (EDF)
would be authorized to order a demo unit in the near
future. Fontaine aides said construction wouldn't begin
for at least three years and the unit wouldn't go on
line until 2012-2013. They said once the political green
light is given, "it's up to EDF" and potential partners
to decide what to build, where and when.

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