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US Nuclear Power Plants -Showing their Age. Case Study: Core Shroud Cracking (1995)

Author	Robert Pollard, Union of Concerned Scientists
Date	September 1995
Classification	3.01.0.20/14 (UNITED STATES - SAFETY)
Front

Abstract

As more nuclear power plants approach middle age, it is becoming increasingly 
clear that a wide variety of degradation mechanisms pose significant economic and 
safety risks. Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) confirmed that age-
related degradation in boiling water reactors (BWRs) will damage or destroy vital 
internal components well before the standard 40-year BWR license expires, federal 
regulators must now seriously address the future safety and engineering implications 
of multiple component failures in BWRs. State regulators must also take a long-range 
view and reexamine the cost-effectiveness of their current response to the aging-
reactor crisis-a response that favors a piecemeal, fix-or-replace-at-any-cost strategy. 
And they must put in place the necessary financial incentives to minimize future costs 
to their customers without compromising nuclear plant operating safety standards.

This paper focuses on just one age-related problem confronting the nuclear power 
industry: degradation of the internal components in BWR pressure vessels. This study 
found that the nuclear industry-the regulated and the regulators alike-is not prepared 
to deal with the grave age-related problems that lie ahead. Prudent officials at all 
levels of government need to adopt a broad-gauged management plan to meet current 
and future engineering and economic challenges. A piecemeal, one-component-at-a-
time approach may have been appropriate in the past, but it is simply no longer in 
the public interest, nor in the interest of the nuclear industry, to continue in this 
manner.

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