Dominion Says Crack Found at North Anna Containment Building
Dominion Resources Inc. found a small crack on a wall with “no safety significance” in a room of a containment building at the North Anna nuclear plant after an Aug. 23 earthquake in Virginia, a company official said.
The fissure was a “superficial crack in a wall that serves no safety significance,” Dominion spokesman Richard Zuercher said today in an interview.
The 5.8-magnitude earthquake may have caused ground motion that surpassed the power plant’s design, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Aug. 29. The facility’s two reactors, located about 11 miles (18 kilometers) from the epicenter, are shut until the company and NRC complete their analysis of data from the facility following the temblor.
Dominion, based in Richmond, Virginia, expects the seismic study to be complete by the end of next week, Dan Stoddard, the company’s senior vice president for nuclear operations, told reporters today before conducting a tour of the facility.
Inspections so far have found “no significant damage,” according to Stoddard.
Dominion won’t restart the reactors “until we have completed the inspections and testing and we are highly confident that these units can operate safely and reliably,” he said.
‘Cosmetic’ Crack
Dominion discovered a “cosmetic” crack in a horizontal construction joint on a wall that is in the containment building, Stoddard said.
The wall is “not part of the containment structure” itself, Larry Lane, Dominion’s vice president for the North Anna site, told reporters. The crack, which is about seven feet off the floor, is on a non-load-bearing, inner wall that is used to separate spaces within the Unit 1 building, he said. Its widest point measures 0.03 of an inch, according to Lane.
Other noticeable damage at the site, on the shores of Lake Anna in central Virginia, includes a small crack in the floor of an auxiliary building.
Dominion invited reporters to tour the plant’s control room, transformer and generator areas. Company officials didn’t take the group into the reactor containment structure or the building that houses a cooling pool for spent fuel because that would have been “more complex and more time-consuming,” Stoddard said.
Dry casks storing radioactive spent fuel also shifted from one to four-and-a-half inches in their storage area at the complex, the company said yesterday. The casks, large white barrel-like structures made of steel, sit on a concrete pad away from the reactor containment buildings.
Dominion may not return them to their original positions, Stoddard said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Wingfield in Washington at bwingfield3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net
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