Ready to go nuclear?

Obviously not. But that didn't stop us.

OAK HARBOR, Ohio — A utility asked federal regulators to delay a final inspection of a shutdown nuclear reactor, saying a minor incident suggested some workers aren't fully prepared to restart it.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreed to put off inspection of the Davis-Besse plant — which had been set to begin Monday — for about a week.

The NRC said the move quashes FirstEnergy Corp.'s plans to seek a Jan. 21 meeting with NRC officials to discuss restarting the reactor. No new meeting date was set.

The reactor at the plant along Lake Erie near Toledo has been shut down since February 2002. An inspection after the shutdown revealed a pineapple-sized hole in the reactor's lid.

A pineapple-sized hole? What an odd thing to measure with. Sorry, my remark is irrelevant, but the statement just stood out.

In the incident Tuesday, technicians testing a pressure gauge in an emergency safety system failed to tell the control room that the safety system would be off-line, First Energy spokesman Todd Schneider said.

That mistake meant the emergency system was off-line for two hours without operators shifting to a backup.

Schneider said the incident was minor but that managers believed the plant needed to do a better job of following the rules.

I don't give the sweat off a cold rat's ass if they follow rules or not. What concerns me is that they might have failed to tell the control room because they didn't know that would be important. Maybe they just decided to skip it because the plant wasn't actually up and running, but the concluding paragraph would suggest otherwise - else why would they need to be 10 days in retraining? It takes less than ten seconds to say, "Follow the damned rules".

On Dec 19, the NRC's restart readiness inspectors and a second team looking at the plant's safety environment said they could not recommend allowing the plant to restart. Managers spent the next 10 days retraining workers.
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Are we safe from terrorists? How about from ourselves?

....do what you want....you will anyway.