LA nuclear plants rack up low-level safety issues: report | Business

Entergy Corp.’s three nuclear power plants in southern Louisiana and Mississippi had some of the most safety and security issues among plants of their type in the nation over the past three years, but most, if not all, were in the lowest risk category, an environmental group says.

The group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, reached that conclusion in an analysis of federal data as part of a broader critique of nuclear regulators’ color-coded inspection rating system. The group contends the system may miss or under-represent emerging risks by failing to account appropriately for high numbers of the lowest-level “findings,” or issues raised in inspections.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which issues the findings, called the group’s methodology flawed and not in line with how it operates. Entergy dismissed the report as inaccurate and not “in good faith.”

The raw tallies of NRC safety findings from 2022-2024 made the plants along the Mississippi River the first- and second-most-cited single-unit plants in the nation over the three-year period, it said. Waterford 3 in New Orleans had the fifth most findings.

But the NRC says all three Entergy plants remain in the regulator’s “highest performance category in safety and security” after the agency applies its “action matrix” that accounts for a variety of factors, not just safety and security findings.

“The NRC uses multiple inputs to assess performance, including inspector findings and objective performance indicators showing how well a plant is performing when measured against established thresholds,” Victor Dricks, NRC spokesman, said in a statement.

“The assessment process allows NRC to integrate various information sources relevant to plant safety performance, make objective conclusions regarding their significance, take actions based on these conclusions in a predictable manner, and effectively communicate these results to licensees and the public.”

Questioning the system

The Union of Concerned Scientists used a relatively new NRC database to generate the tallies. Most, if not all, of the findings the group uncovered were rated “green,” the lowest risk category that doesn’t trigger extra levels of scrutiny from the nuclear agency. “Green” findings have “very low safety significance,” the NRC says.

But the group faults this color-coding system and created its own metric to try to assess what a large number of “green” findings might mean for plant safety. It equated five “green” findings to one “white” finding and weighted the results.

A “white” finding, the next risk category up from “green,” represents “low to moderate safety significance,” the NRC says. White and other worse findings spark additional NRC oversight.

Using the Union of Concerned Scientists’ metric, the group ranked the three Entergy plants first, second and third on its “Terrible Thirteen” nationwide listing for single-unit reactors.

In the three-year period analyzed, Waterford 3 had 32 “green” findings and four “white” ones; River Bend in St. Francisville had 60 “green” findings and two “white” findings; Grand Gulf in Port Gibson, Mississippi had 58 “green” findings, including 27 in 2024, but no “white” findings.

“River Bend and Grand Gulf are by far the worst violators,” the report says. “This does not come as a surprise, as accusations of financial problems and mismanagement of its nuclear fleet have swirled around Entergy for decades.”

Entergy also has a dual nuclear reactor plant in central Arkansas.

The report pointed out that the Louisiana Public Service Commission and other officials filed a complaint in 2021 against Entergy. The state officials alleged to the Federal Electric Regulatory Commission that “safety and reliability problems caused “sub-par” performance of the Grand Gulf nuclear plant and excessive costs for ratepayers.

The report added that Entergy’s performance should be kept in mind as the utility plans to increase the power output of its nuclear fleet and, therefore, work reactors harder. It is also considering building a new reactor at the Grand Gulf site.

Entergy disputes report

The report also comes as Entergy and Cleco face renewed scrutiny over reliability following a forced blackout in the New Orleans area in May, triggered by a downed interstate transmission line and large, unplanned plant outages that included a five-day shutdown of Entergy’s River Bend following a leak.

Michael Bowling, a spokesman for Entergy’s nuclear operations, countered the criticisms in the environmental group’s report, also noting that NRC’s online oversight pages show the plants remain in the agency’s best safety and performance category.

“We are proud of the nearly 3,000 nuclear professionals who work 24-7, 365 to ensure we safely produce clean power for our customers,” he said. “We do not consider this blog report accurate or in good faith.”

In a statement, NRC officials pointed out that “green” and “white” findings can’t be equated because they represent different magnitudes of safety and security risk. Simply adding up green findings also isn’t how NRC evaluates plants, the agency said.

Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out in its report, however, that NRC once produced its own watchlists based on safety performance but the lists went away in the late 1990s when Congress changed the agency’s safety assessments to the current, color-coded one.

The group contends the current system could fail to address patterns that might emerge from a series of the lowest level “green” problems.

“Associating higher-risk violations with increased oversight does seem like a reasonable thing to do. However, it violates common sense to argue that the total number of violations, and their cumulative impact on risk, should not be also considered,” wrote Edwin Lyman, UCS’s nuclear expert and the author of the report.

The report noted that even with that number of findings in 2024, Grand Gulf remained in the NRC’s highest performance category along with a facility that had two findings in that year.

In an interview, Lyman argued that green findings can be serious, representing “sometimes years or decades of negligence.”

In his report, he pointed out that Entergy received a “green” finding for its failure to implement a program at Waterford 3 to address more than 2,500 corrosion issues. Some of the problems had been identified “as far back as 2011, with around 200 classified as severe and affecting critical safety-related systems,” the report noted.

Lyman also alleged that NRC inspectors may face pressure from industry to keep border-line findings “green” and avoid more higher rated findings with more serious regulatory consequences.

He argued some “green” findings count on backup systems implemented since the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan in 2011 that don’t have the same reliability demands as other equipment. 

“So, there are a lot of uncertainties in there, and I think ‘green’ may not be as benign in many cases as the NRC claims it is,” Lyman said.