Point Lepreau not at risk of earthquake damage: station manager

HALIFAX, N.S. – Japan’s nuclear plant crisis shouldn’t be cause for concern to those living near New Brunswick’s Point Lepreau power plant even though it’s built on a fault line, according to an official with NB Power.

The plant is currently off-line as upgrades continue, but when it opens up again, says Wayne Parker, it will have even higher safety standards than units operating in Japan right now.

“We have by design seismically qualified means of cooling the fuel,” says Parker, Point Lepreau’s station manager.

“If that is ineffective, we have alternative means to cool the fuel, which comes in under our severe accident management plans.”

Parker acknowledges the situation at the Fukushima and Ibaraki plants are a learning opportunity, despite the difference in station design.

The fault line Lepreau sits on is not nearly as active as Japan, which sits near four tectonic plates, so there is little chance of the area experiencing an earthquake to the magnitude of last week’s disaster.

That quake was “unprecedented” and a crisis was almost impossible to avert, says a 30-year veteran of the nuclear power industry.

Watching Japan

Gary Mosey is the author of “Reactor Accidents,” a book in which he examines major nuclear accidents over the past 60 years.

Mosey, now an industry consultant, looked at the reasons behind such accidents and says most often it came down to human error.

In Japan, it was the force of the tsunami that knocked out back-up power at the Fukushima plant causing the cooling system to fail.

“What’s important to remember,” the Lunenburg, N.S. resident says, “is the reactors withstood the earthquake which is quite remarkable.

“They shutdown automatically as it was supposed to and the containment was not damaged or intact.”

A repeat of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 – where one-third of the core melted at the Pennsylvania plant – would be the worst case scenario.

In that incident, he says, no significant amounts of radiation were detected in the environment.

Mosey doesn’t think that is going to happen in Fukushima: people would know by now.

“At the time of Chernobyl, people were detecting radiation in other countries almost immediately.”