By KATHARINE WEBSTER, InDepthNH.org
The Seabrook Station nuclear power plant got a “green” bill of health in 2024 from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with only two minor issues noted, according to NRC inspectors who held a public, town hall-style meeting Wednesday night at a hotel in Hampton.
But members of the public and the nonprofit organization C-10 Research and Education Foundation questioned the NRC engineers about whether a series of executive orders from President Trump will impair the agency’s ability to continue protecting the health and safety of the 175,000 people who live within a 10-mile radius of the reactor – the “evacuation zone.”
One executive order has reduced labor protections for government whistleblowers, said Sarah Abramson, executive director of C-10, which performs real-time monitoring of airborne radiation inside the evacuation zone, using sensors in both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. She asked whether that had a chilling effect on reports of problems at Seabrook Station or elsewhere.
Matt Young, the branch chief in the NRC Division of Operating Reactor Safety who oversees the two on-site NRC inspectors at Seabrook, said it had not, at least internally, although other changes had limited the information the NRC can discuss publicly.
“Now clearly we’ve got some executive orders we’re addressing and trying to handle that are coming out fast and furious,” he said. But when it comes to safety issues, “we do push back as much as we can.”
And while the agency is under pressure to “find efficiencies,” Young said, “We’re not cutting the resident inspectors. … They’re not going to be touched. We learned a lesson: We’ve got to have residents on site. Every day, we need people walking around.”
The meeting, and the questions, came five days after national news outlets reported on a draft executive order that would cut the NRC’s staff, loosen NRC standards for safe radiation exposures, limit environmental reviews and speed up the approval process for new reactor designs and plants. It would also promote new, small “modular” reactors.
The draft order has not been signed, but the White House has issued other executive orders that affect the agency, including one that requires independent agencies to report to the White House Office of Management and Budget. The NRC must also submit any new rules on reactor safety to the White House for review before making them public, leading critics to warn that the agency is in imminent danger of losing its independence.
Young said that his division had been pushing back internally against any cuts to inspections for existing reactors, because one nuclear accident would effectively end public acceptance of new nuclear power facilities.
“If we mess up, there is no new nuclear, right?” Young said. “None of that stuff is going to happen if one of the operating facilities has an issue.”
Abramson also expressed concern about a new state law passed by Republican legislators last year (House Bill 1623 of 2024) that requires electricity generators to notify the New Hampshire attorney general about regulatory actions, such as a plant shutdown or closure, that could make electric bills go up.
The law also requires the state Department of Energy to investigate whether it should defend the electric generator against an outside regulator.
The new law, Abramson said, was specifically designed by its sponsor, state Rep. Michael Vose, R-Epping, to help Seabrook’s owner, NextEra Energy Resources, fight regulatory actions by the NRC.
“If a federal agency issues a violation that is economically burdensome … potentially the attorney general would step in and fight that violation,” she said.
She encouraged the two state representatives from Seabrook at the hearing, Reps. Aboul Khan and Matt Sabourin dit Choiniere, both Republicans, to talk to their colleagues about the importance of safety at Seabrook.
Most, but not all of the other questions raised by members of the public and C-10 focused on the premature deterioration of the concrete used in virtually every building at Seabrook Station, including the reactor shell and the inner containment chamber.
The deterioration is caused by alkali silica reaction, or ASR, a chemical reaction between alkali in the cement and silica in the aggregate that creates a silica gel. The gel causes the concrete to expand and crack over time. Eventually, ASR can cause walls and floors to buckle or shift.
ASR, also known as “concrete cancer,” is triggered by water, including the water originally used to mix the concrete. At Seabrook, the problem is worst at the plant’s base because it sits in a salt marsh, Abramson said.
“This is the only nuclear reactor still in operation that has this problem,” she said before the meeting.
Cracking caused by ASR was first identified at Seabrook Station in 2009, and the plant’s license now requires NextEra to monitor the concrete’s rate of expansion and project expansion rates into the future.
“They do have some indications that those expansion rates may increase in the future,” said Travis Daun, the NRC’s senior on-site inspector for Seabrook. (The other on-site inspector, Seamus Flanagan, was not at the meeting because he is attending a special, two-week course on concrete.)
“There’s nothing they (NextEra) can do to arrest expansion rates,” but the company can make modifications to increase the structural capacity of the walls, Daun said.
Asked what would happen if the plant exceeded the expansion rates in its operating license, which has been extended to 2050, Daun said that before it reached that point, it would have to shut down permanently unless it could demonstrate to the NRC’s satisfaction that it could continue to operate safely. Another NRC official had previously said the rate of expansion could exceed safe limits before 2050, possibly as soon as 2034, he said.
Daun noted that the NRC does not rely on NextEra’s monitoring alone: A team of specialized structural engineers inspects the nuclear plant thoroughly twice a year just for ASR, and the on-site team of two engineers also keeps tabs on the expansion monitoring and any deformation in the walls and concrete structures, visiting every accessible structure once a week, on average.
Daun said he’s not concerned that a wall or the containment shell will collapse without warning. His worry is that, as the concrete expands, the space between walls and critical equipment narrows or disappears altogether. That space is a safety margin designed to keep the concrete walls from hitting and damaging key equipment during an earthquake or other seismic event.
C-10’s Abramson is also critical of the ways in which NextEra measures the expansion rate, saying the NRC is allowing the company to use a methodology that is inadequate, according to two independent studies the NRC itself commissioned: One by a professor at the University of Colorado who is an expert on concrete and ASR and the other by the National Institute of Standards and Training.
Seabrook Station spokesperson Lindsay Robertson said in a statement after the meeting: “The NRC’s assessment of Seabrook Station demonstrates that the plant fully met all NRC objectives and operates in a manner that preserves public health and safety. We are pleased with this evaluation, which maintains Seabrook Station in the NRC’s highest performance category.”
The issue of whether NextEra should be required to adopt the testing methods recommended by those studies is currently before the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards. A decision is not expected until at least October, said NRC spokesperson Diane Screnci.