Nuclear response center opens in West Valley

• The West Valley is housing an equipment warehouse to help nuclear power plants in emergencies.
• An identical facility is near completion in Memphis.
• They are a response to the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.

The nuclear-power industry opens a $40 million response center near Phoenix today that aims to back up reactors around the country in the event of a major disaster.

Industry officials hope the 80,000-square-foot center, which was built in Arizona because of the state's low exposure to natural disasters, will never be put to use. But it gives them peace of mind to know that the equipment is there, and it helps meet new regulatory requirements added since the 2011 nuclear meltdown in Japan.

"The nuclear plants are already designed to withstand anything we can think of," said Randy Edington, executive vice president and chief nuclear officer for Arizona Public Service Co. "This effort added flexibility. This is just building on an already well-designed system."

The response center in Tolleson — and one just like it taking shape near Memphis, Tenn., — was built in response to the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster in Japan.

That meltdown was triggered by a March 11 earthquake and tsunami that knocked out power to a six-reactor nuclear facility.

The 100 operating reactors in the U.S. already have backup generators and emergency equipment. And ever since the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, nuclear plants have formulated emergency plans to support each other in the event of a disaster, said Edington, who runs Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, 50 miles west of downtown Phoenix, for APS.

But disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Fukushima prompted further reviews of emergency preparedness, and the flexible-response centers are among the results. They were built to ensure backup equipment would be available even in unthinkable disasters that disable one or more nuclear-power plants at once.

"We asked the industry to ensure a number of levels of protection of facilities in light of what we learned from Fukushima," said Allison Macfarlane, chairwoman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "Having seen what happened at Fukushima, we know it is important to have lots of extra backup equipment available. If Fukushima had such equipment, things might have gone differently."

Macfarlane was in Arizona this week to see the response center, take her first tour of Palo Verde since being sworn in to her job in 2012 and to attend an industry conference.

Arizona was selected as the site of the response center because of the low probability of a natural disaster that would prevent emergency workers from accessing the equipment. The centers in Tolleson and Memphis are both designed to get equipment to any plant within 24 hours.

"We don't have any big natural events," Edington said of Arizona. "Nothing stops us from getting the equipment out. Maybe a dust storm, which would only delay you a few hours."

The centers cost $40 million each to develop and stock with equipment. They will cost about $400 million to maintain over their 40-year operating life, or about $4 million per U.S. nuclear reactor.

They contain portable generators, water pumps, lighting and other equipment to help keep nuclear fuel cool and repair damaged reactors.

Everything in the warehouse is preloaded onto trailers to be shipped out.

Everything also is capable of being lifted by helicopter to get to a nuclear reactor despite downed bridges or other obstacles.

FedEx Corp. is contracted to transport the equipment from the warehouses by air if necessary to an airport near a plant in distress through the company's "custom critical" service.

Pooled Equipment Inventory Co., or PEICo, manages the warehouses, and Areva Inc. is contracted to send operators to the site of a nuclear crisis.

PEICo ran similar facilities in Memphis housing motors, pumps and other shared equipment for the nuclear industry, but the new centers add sophistication and actual plans for delivering the goods in extreme emergencies.

The warehouses are equipped with a "playbook" for each nuclear facility.

That includes an off-site location to drop the equipment before moving into the vicinity of a damaged nuclear reactor. They also include specifications for each reactor so emergency workers will know where to connect the equipment.

After Fukushima, the Nuclear Strategic Issues Advisory Committee industry group proposed new strategies to deal with the loss of power at nuclear plants, Edington said.

The NRC, which oversees the industry in the U.S., subsequently required nuclear utilities to develop such plans, with equipment stored off site, and the Arizona and Tennessee sites will play a role in meeting that requirement.

The nuclear industry refers to the effort as the Strategic Alliance for FLEX Emergency Response, or SAFER.

Inside the sprawling, spotless Tolleson warehouse on a recent morning, the floors glistened with a fresh coat of paint.

Trailers of equipment were lined up in orderly rows, and workers used a buffer to wax a shining red generator.

"Nuclear does things a certain way," said Edington, who was brought to Palo Verde in 2007 to help get the plant out of a category of increased regulatory oversight that stemmed from operational problems. "We are pretty fanatical."

He said that the industry takes safety seriously, and that maintaining a professional appearance encourages workers to maintain a professional attitude toward their work.

"It drives behaviors," he said of the warehouse's cleanliness.

Lessons from Japan

One of the biggest problems in Fukushima was keeping nuclear fuel cooled without electricity to run water pumps, and that concern is directly addressed by the equipment now housed west of Phoenix.

While the earthquake did not damage the plant, the backup power generators and their backup batteries used to pump water on to the nuclear fuel were damaged by the tsunami, which was larger than the protective sea wall at the power plant.

Three of the Fukushima reactors were running at the time of the disaster, and they eventually melted down because they could not be kept cool.

Fukushima's emergency workers responded by using firetrucks to spray water on the fuel and attempted to cool it by dumping water from a helicopter.

Fukushima experienced hydrogen-gas explosions caused by the heat from the fuel and released large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere and sea.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. continues to face problems with cleaning up the contaminated and damaged site.

A large exclusion zone still prevents residents from returning to their homes near the plant other than for brief trips.

Chief nuclear officers from U.S. utilities visited Fukushima last fall to talk with the Japanese plant operators about the challenges they faced during the emergency, and they brought those lessons back home.

"I had a really life-changing experience in September," Michael Pacilio, chief nuclear officer of Exelon Generation, said of the trip. Exelon runs 23 nuclear reactors at 14 sites in the U.S.

"One significant takeaway was the need for a national response," he said. "These response centers are very important facilities for adding redundancy."

U.S. reactors made other changes as well. Palo Verde purchased millions of dollars in new equipment to be more prepared for an emergency, including five new firetrucks.

The NRC also required more instrumentation at U.S. reactors to monitor pools of used fuel, which was a concern at one of the reactors in Fukushima that didn't melt down because workers couldn't tell if it had enough water to keep the fuel cool.

Officials from Japan's nuclear industry will tour the new response centers in October, when they will be fully operational.

Each of the response centers will employ three to six people to maintain the machinery.

Officials hope they never need to call in more workers to deploy the equipment.

"Hopefully, they will be the most boring places in the world," Pacilio said.