To access this article on-line: http://www.mothballmillstone.org/news2008a.html#secondscram

A Class I Emergency was declared at Millstone Unit 2 on Saturday, May 24, 2008, when the 33-year-old nuclear reactor suffered its second “scram” - emergency shutdown - in three days, according to the Associated Press. The first scram occurred on Thursday, when a lightning bolt struck a transformer and the reactor automatically shut down.

Any scram at a nuclear reactor creates emergency conditions during which safety systems are put to the ultimate test; a scram is usually accompanied by a sudden venting of radioactive gases to the air. The gases typically include the radioisotope krypton, which rapidly decays to strontium-90, a deadly carcinogen which falls back to earth in precipitation.

Millstone Unit 2 has an unusually high record of unplanned shutdowns and recurring mechanical deficiencies.

In 1998, the Department of Public Utility Control declared Millstone Unit 2 “no longer used and useful,” a category evoked to remove the trouble-plagued Unit 2 nuclear reactor from the rate base - and exclude its costs from ratepayer assessments under the then-regulated energy protocols.

Millstone Unit 2 was recently given a life extension when Attorney General Richard S. Blumenthal championed Dominion's application to the Connecticut Siting Council to transfer Unit 2's high-level nuclear waste from its nearly filled spent fuel pool to an onsite nuclear graveyard. Without the ability to store newly generated high-level nuclear waste, Millstone Unit 2 would have had to shut down.

The two scrams-in-three days events follow a refueling outage during which Dominion - Millstone’s owner - performed maintenance throughout the plant which had been deferred during the previous 18 months of operations, mostly at full power.

In April 2007, Millstone 3 lost offsite power while it was shut down during a refueling outage. A Class I emergency was declared. At the time, the NRC declared that there were “no safety implications and no release of radioactivity” because the reactor was shut down.

The NRC’s reassurances were faulty.

According to David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, when a nuclear reactor loses offsite power while it is in a refueling outage, conditions may be especially harardous.

Indeed, according to an NRC survey released in August 2000, nuclear reactors suffering loss of offsite power during a refueling outage accumulated the equivalent of about 10 per cent of their annual at-power risk in essentially one day of “midloop” operation.

The reason that midloop operation involves such high risk is that the operators deliberately drain cooling water from the reactor system. During midloop operation, the reactor has minimal cooling water. If cooling is interrupted or water is lost due to a pipe break, the operators have the least amount of time to respond in order to prevent meltdown.

The State of Connecticut lacks the services of an independent monitor qualified in nuclear engineering and operations to serve as a government watchdog over Millstone’s operations. Many states engage nuclear specialists to oversee operations of nuclear power plants.

As a consequence, details of emergency conditions at Millstone are often withheld from the public. Details of emergency conditions at Millstone are frequently withheld for months at a time and not disclosed to the public until the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission releases annual assessment reports.