Two years ago, at the end of this month, the NRC made its first foray into social media with this blog. We didn’t know what to expect, but we knew we needed a new way to provide information to the public about – and explanations of – the important, but frequently complex and technical activities of the agency.
We were pleased with the initial interest in the blog, which sky-rocketed during the March 2011 events in Japan, and which spiked again during the August 2011 earthquake in Virginia and this fall’s Hurricane Sandy. Some stats for 2012: we put up 138 posts and approved 893 comments, and got some 126,000 views. And we have 700+ subscribers.
Also during those 12 months, the NRC sent out 540 tweets (to 2,996 followers), posted 47 videos on YouTube (which got 17,170 views) and posted 1,100 photos on Flickr, with 93,000 views. We are continuing to look at new ways to make our social media program interesting and relevant to you, and we may have some news in that regard later in the year. So stay tuned.
We are making a few small changes to the blog for 2013. We’ll be using more specific tags to make it easier to find our content. We’re also moving the bylines up to the top, so you’ll know right away who has authored the post. And when we can, we’ll be adding more links and more interactive content.
We hope to continue to see the lively conversations in the comments to our posts. We approve and post comments several times a day to reduce delaying the conversation. In only a few instances, we have not approved comments because they didn’t meet our blog comment guidelines. If the comment is determined to be an allegation, for example, it will not be posted (but you will be contacted by our allegations team.) If your comment is a personal attack, we also cannot post it. Some comments lately have drifted into this category, so we ask that you be respectful to other commenters and their points of view so that we can approve your comments.
Also remember that comments need to be related to the post under which they are submitted. If they’re not, we’ll move them to the Open Forum section. We encourage you to post there when there’s something you want to talk about, but about which there is no recent post.
Which brings me to my last point. We would love to know what you’d like us to cover for the new year. What topics are of interest to you? What do you want to know more about – or perhaps get a plain language explanation of? Please let us know in the comment section below and we’ll try to tailor future content to your needs.
Happy New Year to you, and thank you for reading the NRC’s blog.
U.S. NRC Blog 
Mr. Eliot Brenner, Happy New Year to You and All the NRC Staff and their families
San Onofre Unit 2 Steam Generators are not Safe at any Power due to fluid elastic instability and do not meet the NRC Licensed Conditions for Operation to RTP and Design Basis Accident Conditions. Fluid Elastic Instability is a very controversial and complex phenomenon, which has been around since 1966. To understand the concept of FEI in a two-phase heterogeneous steam water mixture in a Nuclear Steam Generators such as SONGS, Researchers and Steam Generator Designers/Manufacturers are still struggling. FEI can be caused by a combination of low steam generator pressures, low steam saturation temperatures, low tube clearances, high steam flows, high fluid velocities, improperly designed floating anti-vibration structures, no-in plane supports, potential of corrosion products clogging the TSP holes, lack of mixing baffles in the steam generator lower section, narrow tube pitch to tube diameter, low tube wall thickness to diameter ratio, high tube length to tube diameter ratio, tube frequency, resonance vibrations, reactor coolant pump pressure pulses and several other unknown factors. The bottom line of FEI is the absence of water film on the steam generator tubes AKA localized steam voids, Zero Damping, etc.. SONGS MHI RSGs suffer from most of these problems. On top of these problems, these “defectively designed and degraded generators” have thousands of damaged and cracked tubes. Therefore, these generators cannot meet the 10 CFR Part 50 Appendix A, General Design Criteria 14 and SONGS Unit 2 Technical Specifications structural integrity performance criterion in TS 5.5.2.11.b.1. APS/Westinghouse/Combustion Engineering solved all these problems in Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station Replacement Steam Generators via a 50.90 License Amendment Process and thorough scrutiny by NRR Brilliant Engineers and Experts from other NRC Divisions. When I see examples of work like this, I am proud of NRC but SONGS is all messed up. NRC Region IV really needs to do a self-assessment to figure out what went wrong at SONGs and not come up with excuses because of the careless attitude of a few. Just my humble suggestion.
If SCE, NRC Region IV and CPUC want safe, dependable and profitable power and win public confidence, SCE needs to return $1 Billion to Rate Payers and pay another 1 Billion Dollars to Westinghouse (The Most Advanced, Sophisticated, Skilled and Dependable US Nuclear Plant Designer & Manufacturer) to remove the defective generators and build new replacement generators designed to produce licensed safe power like Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station.
MHI & SCE cannot fix these Defective and Degraded replacement steam generator. Thanks…
Ditto, KR.
If “fresh”‘s maximum Carrington frets ever came true, nuclear plants — which in all exampled likelihood wouldn’t harm anyone even in unattended full meltdown — would literally be the last of my concerns what the social state the country would be in. Besides I trust that our engineers and techs are bright enough to’ve foreseen the issue and solutions even before fresh has!
James Greenidge
Queens NY
Because that is realistic? If we seriously couldn’t get diesel fuel at any cost, there would be a lot more problems than the local nuclear power plant. And I’m pretty sure the military will have already stepped up and provided or moved that fuel.
… and comment preview would nice… as you can tell from my mistakes above…
I would like to see a realistic discussion of the scenario of another Carrington Event that fries 80% of all the big transformers in a multi-state zone, and what happens after 2 weeks of oil for the generators runs out and cannot be supplied at any cost.
Thumbs up for your social media interaction!
Congratulations on another year of blogging. Some interesting posts and insights in NRC thinking.
I wasn’t aware of your open forum. There are a couple of things about it that could be improved:
1. Comments moved appear to all be assigned to “Moderator”; it would be better if the original commenter was still shown for the post, even if 90% are CaptD rambling on about conspiracies at San Onofre.
2. There are some many comments that a comment page number access is required, rather than simply “Older” and “Newer” navigation.
3. Some of the moved posts have lost context to the extent that they are meaningless.
I’m not sure it’s the best way to capture ongoing discussion, since there is little opportunity to organize into discussion threads, but I do appreciate
Possible future topics:
– Regulation of hospitals
– Food irradiation
– Yucca Mountain safety case