Regulatory Commission (NRC) calls near-miss incidents
“accident sequence precursor” incidents, Johnson says, and
he describes them as incidents in which the NRC sends an
inspection team to investigate an event or condition that in-
creases the chance of reactor core damage by a factor of 10
or more.
According the UCS, two of the incidents were related to
security and the third involved an air conditioner working at
30 percent capacity in what Johnson calls “a critical part of
the reactor.”
Angela Walz of Energy Northwest, which runs CGS,
calls most of the UCS report “inaccurate” and says, “We’ve
had no near-miss incidents at Columbia, and we remain in
the NRC’s least stringent oversight category because of our
excellent safety performance.”
She adds, “UCS misassociated three NRC special in-
‘Time will tell whether the trio of
near-misses at the Columbia
Generating Station was merely
bad luck or indicative of broader
programmatic deficiencies.’
— N U C L E A R E N G I N E E R D AV I D LO C H B A U M
spections with safety incidents. Two of those inspections
we purposefully initiated, and they resulted in a clean bill of
health from the NRC regarding station security procedures.”
Walz says the third inspection looked at how CGS tests and
maintains air coolers and led to a finding of “very low safety
significance” from the NRC.
The author of the UCS report, nuclear engineer David
Lochbaum, writes, “Time will tell whether the trio of near-
misses at the Columbia Generating Station was merely bad
luck or indicative of broader programmatic deficiencies.”
Nuclear safety issues arose at the recent Public Inter-
est Environmental Law Conference in Eugene with retired
NASA scientist James Hansen, who has suggested nuclear
power as a solution to the problem of global warming. John-
son says Hansen is “rightly venerated for his research and for
his willingness and bravery in risking his career to declare
climate change is a huge problem.” But he says that Han-
sen should not “hang his entire strategy for avoiding cli-
mate change on experimental reactors that haven’t worked
very well” and that are a fire and nuclear proliferation
danger in addition to their unsolved nuclear waste issues.
— Camilla Mortensen
E UGENE
G ARDEN C LUB
GET OUT. Get
Answers.
1645 High Street
541.337.0528
3rd Tuesdays - 11:30 am
Coming up:
Plant “Nerd” Night
March 27
District Flower Show
The March 31st deadline for health insurance is coming fast.
That’s why we’re coming to your neighborhood with the
Pacifi cSource Get Out, Get Covered Tour. Drop in,
grab a bite, get answers and get enrolled in an
affordable plan, all before the deadline.
April 25-26
in Cottage Grove
Oregon Plant Fair
May 10
(Alton Baker Park)
,9("
RAFFLE
Enter for a chance to win
A VACATION
IN HAWAII
We are selling tickets to Eugene Waldorf
SchoolPs ,9(" RaffleD Proceeds will benefit
their needs5based scholarship programD
Tickets are SY each
or Y for S,9D
Grand Prizev (5Week vacation on Kauai
,nd Prizev Go5Pro Action Camera
)rd Prizev Gift CertD for Carmelita Spats
Drawing will be on March (Y at the
Eugene Waldorf SchoolPs (:th Annual
Spring Auction at the Downtown Athletic
Club b::: Willamette StD$ Eugene-D
Visit GetOutGetCovered.com to fi nd out
when and where we’ll be in your neighborhood.
uYour purchase of a raffle
ticket will directly help children
gain a Waldorf educationDu
FOR DETAILS ON THE RAFFLE,
THE AUCTION & THE SCHOOL:
wwwDeugenewaldorfDcom
25th & Willamette • Daily 8AM-10PM
541-345-1014 • capellamarket.com
14PSH011E Pacifi cSource Open Enrollment Ad for
March 6, 13 & 20, 2014 issues
Insertion Order #51078
4-Color, 7.25”wide x 10.083”tall
eugeneweekly.com • March 13, 2014
11