Columbia Generating Station Operates BLIND, Once AGAIN Loses Radiation Assessment Capability

The Columbia nuclear plant in Richland, Washington has once again lost its exhaust stack radiation monitors. These monitors have been down the 9 out of the last 12 days. The original outage on August 24th resulted in a Maximum Alert notice on our part do to reports of increased background radiation "noise", which just so happened to coincide with potential fallout from Fukushima.

In this case, we have not released an alert because they appear to have gotten the system back up within a few hours of its re-demise. None-the-less, these occurrences bare watching. Fortunately we have the following reassuring words from the Columbia Generating Station:

"To compensate for the loss of assessment capability while the Turbine Building Stack Radiation Monitoring equipment was nonfunctional, a field team survey would have been used if required."  (emphasis added)

The question remains how would they know if they required a survey team if the very equipment which would alert them to such a need was not working? In other words, Columbia Nuclear was blind to a radiation detections during the failure. 

See NRC event reports:

#49306 and #49327