FirstEnergy officials will head back to
Rockville, Md., in June to the headquarters of the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission.
This time, they will meet with NRC officials about replacing the
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station reactor head.
This meeting was scheduled for May, but was canceled by
FirstEnergy because engineers hadn't finished inspecting the reactor
head it bought Thursday from Consumers Energy in Michigan.
FirstEnergy hopes to replace its corroded reactor head with one
that was installed, then abandoned in Midland, Mich., after the
plant never started up. It's been sitting there for 17 years,
unused.
The June 4 meeting, from 1 to 4 p.m., will likely include
FirstEnergy officials detailing its plan for removing the abandoned
reactor head from the Midland site, transporting it to Carroll
Township and installing it on the Davis-Besse reactor.
The Davis-Besse plant has been shut down since February. It went
off-line for a routine refueling outage, but then workers found a
hole on the top of the reactor head, as well as cracks in nozzles on
the head.
Those cracks are believed to have leaked boric acid, which is in
the cooling water inside the reactor. That boric acid, engineers
believe, is what caused the corrosion.