Almost all nuclear power plants in the United States have a design defect, but no one is in a hurry to fix it.

A team of seven engineers of the US Nuclear Energy Commission filed a petition in which it called for an urgent correction of an error in the design of virtually all nuclear reactors of US nuclear power plants. The error found can lead to an emergency stop of any of the reactors at any time. This defect has been known since 2012 after the appearance of problems at the Byron NPP (Illinois).

In January 2012, an emergency shutdown of the reactor occurred at the Byron NPP - the automatic protection system detected a sudden voltage drop in the cooling pump power supply system. The catastrophe was avoided thanks to the quickness of the personnel who manually cut off the necessary knife switches. If this had not been done, in just a few minutes the isolation of the pumps could have been broken, which would lead to a leakage of coolant. The reactor was idle for a week.
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A similar problem arose exactly one month later, though, the second time, the automatics managed to turn off the necessary circuits by themselves. It turned out that the problem in both cases arose due to the violation of the ceramic insulation of one of the conductors.

Initial recommendations to remedy the situation were made by engineers in the summer of 2012. Then, over the course of three years, the situation was thoroughly studied by experts, and last summer a detailed report was prepared with recommendations - however, so far no action has been taken to correct the defects of the reactor design. Engineers urge the Nuclear Energy Commission to respond to their report before March 21 and urgently begin to remedy the situation.

The report states that such design flaws can, in particular, lead to the burnout of the cooling system motors - and in this case, after a power outage, the power safety systems can do little to fix it.

The commission has already warned NPP operators of possible problems, but so far it has not necessarily required their correction. In their petition, engineers urge to put forward stringent requirements for nuclear power plants, since according to their calculations, over the past 14 years, 13 similar events have occurred at American nuclear power plants.

However, the commission is in no hurry to respond to the petition. John Keeley, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said that "This issue is not significant enough from a security point of view to interrupt the safe operation of our enterprises." The representative of the Nuclear Energy Commission, Scot Burnell, said: "Based on the consideration of the statement of 2012, the Commission is confident that the nuclear power plants are safe enough to continue their operation."