Stephen Koff, John Mangels and John Funk Plain
Dealer Reporters
Washington- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission yesterday said it has
already begun implementing extensive reforms to make certain it won't
again be caught unaware of big problems like those at the Davis-Besse
power plant in northern Ohio.
The plant developed an unprecedented hole in its lid while receiving
good reviews from the NRC. The hole was discovered last March.
"Assuring the public health and safety is the fundamental goal of the
NRC, and the commission is prepared to learn from this experience to
assure that we achieve that goal," NRC Chairman Richard Meserve said at
the start of a public meeting where the 49 reforms were publicly unveiled.
The five commissioners and their senior staff acknowledged inspection
failures and other shortcomings that caused the agency to miss signs that
a potential disaster was brewing, including clogged, discolored filters
and corrosion deposits on the reactor vessel lid.
As was first disclosed in The Plain Dealer yesterday, they are
implementing policy, inspection, staff and training reforms in response to
an internal Lessons Learned Task Force report that focused on inadequacies
and oversights in the months and years before the Davis-Besse hole was
discovered.
William Travers, NRC executive director for operations, issued a memo
on Jan. 3 ordering the agency to develop an "action plan" by Feb. 28 to
implement reforms that include instilling a more questioning attitude.
"Our goal going forward . . ." said Travers, "is to improve our
program, and not just in the area of boric acid corrosion but much more
broadly than that. And I'm here to tell you that the staff is dedicated to
that sort of improvement."
William Kane, deputy executive director for reactor programs, said he
has already visited two of the NRC's four regional offices and will visit
a third next week to encourage the regional staffs to embrace the reforms
and acknowledge "our disappointment with what took place."
The staff will provide six-month updates to the commissioners on
progress made in implementing reforms. David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety
engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog organization,
said the reports "will help ensure that all these good intentions lead to
real improvements, so that's what we're going to be monitoring."
NRC commissioners were generally favorable in their comments at
yesterday's meeting, but Commissioner Greta Dicus asked, "Are we really
learning the lessons learned, given that some of these problems keep
resurfacing? . . . Do we have some other smoking guns out there that we
are not paying the kind of attention to that we should?"
Travers told her that "we do have to apply these lessons much more
broadly than boric acid corrosion."
Commissioner Nils Diaz asked if the staff could assure the public that
there are no more reactors with holes in their lids.
Travers said, "We have reasonable assurance, and I think that's the
best I can give you, that, given the inspections that have been done - and
we think that they have been fairly thorough - that there are no more
further issues similar to Davis-Besse."
Meanwhile, at a separate meeting at Camp Perry, Ohio, near the reactor,
plant managers said their engineers were still evaluating more than 1,600
reports of problems or conditions that they believed were significant
enough that they would have to be resolved before restarting the reactor.
That number was down from a peak of nearly 2,500 in November.
Often, resolving a report can generate several jobs. Crews this week
were still facing 2,157 repairs or engineering tasks, down from nearly
2,300 last month, that must be completed before the restart.
The company unveiled a new plant program yesterday that it believes
will vastly increase awareness of, and attention to, leaks in the
reactor's coolant system. Leaks led to the pineapple-size rust hole in
Davis-Besse's reactor lid.
The new program demands that reactor operators take action when coolant
leakage exceeds low levels or goes on for very long. Such actions include
temporarily shutting down the reactor if necessary to track down the
source. Had the system been in place between 1998 and last year, the
operators would have had 21 shutdowns, based on plant leak rate records,
the company said, including 11 times in the last two years.
"This program . . . has trigger points where it forces you to make
management decisions," said Lew Myers, chief operating officer of
FirstEnergy's nuclear division. "We did not have that before. That is the
fundamental difference in safety culture."
In addition to the equipment fixes, Davis-Besse must also convince the
NRC that it has fixed its broken safety culture, the attitude that compels
every employee to put safety before profits or anything else. The company
has hired a nationally known safety-culture consultant who has worked with
other nuclear plants and the NRC itself. FirstEnergy will give more
details about its safety-culture work at a special NRC meeting Jan. 30 in
Chicago.
FirstEnergy officials say they plan to bring the reactor up to
operating temperature and pressure for a week, probably in March if the
NRC approves, in order to check for possible leaks in the bottom of the
reactor's steel vessel, where rust earlier had been found. The outcome of
that test will help determine when the plant can resume generating
electricity.
The steady drumbeat of community support for Davis-Besse that began at
last month's meeting continued last night, with elected officials and some
residents reminding NRC officials of the plant's economic importance to
Ottawa County and urging them to approve its restart.
Area resident Donna Leuke urged her fellow audience members, however,
to not only question how they can save jobs at Davis-Besse, but also to
ask themselves what they can do to hold FirstEnergy accountable for
jeopardizing the safety of the public and the environment.
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