Managers of the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant moved one step closer
to gaining permission to restart the reactor yesterday. They detailed to
federal authorities the steps taken to prove the plant's safety systems
will function as designed in an emergency.
Davis-Besse has been idle since February while workers replaced the
reactor's badly corroded lid and repaired or replaced much of the plant's
auxiliary and emergency equipment.
Plant owner FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron hopes the Toledo-area reactor
can begin making electricity by early April.
Meeting with Nuclear Regulatory Commission engineers in Chicago
yesterday, the plant's executives reported that more than 100 outside
consulting engineers spent months reviewing the 15 most critical safety
systems of the plant's 36 mechanical systems.
The investigation was done to determine whether Davis-Besse's safety
equipment meets the engineering standards demanded by federal code and the
plant's own original design specifications.
"If you change something in plant - and there are lots of components -
if you change things as they wear out, the new part might be a little
different," James Powers, director of engineering at Davis-Besse, said in
an interview.
"The new part needs to meet the design basis of the original part," he
said. "Or you need to show why it is OK if it doesn't."
Proving new parts meet the original design specs or new criteria
demanded by the industry involves recalculating all the engineering specs
for each part, what Powers called "the bedrock" of the plant's safety
systems.
The review generated 1,200 suspected design problems, each written up
in critiques called "condition reports," Powers said.
By yesterday, those problems had been whittled down to 26 that could
potentially affect safety, he said. Concerns about the others were
resolved, either with new calculations or by finding original
specifications that had been misplaced.
The NRC staff wanted to know why so many suspected problems had
resurfaced since Davis-Besse's own engineers had reviewed the design basis
of the plant just five years ago.
"Of the 26 potential safety concerns, were any of them identified
previously and not resolved?" asked Jack Grobe, chairman of the NRC
committee overseeing the company's efforts to rebuild Davis-Besse.
Powers and his colleagues said some had been identified in the late
1990s but not resolved because the engineering staff did not have the
resources.
"Yes, we could have done better," Powers conceded.
The current engineering effort has proved that most of the 1,200
concerns were not safety issues, said Lew Myers, chief operating officer
of FirstEnergy's nuclear division. That is likely to be the story, he
said, for the remaining 26.
That assertion won't get the plant restarted, Grobe said. Only if the
plant engineers can resolve the last 26 issues - and no additional
questions crop up - "then I think we are comfortable," he said.
But if there are more questions - and the NRC will be looking over the
shoulders of Davis-Besse's engineers - "then we need to step back and look
at other systems you are not evaluating."
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