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Local
Companies | Article published November 14, 2002
February start is FirstEnergy goal for
Besse
Remaining questions make date
uncertain, firm admits
By TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF
WRITER
OAK HARBOR, Ohio - FirstEnergy Corp. now hopes
to get its Davis-Besse nuclear plant running again by early
February.
But the company's timetable has become so clouded
by ongoing safety issues that some of the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission's top officials yesterday said they cannot even commit
themselves to saying whether the new dates are viable.
NRC
officials floated mixed signals at their monthly oversight panel
meeting here, acknowledging progress with inspections while pointing
out several remaining obstacles.
Among those expressing
concerns was Sam Collins, a senior NRC official from Washington who
allowed Davis-Besse to keep operating until Feb. 16 rather than
shutting it down last Dec. 31 for an emergency safety inspection, as
some of his staffers had recommended.
Mr. Collins, the NRC's
director of nuclear reactor regulation, is in charge of safety
issues at all U.S. nuclear plants. His appearance at yesterday's
meeting was his first at a public forum in Oak Harbor since
Davis-Besse's massive corrosion - an unprecedented headache for the
nuclear industry - was revealed in early March.
He defended
his decision to let the plant keep operating until Feb. 16 by saying
it was based on the best information that NRC headquarters had at
the time.
Mr. Collins acknowledged a couple staffers
disagreed with him but claimed there was a general staff consensus
that the plant was safe to continue operating at reduced power so
that it would run a little cooler and keep cracks from
widening.
The NRC knew Davis-Besse had at least a couple of
hairline vertical cracks in its reactor-head nozzles but not the
corrosion, he said.
"Had we known about the erosion on the
head, we clearly would have made a different decision," Mr. Collins
said.
And Mr. Collins also said for the first time that
Davis-Besse will continue to be categorized by the NRC as a "high
susceptibility plant" and, therefore, will be subject to enhanced
inspections whenever it goes back on line.
FirstEnergy for
months has been pushing back its restart date as more issues are
identified by both the regulator and the company.
One
telltale sign that the utility's schedule remains fluid: The NRC
yesterday skipped over a portion of the company's report that
included the latest proposed dates.
A written presentation
prepared by FirstEnergy shows that the utility hopes to bolt down
Davis-Besse's replacement reactor head on New Year's Day and power
up the plant for a test run by mid-January.
Lew Myers,
FirstEnergy chief operating officer, and Mike Stevens, the company's
nuclear maintenance director, told The Blade that those are still
the company's target dates. Mr. Stevens added that the company now
believes it can get Davis-Besse running by early February, barring
any complications with the test run.
FirstEnergy plans to
load nuclear fuel into the reactor to perform an upcoming pressure
test run, something the NRC agreed is necessary to keep the plant's
pumps from being damaged. Control rods will be fully inserted into
the reactor to prevent any nuclear reaction from occurring while the
test is being done, NRC officials said.
Pressure tests also
will be done on the containment building to check its strength. The
containment building, designed to shield the public from any
radioactive steam that might ever escape from the reactor, had to be
cut open this summer for the first time in the plant's 25-year
history. That was done to swap the damaged reactor head with a
replacement lid brought from a discontinued nuclear plant in
Midland, Mich.
Some of the key issues that remain for the
NRC, as highlighted by oversight panel Chairman Jack Grobe,
include:
w The integrity of Davis-Besse's reactor
bottom.
w Design issues unique to Davis-Besse and other
plants designed by the former Babcock & Wilcox Co.
w
Ongoing concerns about FirstEnergy's commitment to a
safety-conscious work force.
Questions about the bottom of
Davis-Besse's reactor arose in June when acid stains were found on
the underside of the vessel. Officials want to know if boric acid
simply dribbled down from the reactor head, where it was known to
leak out of implanted nozzles, or if there are separate leaks on the
bottom of the reactor.
The reactor head has 69 nozzles
separate from 52 monitoring instrumentation tubes on the
bottom.
A chemical analysis performed last month failed to
verify if the acid on the bottom was the same as that found on the
top. Mr. Myers said he does not believe cracks exist in the bottom,
largely because that part of the reactor typically ran at 550
degrees - about 50 degrees less than the head.
The reactor
pressure test will show whether a problem exists there, officials
said.
FirstEnergy officials told the NRC yesterday that the
company has become more proactive in identifying problems itself and
in facilitating a workplace atmosphere in which employees have been
encouraged to bring forth safety issues to management.
NRC
officials said they weren't convinced.
Mr. Grobe told one
angry Ottawa County resident there is "no justification" for
Davis-Besse's corrosion.
"There are reasons, but there is no
justification," he said.
Mr. Collins admitted the NRC was
partly to blame for not being more vigilant with its
inspections.
"We ourselves did not recognize the phenomenon
that was going on with the boron [leakage]. We had missed
opportunities ourselves," he said.
Boric acid that leaked
through reactor-head nozzles melted through six inches of steel,
leaving less than a quarter-inch of a stainless steel
liner.
The corrosion has prompted the NRC to issue two
nationwide directives to all 68 other nuclear plants with
pressurized-water reactors, demanding information on the extent of
their reactor-head inspections.
FirstEnergy responded Tuesday
with an unscheduled shutdown of another of its nuclear plants, the
Beaver Valley 1 plant in western Pennsylvania. Todd Schneider,
company spokesman, acknowledged this year that plant has "surface
rust" on its reactor head and elaborated on that yesterday by
claiming it has not gouged off steel.
The company voluntarily
did the shutdown to comply with the NRC request for more
information, and it plans to have Beaver Valley 1 operating in early
December after ultrasonic tests on the head, Mr. Schneider said.
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