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Other | Article published
Sunday, September 1, 2002
Next question:
Why weren’t the slip-ups at Davis-Besse discovered
earlier?
3 investigations direct
scrutiny at the federal watchdog agency
By KELLY
LECKER
BLADE STAFF WRITER
OAK HARBOR, Ohio - The Davis-Besse nuclear
power plant was getting positive marks on federal inspections in the
1990s, even as mounds of boric acid were eating a hole in the
reactor vessel head, causing a safety problem that would send
ripples through the nuclear industry.
As the investigation
continues into how corrosion on Davis-Besse’s reactor head got so
bad it caused a milk-jug-sized hole, leaving only a thin stainless
steel liner to cover the reactor, some of the attention is turning
toward the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Critics and the
agency itself want to know how the mounds of boric acid on the head
and other signs of problems were missed at the plant.
"If the
NRC can ensure these things are fixed, they’ll have a greater
confidence that it won’t get to this point again," said David
Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the watchdog group Union of
Concerned Scientists. "The NRC are kind of like the nuclear police.
That didn’t happen here."
Three separate investigations are
going on into the NRC’s role in the reactor head corrosion, which
has kept the plant shut down since February. Investigators are
looking at whether warning signs were missed or if inspection
procedures should be strengthened.
The Inspector General’s
office, an independent unit of the NRC designed to audit the federal
agency, is looking into some of these questions, including what
motivated the NRC to allow Davis-Besse to operate for an additional
six weeks instead of shutting them down late last year when cracked
nozzles were found at another plant. It was the cracking nozzles
that caused the boric acid to leak, corroding the reactor
head.
The NRC also formed a body, called the Lessons Learned
Task Force, to look into the Davis-Besse situation and what the NRC
could have done better to prevent it. Among other things, the NRC is
looking into whether FirstEnergy officials deliberately gave false
information on documents. The agency has already issued a proposed
violation for inaccurate reports.
In addition, the U.S. House
Energy and Commerce Committee, which helped Congress form the
country’s energy policy, is investigating Davis-Besse and the NRC to
make sure the public was not endangered by the corrosion.
The
NRC in 1997 called Davis-Besse one of the best-run nuclear plants in
the Midwest, if not the country. It gave the plant high marks in
subsequent inspections throughout the 1990s. It wasn’t until
recently, when the corroded head was found, that it came out that
problems at the plant included a tendency by management to put
production before safety and not to find and fix problems as they
occurred.
That shortcoming, company officials have said, led
to the corrosion problem that one former regulator has called the
closest brush with disaster in the nuclear industry since the Three
Mile Island incident.
At a recent public hearing, the NRC
regional administrator for the Midwest acknowledged that federal
regulators were not as involved at Davis-Besse in the 1990s as they
should have been.
In large part, that was because the NRC -
and particularly its regional office in Lisle, Ill. - was handling
problems at other nuclear power plants. Four plants were going in
front of the regulatory body that Davis-Besse faces now - called the
0350 oversight panel - because they had been shut down for various
safety problems. One of the plants, the Clinton nuclear power plant
near Clinton, Ill., did not operate for more than two
years.
At the time, Davis-Besse was giving the NRC no such
indications, regulators said, so the agency decided to devote its
resources to the other plants. Davis-Besse was operating under the
NRC’s baseline inspection program, meaning it was showing no signs
of safety troubles. Two resident inspectors are typically assigned
to such plants.
Resident inspectors are the first line of
federal oversight at nuclear power plants. They work at the plant,
monitoring meetings, inspecting the plant, and overseeing workers’
activities.
At Davis-Besse, the NRC has a resident inspector
and a senior resident inspector. From March 28, 1999 to October 10,
1999, and again between Sept. 22, 2001, and Jan. 12 of this year,
one of those spots was vacant. The longest-running resident
inspector in the 1990s, who served from June, 1999, to September,
2001, was listed earlier this year as an employee at
Davis-Besse.
In June, the NRC’s Advisory Committee on Reactor
Safeguards, an influential federal body, questioned how resident
inspectors could have missed signs like 900 pounds of boric acid on
the reactor head. Those questions were echoed in the most recent
public hearing on Davis-Besse.
But Mr. Lochbaum said he is
reluctant to criticize the resident inspectors, who have the task of
monitoring activities at the entire plant.
"Just the
mechanics with several hundred workers and two resident inspectors,
that’s just an impossible task," he said. "They were kind of
indicating the resident inspectors didn’t do a good job. It would
have been nice if they had caught it, but I don’t think it was their
fault."
In plants that are undergoing baseline inspections,
the NRC performs about 5 percent of the inspections done at the
plant, Mr. Lochbaum said. The power plant is expected to complete
the other inspections and report problems to the federal
agency.
In addition to the resident inspectors, regional
inspectors conduct occasional reviews of the plants, and specialists
look at specific areas of the plants throughout the year. It is
typical for specialists to complete 10 to 25 inspections a
year.
Jim Dyer, head of the NRC’s regional office in Chicago,
said at a recent public hearing that he was worried Davis-Besse was
anticipating what inspectors would look at, then making sure those
areas were in compliance, much the way a student could anticipate
what’s on a test, then study just those areas.
Because
resident inspectors don’t look at every part of the plant during
each check, inspections are based on risk assessments, according to
Doug Simpkins, who is a resident inspector at Davis-Besse. The
industry, including plant officials and regulators, developed a
system in which systems at the power plant were rated based on what
would cause the most risk if it failed. Resident inspectors pay the
most attention to what, according to the list, poses the highest
risk.
High on the list are auxiliary feedwater systems and
diesel generators. The reactor head vessel was toward the
bottom.
"We never thought it would happen. We didn’t think it
could happen," Mr. Simpkins said. "They don’t understand. We have a
strict set of guidelines to follow."
Mr. Lochbaum said the
NRC needs to re-evaluate its risk assessment, which was developed
around 1997.
"Things that are on the top of the list get the
most attention. And nobody ever gets to the bottom of their inbox,"
he said.
Mr. Lochbaum and other experts in the nuclear
industry said the regulations are a system of checks and balances
that are designed to catch problems with equipment or
workers.
"But the problem at Davis-Besse wasn’t just one
worker. The NRC needs to figure out why those backups didn’t work.
You have to try to figure out why the safety nets weren’t in play,"
Mr. Lochbaum said.
Privately, some people who are active in
the nuclear industry say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot
afford to assume nuclear power plants are evaluating themselves, and
the incident at Davis-Besse proves that. Federal regulators need to
constantly assess how well nuclear power plants are inspecting
themselves and reporting problems, they said.
"They need to
restore the public’s confidence," Mr. Lochbaum
said.
For complete coverage of Davis-Besse go to
www.toledoblade.com/davisbesse
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