Published: Thursday, January 26, 2012, 6:38 PM Updated: Thursday, January 26, 2012, 8:11 PM
By Brian Lawson, The Huntsville Times
This March 12, 2008 file photo shows TVA's Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Athens. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves)ATHENS, Alabama -- A Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector on Thursday delivered a tough critique of maintenance operations at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant near Athens, and TVA officials agreed with the findings.
NRC engineer John Jandovitz led a team that spent three weeks at the Tennessee Valley Authority plant this fall, watching maintenance workers in the field, analyzing records and talking to employees and managers.
The team's intensive inspection was unusual for the NRC, which normally reviews completed work, not plant workers. But a critical "red finding" last year that cited a serious safety violation related to a valve failure in a plant safety system has pushed the plant into a new inspection category.
TVA operates three nuclear reactors at Browns Ferry.
During a public meeting Thursday at the plant, Jandovitz said Browns Ferry has a significant maintenance backlog, needs to do a much better job prioritizing and scheduling work, and it has too many projects that aren't done right the first time.
Keith Polson, site vice president for Browns Ferry, said the utility agrees with the NRC findings and is committed not to just improving operations to meet requirements, but striving for excellence in its operations.
Jandovitz stressed that the bulk of the team's findings were non-regulatory -- not direct safety violations -- but that the slow rate of updating equipment and the failure to work efficiently plagues the plant's maintenance operations.
"We were told by workers that they can do preventive maintenance and surveillance of systems, but they can't do corrective maintenance because they don't have enough resources," Jandovitz said.
Preston Swafford, TVA's chief nuclear officer, told the audience that TVA has been learning more through the inspection process, but has known that its maintenance programs and processes have been deficient for some time.
Swafford said they have been working hard in the past 30 months or so to bring in new personnel, and when necessary, to provide plant managers with contract workers to bolster the workforce.
"It has been an ugly period as we've been identifying issues," Swafford said. "But you can't get well unless you put these issues on the table and address them."
Jandovitz said when corrective action plans and work orders are poorly drafted or left incomplete, the system is forced to rely too heavily on plant workers and foremen to ensure misinformation is corrected. That slows the rate of work and undermines employee confidence in bringing up additional areas that need to be address, Jandovitz said.
Swafford said as Browns Ferry has begun to stress the need to address problems that more workers are coming forward and pointing out other work that needs to be performed.
The NRC will conduct a third inspection, likely this spring, which will be an even more extensive look at the plant's safety culture and related issues.
A number of people in the audience spoke at the end of the meeting. The public comments included calls for moving spent fuel rods from pools to concrete and steel storage units. Residents urged TVA officials to make safety a greater priority at the plant, to take additional steps to guard against tornado damage and to hold workers and TVA leaders accountable -- by firing them -- for safety-related errors.
While the storm dumped from 10 to 40 inches of snow across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern portions of the country, Exelon's seven plants in New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania operated without a hiccup, producing 10,832 megawatts of electricity per hour, the company said, adding that this was enough power for more than 10 million homes.
