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1988 warning ignored at the Besse-Messie
Davis Bessie - Nuclear chickens came home to finally roost:
"Dr. Bill Corcoran at NSRC" wrote:
> Please scroll down for today's story from the NY Times. Best
> Regards, Bill Corcoran W. R. Corcoran, Ph.D., P.E.
> Nuclear Safety Review Concepts
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> Windsor, CT 06095-1634
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> where you will find a dialogue on the Davis-Besse near miss LOCA.,
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> September 30, 2002
>
> '88 Warning Was Rejected at Damaged Nuclear Plant
>
> By MATTHEW L. WALD
>
> ASHINGTON, Sept. 29 — The discovery in February that a reactor
> vessel in a nuclear power plant had corroded to the brink of
> rupturing may have shocked the plant's operators and federal safety
> regulators, but years ago, Howard C. Whitcomb saw it coming, or
> something like it.
>
> Mr. Whitcomb, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector who was
> hired by the owners of the Davis-Besse reactor, near Toledo, Ohio, to
> write a report on what was wrong with maintenance there, concluded in
> 1988 that management so disdained its craft workers that it had lost
> touch with the condition of the plant.
>
> Top executives responded swiftly and decisively, he said: They ordered
> him to change his report. He quit instead.
>
> Now, the owners are saying they need to get in better touch with their
> employees, who according to company surveys are still reluctant to
> raise safety concerns. In a meeting with the Nuclear Regulatory
> Commission in mid-September, company officials explained that they
> were meeting with all 800 plant employees in small groups with a
> facilitator to improve communication. The plant, built for Toledo
> Edison, is now run by First Energy Nuclear Operating Company, after a
> merger.
>
> The simple problem at Davis-Besse, a 24-year-old reactor, was that
> water was leaking from two nozzles on top of the vessel. The water
> contained boron, a chemical used to regulate the nuclear reaction, and
> the boron accumulated in a hidden spot and ate away about 70 pounds of
> steel.
>
> The commission staff has said that the company's reports on the
> condition of the vessel head were misleading.
>
> Now the reactor head must be replaced, a task that has required
> cutting a big hole through a containment dome several feet thick.
>
> But there are broader questions. Why did the company delay making a
> change to the reactor head that would have made inspection possible?
> Why did not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which wanted all plants
> of Davis-Besse's type to inspect for the problem, push for earlier
> action?
>
> As is common after severe problems at a reactor, the commission has
> been examining the structure of management and what it calls the
> plant's culture, meaning the attitudes of the people who work there,
> the willingness of operators to raise safety questions and
> management's willingness to consider them.
>
> While the corrosion at the vessel head was not obvious, the boron had
> spread elsewhere, and the commission is particularly interested in why
> no one did anything about corrosion on a ventilation duct that was in
> plain sight of workers entering the containment.
>
> "People generally accepted that condition," said Todd M. Schneider, a
> spokesman for First Energy. Since the discovery of the corrosion in
> the vessel head, management has worked to change attitudes so "those
> conditions are no longer acceptable," Mr. Schneider said.
>
> In his 1988 report, Mr. Whitcomb mentioned the culture problems that
> are now recognized.
>
> "Many craft personnel hold strong negative perceptions of engineering
> and management personnel," he wrote. "In general, the labor forces
> feel that management exhibits a general lack of concern or respect for
> their abilities, efforts or problems."
>
> Mr. Whitcomb was hardly an industry rebel. A veteran of the nuclear
> Navy, he was a resident inspector for the Nuclear Regulatory
> Commission at the H.B. Robinson reactor in South Carolina, and then
> went to a plant under construction in Ohio before being hired by
> Toledo Edison. After he gave two weeks' notice at Davis-Besse, he went
> to work at the Fermi reactor, near Detroit. Now he is a lawyer in
> general practice in Oak Harbor, Ohio, the location of the Davis-Besse
> reactor.
>
> In a report on June 20, 1988, to the company's vice president for
> nuclear power and the plant manager, he said that closing to refuel
> took too long; that preventive maintenance was slow and not fully
> effective because managers did not pay enough attention to the
> workers' needs; and that the workers were embittered.
>
> "Maintenance has traditionally been regarded in a subservient role at
> Davis-Besse," Mr. Whitcomb wrote. To be successful, management must
> recognize "the contribution that craft personnel may provide in the
> development of plant-specific maintenance actions." Managers must take
> a more serious attitude toward maintenance, he wrote.
>
> That finding in the report, a copy of which was provided to The New
> York Times by Ohio Citizen Action, a nonprofit group that has raised
> many safety questions about the reactor, seems prescient.
>
> "If they followed the advice of 20 years ago, we wouldn't be here
> now," said Amy K. Ryder, the group's program director in the Cleveland
> area.
>
> In an interview, Mr. Whitcomb said, "They just didn't want to hear
> it."
>
> Mr. Schneider, the spokesman for First Energy, said that the two
> executives to whom Mr. Whitcomb had made his report 14 years ago were
> no longer with the company. The report "was not up to our
> requirements," he said, but he would not confirm that Mr. Whitcomb had
> been told to rewrite it. Mr. Whitcomb left Toledo Edison voluntarily,
> he said.
>
> The company says it hopes to restart the plant this year. Work is
> progressing well on the head replacement, Mr. Schneider said. First
> Energy bought the head of a similar reactor in Michigan on which
> construction has been abandoned. It is still working on the culture,
> he said.
>
>
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