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CLEVELAND, Aug. 31 — Federal regulators are investigating accusations that the owner of a nuclear plant where acid nearly ate through a six-inch-thick steel reactor cap altered records about the damage, the company said.
Todd Schneider, a spokesman for the company, FirstEnergy Corporation, said the utility was cooperating with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission but he would not provide details of the investigation at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo.
"Allegations of altered documents and records are part of this investigation," Mr. Schneider said.
The plant has been closed since engineers discovered in March that boric acid had nearly eaten through the steel cap on the reactor vessel. It was the most extensive corrosion ever found on a nuclear reactor in the United States and led to a nationwide review of all 69 similar plants.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said the leak that caused it should have been spotted as long as four years ago. An agency spokesman, Jan Strasma, would not confirm that officials were investigating whether FirstEnergy had altered records.
A coalition of 14 environmental and nuclear watchdog groups is urging the agency to order an independent review of the plant.
A coalition spokesman, David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer, said investigators told him that the agency was studying whether FirstEnergy backdated videotapes, falsified documents and withheld a photograph to make damage seem less severe than it was.
Workers removed the damaged reactor head on Thursday and were to begin installing a replacement. The plant is expected to be operational by October, Mr. Schneider said.
3 investigations direct scrutiny at the federal watchdog agency
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.
OAK HARBOR, Ohio - FirstEnergy Corp.’s failure to stop acid from chewing steel off part of its Davis-Besse reactor head has refocused the nation’s eyes on one of the most basic and fundamental issues of nuclear power: Human error.
More than just a rust problem that reinvigorated the juices of anti-nuclear activists, Davis-Besse’s corrosion has raised new questions about how much vigor is in place for meeting safety obligations.
The result has been the opening of a Pandora’s box at a critical juncture, not only for the nuclear industry but for the country.
America’s insatiable appetite for energy is growing. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration figures, America’s electricity consumption rose 23.5 percent during the 1990s. The agency figures the demand will increase from 1.8 percent to 2.5 percent for each of the next 20 years, requiring 50 percent to 70 percent more electricity on the nation’s grid over the next two decades.
Nuclear energy is poised to be a big part of that picture.
Ten of the existing 103 plants have been granted 20-year extensions to their licenses; reviews are pending for more than a dozen others.
Twenty-seven other applications are expected to be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission within the next six years, including one from Davis-Besse. Those figures come from the industry’s Washington-based trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, which predicts that virtually all of today’s nuclear plants will end up seeking a license extension someday.
Many plants are boosting their power output along the way. And, according to the institute, optimism for a new generation of plants is the highest it’s been since a 23-year stagnation began after the Three Mile Island accident of 1979 and huge cost overruns that preceded that watershed event.
"There is no doubt that the fortunes of nuclear energy in the United States are and have been on the upswing. Every time we think things can’t get much better, they do," Joe F. Colvin, institute president and chief executive officer, beamed during a June 10th speech in Florida.
Skeptics question Mr. Colvin’s flowery rhetoric, yet there is ample reason for the industry’s bright outlook:
For the first time in years, nuclear power has staunch support from the White House. Expanded nuclear power is a cornerstone of the Bush-Cheney national energy policy. President Bush’s budget requests $38.7 million to help start a U.S. Department of Energy initiative calling for construction of more nuclear plants to start by 2010.
The industry’s biggest obstacle, where to bury spent reactor fuel, moved significantly closer to resolution during the summer when Congress designated Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the disposal site. President Bush has signed the bill, something former President Clinton vowed he never would do while in office and something former Vice President Al Gore vowed he would never do if elected president.
The construction process has been made easier, in hopes of making a nuclear plant’s billion-dollar-or-more price tag more attractive to Wall Street. The NRC has approved three types of standardized designs and is considering others, thereby reducing the cumbersome task of reviewing each on a case-by-case basis. Serious thought is being given to combining construction and operating permits, too - all of which could shave three or more years off a review process that can take eight years or longer.
The 1957 Price-Anderson Act, a bill that caps the accident liability for any one nuclear plant at $9.3 billion, was re-authorized by Congress last spring. Without it, the 45-year-old act would have expired this month and left the industry in a quandary over how much financial risk it would face in the event of a disaster.
Global warming has given the nuclear industry a new avenue for promoting itself, especially with Mr. Bush trying to deflect criticism about his opposition to the Kyoto agreement that calls for massive reductions in greenhouse gases by the United States and other countries. Many of those gases come from coal-fired electrical plants, factories, and automobile exhaust. Nuclear plants have one major advantage over coal plants in that they do not emit greenhouse gases, although the radioactive waste generated by nuclear plants poses long-term disposal issues.
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During the same speech in which Mr. Colvin extolled the advantages of nuclear energy - a follow-up to a similar one he delivered at a symposium in Japan last spring - the Nuclear Energy Institute chief offered words of caution:
"Without our collective, underlying commitment to safety, the promise of nuclear energy for future generations around the world will evaporate before our eyes."
Similar views have been expressed in speeches by NRC Chairman Richard Meserve, who next month is to be a keynote speaker at a three-day event in Washington called "The Nuclear Renaissance."
Although the NRC’s national focus has been on terrorism threats since Sept. 11, Mr. Meserve told a group in Florida in May that some basic safety issues have emerged, using the phrase "as we have recently seen at Davis-Besse," to help drive home the point.
While few people suggest that Davis-Besse’s woes are big enough to shut down the nuclear industry, there is almost unanimous agreement that the corrosion at the Ottawa County plant - 25 miles east of Toledo - has made officials step back and take a closer look at what they’re doing.
By the NRC’s own admission, the government agency was stunned by Davis-Besse’s corrosion because of the belief that inspection programs were strong enough to head off that kind of a problem.
The agency’s own Office of Inspector General has told The Blade it plans to determine whether the surprise discovery of corrosion at Davis-Besse is symptomatic of a regulatory breakdown within the NRC that needs to be addressed.
But regardless what the Inspector General decides, changes are coming.
Consider an announcement in June by Bill Bateman, chief of the materials and engineering branch of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.
Frustrated and embarrassed by what had been found at Davis-Besse, Mr. Bateman said he was ordering his staff to draw up a nationwide bulletin for all nuclear plants, warning utilities to start doing a better job of inspecting their reactor heads or face the wrath of the NRC.
"If you’re going to wait for the regulator to come around, you’ll be caught between a rock and a hard place," the message warns.
Several utilities, after learning about Davis-Besse’s problems, apparently knew better than to sit back and wait for regulators to come around.
In June, Dominion Energy’s board of directors voted to swap out all four reactor heads at the utility’s Surry and North Anna nuclear complexes in Virginia. Those multimillion-dollar replacement projects are to occur in 2004 and 2005, when new heads are ready, Richard Zuercher, Dominion spokesman, said.
"I think it [Davis-Besse’s corrosion] has raised everybody’s awareness that these kind of things need to be examined closely. You can’t be complacent. You can’t just say that happened at Davis-Besse, that it’s not our problem," he said.
Mississippi-based Entergy also questions how things got so far out of hand at Davis-Besse. But Entergy spokesman Carl Crawford is one of many pro-nuclear officials who recite a common thesis: That Davis-Besse should be a wake-up call, not an indictment of nuclear power.
"The entire industry was rather surprised and taken aback by the problems at Davis-Besse. Now, we’ve pretty much come to view it as an isolated incident," he said.
That’s the theme the Nuclear Energy Institute is pushing, too, as it moves forward with its sales pitch for expanding nuclear power.
FirstEnergy doesn’t want to give the industry a black eye.
Richard Wilkins, company spokesman, said last week the corrosion issue is "unique to Davis-Besse" and agreed the plant’s woes can be attributed to a series of short-sighted management decisions that have occurred over its 25-year history.
"This will be a defining moment for this plant," Mr. Wilkins said. "We’re turning it upside down. We will have to earn the right to restart and run this plant."
Davis-Besse began operation in April, 1977. Its 40-year license is due to expire in 2017 - but FirstEnergy has announced plans to apply for a 20-year extension.
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The possibility that Davis-Besse had America’s most-corroded reactor head was so far off the radar screen that nobody was even looking for rust when workers entered the plant’s containment building in early March, NRC officials have said.
Davis-Besse had impressed the NRC with several prior inspections leading up to the most recent outage, which started Feb. 16 with the intent of refueling the plant, doing routine maintenance, and checking for an emerging wear-and-tear issue - hairline cracks in long, metal tubes known as control rod drive mechanism nozzles.
Sixty-nine such nozzles pass through a reactor head. The tubes serve as passageways for the boron-filled control rods that operators plunge into a reactor to absorb neutrons and shut down the nuclear reaction.
Cracks in those reactor-head nozzles, an issue that many aging plants are encountering, are often so tiny they cannot be detected without ultrasonic tests.
The NRC’s anxiety about them became magnified on a national level in February, 2001, when Duke Energy Corp.’s Oconee Unit 3 plant in South Carolina became the first to have nozzles that developed circular-shaped, horizontal flaws. Those are especially dangerous because they can weaken reactor-head nozzles so much the tubes can end up shooting into the air like champagne corks, officials have said.
Such a thing could result in a worst-case scenario: A reactor-head hole can allow radioactive steam to fill up a nuclear plant’s containment building and put it - the public’s last line of defense - under enormous pressure.
But given Davis-Besse’s enormous rust problem, the NRC’s attention was diverted away from a search for tiny nozzle cracks.
Little was said in June when FirstEnergy acknowledged at an NRC meeting that lab tests revealed a total of nine cracks in Davis-Besse’s nozzles - not five, as originally announced. One of those nine cracks was circumferential, officials said.
By then, the NRC was focused on a much more basic and fundamental problem: The human error that had allowed Davis-Besse’s rust problem to get out of hand.
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The nozzles that house control rod drive mechanisms were once thought to be impervious. But in 1989, at the Bugey Unit 3 nuclear plant in France, the world’s first known cracking of them was discovered.
The nozzle cracks in France "obviously showed the potential" existed at other nuclear plants throughout the world, according to Dr. Edwin M. Hackett, assistant chief of the NRC’s material engineering branch.
France has been more pro-active in dealing with the problem. Its government-owned utility, Electricite de France, has decided to replace that nation’s reactor heads instead of waiting for boric acid to escape from the reactor and chew steel off the reactor cap, as it did at Davis-Besse.
It’s an incredibly expensive proposition. New reactor heads can each cost $20 million to $50 million when engineering and all other costs are included, according to industry estimates.
The propensity for nuclear plants having nozzle leakage is one of the serious wear-and-tear issues that prompted utilities to pool together resources and hire the Electric Power Research Institute of Palo Alto, Calif., to develop an initiative called the materials reliability program in 1998.
The engineering program tackles issues related to plant aging that are common throughout the industry. The goal was to provide research that will help keep existing nuclear plants up to snuff as their owners make a case for extending operating licenses, said Chuck Welty, technology applications director for the California institute.
"We try to follow things close enough so we understand the plants that are aging," he said.
Was Davis-Besse’s corrosion largely the result of FirstEnergy’s failure to do that - the human error of overlooking warning signs?
"That’s correct," he said. "That’s what it suggests. We’re trying to avoid having that happen again."
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Alex Marion, engineering director for the Nuclear Energy Institute, acknowledged in an interview with The Blade that Davis-Besse’s rust is a new chapter for the industry, a follow-up to the nozzle-cracking issue that started in France in the early 1990s.
But the engineer used caution in explaining possible ramifications.
"Hindsight is 20/20," Mr. Marion said. "It appears, at this point, the Davis-Besse situation was an isolated situation, because none of the other plants have had similar corrosion."
Indeed, one of the first things the NRC did after learning about Davis-Besse’s problem was to issue a bulletin alerting all nuclear plants in the country to be on the lookout for reactor-head corrosion and demanding that those with pressurized water reactors - the same type as Davis-Besse - immediately turn over their latest inspection records.
The NRC’s consensus after weeks of review: Bits of minor corrosion exist elsewhere, but clearly no reactor head has been as badly damaged as Davis-Besse.
"Davis-Besse’s problems may have been one of implementation," Mr. Marion said.
According to documents reviewed by The Blade, the utility had drafted work orders several years ago to improve visual access through inspection ports near the reactor head known as "mouse holes." But the proposed modifications were canceled by management, apparently because of the $250,000 price tag.
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Although the nuclear industry doesn’t want Davis-Besse to slow down its momentum, serious questions about nuclear power have been raised by people other than anti-nuclear activists.
In an opinion piece published by several major newspapers, including The Blade, former NRC Commissioner Victor Glinsky accused the agency of downplaying Davis-Besse’s problems and not being immediately forthcoming about the risks.
"If the reactor had gone back into operation - as it very nearly did - the consequences could have been enormous in terms of public safety as well as the future of the nuclear industry," Mr. Glinsky wrote. "All in all, what happened at Davis-Besse was a narrow escape."
Yet in this post-Sept. 11 era that is marked by roller-coaster stocks, business failures, and anxiety over investor confidence on Wall Street, there appears to be many other factors influencing the future of America’s nuclear industry than the rust problems of one nuclear plant 25 miles east of Toledo.
Some people question whether nuclear is poised for a renaissance from a dollars-and-cents point of view, given the huge up-front investment that is required.
"We would like to see a new generation of nuclear plants become a reality, but the fact of the matter is there are a lot of issues that need to be resolved before anyone’s going to risk capital on a nuclear plant," Richard Zuercher of Dominion said.
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