[NukeNet] APP July 27, 2006 NRC faults Oyster Creek staff

[Edith]

NRC faults Oyster Creek staff
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 07/27/06

BY NICHOLAS CLUNN
STAFF WRITER

When interviewed by federal regulators investigating a safety violation caused by human error at the Oyster Creek Generating Station, plant operators said they would execute step-by-step procedures by skipping around instead.

Those responses, which indicated to regulators that "key procedural steps" could be missed, were part of a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission report released Wednesday on whether plant operator AmerGen Energy Co. had addressed the violation's two causes.

AmerGen successfully dealt with a failure in emergency preparedness, but not the one associated with operator performance, according to the report.

Both shortcomings explain why AmerGen in August 2005 failed to issue a mandatory advisory in time. AmerGen should have issued the advisory, meant to inform state and local officials about a plant condition that could have affected the public, after sea grass briefly clogged an intake used to pump cooling water into the plant.

Though AmerGen took corrective actions to improve operator performance after the emergency, regulators found that operators continued to demonstrate weakness when it came to adhering to procedures and understanding the expectations of management.

As a result, AmerGen will submit itself to further investigations until regulators are satisfied with operator performance. When that happens, regulators will close the violation, which had a low-to-moderate safety significance.

Oyster Creek now runs the risk of coming under increased oversight if regulators find another violation of similar severity — and in the emergency preparedness area of operations — while the August citation remains open.

"Important milestone"

Showing regulators that plant operators can follow procedures is an "important milestone" in a wider improvement program at the Route 9 facility, plant Vice President Tim Rausch said in a prepared statement.

"We expect all station employees to strictly adhere to procedures, and we continue to drive toward excellence in that area," Rausch said.

Regulators discovered that some operators did not understand how to follow procedures after interviewing eight of them from several crews.

In the report, regulators wrote that there "appeared to be confusion as to the definition of "step by step' and that it was okay to skip around in the procedure as long as the subset steps of a particular section were performed in sequence."

They went on to say that "several operators conveyed that performance of the step could be a judgment or subjective call."

Making sure that operators contact key decision-makers in government when emergencies happen appeared important to Rep. H. James Saxton, R-N.J., who spoke about Oyster Creek and other topics with members of the Asbury Park Press editorial board Wednesday.


Saxton, on a conference call, described former plant owner GPU Nuclear as "extremely cooperative" but said AmerGen was more difficult to deal with because "local control has been diminished to a large degree."

GPU was based in Parsippany. AmerGen is owned by Illinois-based Exelon.

"GPU actually used to call me in the middle of the night when they had a so-called event, when something went wrong," Saxton said.

Staff writer Todd B. Bates contributed to this story. Nicholas Clunn: (732) 643-4072 or nclunn at app.com
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BEHIND THE NEWS
The violation discussed in the federal report released Wednesday was one of two plant errors that caused Oyster Creek to rank among the worst in the nation — in terms of safety performance — during the third quarter of 2005.
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