ML023640177
| ML023640177 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Davis Besse  |
| Issue date: | 12/10/2002 |
| From: | Bill Dean, Grobe J, Hopkins J, Christine Lipa, Mcconnell K, Douglas Simpkins, Thomas C NRC/RGN-III |
| To: | Fast J, Morrison N, Myers L, Pearce L, Powers J, Price C, Schrauder R, Mackenzie Stevens FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co |
| References | |
| Download: ML023640177 (150) | |
Text
1 1
2 PUBLIC MEETING BETWEEN U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION O350 PANEL 3 AND FIRST ENERGY NUCLEAR OPERATING COMPANY OAK HARBOR, OHIO 4 - - -
Meeting held on Tuesday, December 10, 2002, at 5 2:00 p.m. at the Camp Perry Clubhouse, Oak Harbor, Ohio, taken by me Marie B. Fresch, Registered Merit Reporter, and 6 Notary Public in and for the State of Ohio.
7 PANEL MEMBERS PRESENT:
8 U. S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION 9
John "Jack" Grobe, Chairman, MC 0350 Panel 10 William Dean, Vice Chairman, MC 0350 Panel Christine Lipa, Projects Branch Chief 11 Douglas Simpkins, NRC Resident Inspector Christopher Scott Thomas, 12 Senior Resident Inspector U.S. NRC Office - Davis-Besse 13 Jon Hopkins, Project Manager Davis-Besse Keith McConnell, Acting Director 14 Project Directorate Three 15 FIRST ENERGY NUCLEAR OPERATING COMPANY 16 Lew Myers, FENOC Chief Operating Officer Robert W. Schrauder, 17 Director - Support Services J. Randel Fast, Plant Manager 18 James J. Powers, III Director - Nuclear Engineering 19 Michael J. Stevens, Director - Nuclear Maintenance 20 L. William Pearce, Vice President FENOC Oversight 21 Clark Price, Owner - Restart Action Plan Neil Morrison, 22 Program Compliance Plan Owner 23 - - -
24 25 MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
2 1 MS. LIPA: Good afternoon.
2 Were just about ready to get started. If everybody was 3 able to get the handouts, I know the FirstEnergy handouts 4 just arrived a few moments ago, so if you werent able to 5 get one, you might go ahead and grab one before we get 6 started up here.
7 Also, there is plenty of seats up front, if anyone 8 wants to move a little closer to the front. We wont ask 9 too many questions.
10 Okay, welcome to FirstEnergy and to members of the 11 public. Im Christine Lipa, and Im a member of the NRCs 12 Oversight Panel and Im also the Branch Chief in NRCs 13 Region III Office. And, my branch has overall 14 responsibility for the NRCs Inspection Program at 15 Davis-Besse.
16 Well go through the rest of the introductions in a 17 few moments, but I wanted to go to the next slide and cover 18 the purposes of todays meeting.
19 One of the purposes is to inform the public of our 20 progress and the Oversight Panels activities, and then the 21 second part is to give the Licensee an opportunity to 22 discuss with us their efforts on implementing their Return 23 to Service Plan.
24 This meeting is open to the public. And the public 25 will have an opportunity before the end of the meeting to MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
3 1 ask questions of the NRC. This is considered a Category 2 One Meeting in accordance with the NRCs policy on 3 conducting public meetings. Before the meeting is 4 adjourned, there will be opportunities for members of the 5 public to ask questions or to make comments.
6 Were also having this meeting transcribed to 7 maintain a record of the meeting. The transcription will 8 be available on our web page several weeks after todays 9 meeting. It usually takes about four weeks to get that 10 posted.
11 The agendas and handouts are available in the foyer 12 and theyre also available on the NRCs Website. Youll 13 see we have a December edition of our public monthly 14 newsletter.
15 Also, there is a summary of the Lessons Learned Task 16 Force Report, the handout of our part of the presentation, 17 and the FirstEnergys handouts.
18 We also have some feedback forms that you can use to 19 fill out and provide feedback to us on how this meeting 20 goes. Were always trying to improve these meetings.
21 This is the first time weve held the meeting here 22 at Camp Perry, so well see how it works, how easy it is 23 for everybody to see and hear what were discussing. Feel 24 free to give us feedback.
25 I would like to start off with introductions on our MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
4 1 side of the table here. On the far left is Keith 2 McConnell, and hes the Acting Project Director of PD3 and 3 NRR.
4 Next to Keith is Jon Hopkins and hes the NRR 5 Project Manager in Headquarters for the Davis-Besse 6 facility.
7 Next to John is Bill Dean. Hes the Deputy Director 8 of the Division of Engineering in NRR. And, theyre all 9 located in Rockville, Maryland. Bill is also the Vice 10 Chairman of the Oversight Panel.
11 On my left is Jack Grobe, and hes the Senior 12 Manager in the Region III office in Lisle, Illinois; and 13 hes also the Chairman of the Oversight Panel.
14 On my right is Scott Thomas. Hes the Senior 15 Resident Inspector at the Davis-Besse facility.
16 Next to him is Doug Simpkins, and hes the Resident 17 Inspector at the Davis-Besse facility.
18 We also have several other NRC personnel in the 19 audience today. Viktoria Mitlyng is way in the back.
20 Shes the Public Affairs Officer at our Region III Office.
21 Also, next to her is Rolland Lickus.
22 Greeting you in the foyer was Nancy Keller, and 23 shes the Office Assistant for the Resident Inspector 24 Office at the Davis-Besse facility.
25 We also have Jay Collins, he is a General Engineer MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
5 1 on rotation from headquarters. And we have Ivy Metzel, 2 shes an Engineer in the NRC Region III Office.
3 Our transcriber today is Marie Fresch from Norwalk, 4 Ohio.
5 Are there any representatives or public officials in 6 the room that would like to stand up and introduce 7 yourselves.
8 MR. KOEBEL: Carl Koebel, 9 Ottawa County Commissioner.
10 MS. LIPA: Welcome, Carl.
11 MR. PAPCIN John Papcin, 12 Ottawa County Commissioner.
13 MS. LIPA: Okay, welcome.
14 MR. ARNDT: Steve Arndt, 15 County Commissioner.
16 MS LIPA: Okay, thanks, 17 Steve.
18 MR. WITT: Jere Witt, County 19 Administrator.
20 MS. LIPA: Hi, Jere.
21 Okay, thank you.
22 Lew, would you like to introduce your staff?
23 MR. MYERS: Yes, thank you.
24 Were pleased to be here today. We have several 25 members in the audience. Bob Saunders is with us, the MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
6 1 President of FENOC.
2 Gary Leidich is also here, is Acting Vice 3 President.
4 And we have Kitty, Kathryn Dindo here with us.
5 Shes one of our corporate officers of DB and FirstEnergy.
6 Kathy is out there.
7 At our table today, we have Mike Stevens. Hes the 8 manager of, the Director of our Maintenance Group.
9 Bill Pearce, V P of Oversight.
10 Clark Price is sitting next to me. Clark is going 11 to brief you on the 350 process some.
12 Neil Morrison. Neil Morrison is on loan with us 13 from our Beaver Valley Plant and hes taking care of our 14 Program Reviews.
15 Jim Powers, the Director of our, Director of 16 Engineering is with us.
17 And finally, Randy Fast is down at the end of the 18 table and Randy will be talking on some of our Containment 19 Health.
20 MS. LIPA: Okay, thank you.
21 MR. MYERS: Also, Bob 22 Schrauder is with us. Im sorry. I sort of missed that 23 one.
24 MR. PEARCE: Welcome, Bob.
25 MS. LIPA: Okay, next well MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
7 1 go to the agenda for todays meeting. As you can see, we 2 will be discussing -- we have these meetings every month, 3 and well provide a short summary of last monthss meeting; 4 and well also discuss the NRCs Restart Checklist and the 5 status of some ongoing NRC inspections.
6 Then well turn it over to FirstEnergy for their 7 presentation on the status of their Return to Service 8 Plan.
9 Then well adjourn the NRC meeting, the business 10 portion of the meeting, and well probably do some 11 restructuring of our chairs and then well have, take a 12 break and have the public comment and question session.
13 Then well be adjourning the meeting for this afternoon.
14 So, thats the plan. And the next slide is for John 15 to provide a summary of last months public meeting.
16 MR. HOPKINS: Thank you, 17 Christine.
18 First item, last months meeting we discussed 19 quality assessment and value added by the QA. Licensee 20 discussed steps taken along the lines of organizational 21 changes, stop work orders that were issued, and QAs 22 involvement and the case study that they performed.
23 With regards to Reactor Vessel Bottom Head Plan; for 24 background, rust and Boron were found down the, at the 25 bottom of the reactor vessel head. The Licensee has MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
8 1 cleaned that off now, but the Licensee has a plan to 2 investigate and make sure that that rust and Boron on the 3 bottom of the head did not come from leaking nozzles 4 underneath, and rather just came down from possibly washing 5 down the top.
6 The Licensees plan is to go to normal operating 7 pressure and temperature, using reactor coolant pump heat, 8 no critical reaction, hold there for seven days, and then 9 cool back down, remove the insulation thats underneath the 10 head, and go in there for inspection to see if there was 11 any leakage from the nozzles underneath.
12 There was a meeting about this on November 26th in 13 Headquarters. And, a meeting summary of that meeting 14 should be issued in a few weeks, if not sooner. The slides 15 from that meeting are actually up on the Davis-Besse 16 Website, the NRC -- the NRC has a Website for Davis-Besse.
17 If you go there, there is a lot of information, including 18 the slides from that meeting.
19 The next item discussed last month was System Health 20 Assurance. The Licensee discussed that theyre looking at 21 calculations and analyses and system descriptions. They 22 found that common attributes of interest in their reviews 23 are environmental qualification, high energy line break, 24 fire protection and seismic qualification.
25 The next item last month was Design Issues MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
9 1 Resolution. The Licensee discussed their process for 2 resolving design basis discrepancies and also the Licensee 3 stated that their system engineers are now leading the 4 Readiness Restart Teams for their respective systems.
5 With regards to Management and Human Performance 6 actions, the Licensee discussed several actions that 7 theyve taken under that. Their Case Study Training has 8 been completed; there is Revised Leadership Training for 9 new supervisory personnel; Townhall Meetings, the Licensee 10 has held with their employees; and they also have a 11 Management Observation Program, and that was discussed.
12 Finally last month, Operations Leadership Plan was 13 discussed. The purpose of that plan is to strengthen 14 operations and prepare it for restart. The Licensee 15 discussed their vision for operations with regards to 16 that.
17 One last thing that wasnt discussed at last months 18 meeting, but also on November 26th, in Washington, besides 19 the meeting that we had on the bottom head, there was also 20 a meeting on whats called the Containment Emergency Sump, 21 and the Licensee is doing a modification for a strainer for 22 that sump. And, basically, theyre increasing the strainer 23 size quite substantially. And, again, the slides for that 24 meeting are also up on the NRC Davis-Besse Website and a 25 meeting summary for that meeting will come out in a few MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
10 1 weeks.
2 MS. LIPA: Okay, thank you 3 Jon.
4 The next slide and the next series of slides; weve 5 shown the Restart Checklist at other meetings in a table 6 format. This time weve broken it up into several pages, 7 but its really the same items. The Restart Checklist is a 8 listing of items that the panel has determined necessary to 9 review before restart can be determined. And so, Ill just 10 walk through some of these briefly.
11 The first one is the Adequacy of Root Cause 12 Determination. There are two parts to that. The first 13 part is the technical root cause on the cracking and 14 corrosion, and the second part is the Licensee determined 15 that there were organizational programmatic and human 16 performance issues that was a contributing root cause 17 also.
18 The next item is the Adequacy of Safety Significant 19 Structures, Systems and Components. And there are several 20 items under there, and we have specific inspections looking 21 at each of these items.
22 The next slide shows the Adequacy of Safety 23 Significant Programs. And the Utility is doing reviews of 24 each of these programs to determine if there is changes 25 that need to be made to those programs to make them more MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
11 1 effective, and we have plans to do inspections on each of 2 these programs.
3 The next item is the Adequacy of Organizational 4 Effectiveness and Human Performance. And this is the 5 second root cause that I mentioned earlier. And we have a 6 team thats looking at the adequacy of the root cause, what 7 the Utility has determined for corrective actions and the 8 adequacy of those, and then the effectiveness of those 9 corrective actions as theyre implemented.
10 The next slide is Readiness For Restart. This will 11 be later on after these other inspections that Ive 12 mentioned have been completed, where the NRC staff will 13 perform specific inspections to look at the system, various 14 systems; Readiness for Restart, Operations Readiness for 15 Restart, including Operator Training; and the Test Program 16 Development that the Utility is coming up with to do 17 testing as they begin to start up the plant.
18 The next item is Licensing Issue and Confirmatory 19 Action Letter Resolution. There are several relief 20 requests that are still under review by NRR. And also the 21 Confirmatory Action Letter, one of the items there is that 22 the Utility will meet with the NRC to obtain restart 23 approval before that approval is granted.
24 I wanted to just mention a few upcoming and 25 continuing NRC inspections. We have the Organizational MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
12 1 Effectiveness and Human Performance. That one will be 2 continuing.
3 The second one is the Safety Significant Program 4 Effectiveness. The NRC inspectors have reviewed several 5 programs, but there are several more that were waiting on 6 Utility to complete portions of that before we can do 7 inspections of the programs.
8 And the third item thats not up there is the System 9 Health Assurance. This inspection was begun and there are 10 more parts of it that need to be inspected, so that will be 11 continuing.
12 And then there is also Resident Inspectors, there is 13 two of them that are at the facility, thats where they 14 report to every day, and they do day-to-day observations of 15 operations and ongoing Corrective Action Program items.
16 Also, we have recently issued a couple of NRC 17 inspection reports, and those should be available on the 18 web page.
19 I think thats it for our slides, so Ill go ahead 20 and turn it over to you, Lew, for your part of the 21 presentation.
22 MR. MYERS: Okay, thank you.
23 Were here today to brief you on our Return to 24 Service Plan. We have several Desired Outcomes we would 25 like to accomplish today. The first one is, we would like MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
13 1 to demonstrate that were preparing for core reload 2 somewhere in the early part of the year, probably in 3 January. And then operational testing of the Containment 4 and the Reactor Coolant System shortly thereafter. Mike 5 Stevens is going to provide you an update of our basic 6 milestones.
7 Were going to provide you an update of the November 8 26th meeting that we discussed earlier, and by the NRC, and 9 where we discussed the Reactor Vessel Bottom Head Issue and 10 also the Containment Emergency Sump Strainer Modification 11 that were making. I think thats extremely unique. Jim 12 Powers will discuss that.
13 And finally, provide you with updates on some of our 14 Building Blocks, for example, the Management and Human 15 Performance area, I will discuss that. Randy Fast will 16 discuss the Containment and Neil Morrison will discuss the 17 Programmatic Issues, if you will.
18 Then, finally, I want to provide you some updates on 19 the status of our work activities, mainly in the 350 area.
20 Thats the NRC process theyre monitoring us to. I will 21 tell you this; other work activities besides that, way over 22 and above that, that were doing, that were not going to 23 discuss.
24 And finally, we would like to describe some of the 25 recent FENOC and vendor realignments that weve made to MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
14 1 ensure that were in alignment with our other plants and 2 can sustain operations and some of the QA oversight that we 3 have; and both myself and Bill Pearce will provide that for 4 you.
5 First area is the Management/Human Performance 6 area. We continue to work hard in this area and we think 7 make good progress. We have a detailed action plan. For 8 example, this month, since our last meeting, weve 9 completed our Safety Conscious Work Environment Training.
10 Thats about two hours of training for each and every 11 manager supervisor. Total population of about 257 people 12 at Davis-Besse. It was a pretty aggressive schedule, and 13 we completed that since the last meeting.
14 Finally, we also did some management team alignment 15 training, or meeting, if you will. We had 126 people in 16 that meeting for about four hours. As you can see, this is 17 a picture of the meeting. Mike Stevens is up on the stage, 18 statusing our organization with our, with our milestone 19 schedule and how we intend to accomplish that at this 20 particular part of the presentation.
21 Several other significant improvement initiatives.
22 The Root Cause Report for Operations. We completed that 23 and submitted it to the regulatory agency, and Ill discuss 24 that somewhat later on. We completed that on 11-12.
25 Corrective Action Program Report, we completed on MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
15 1 12-5.
2 And implementation of the Management Observation 3 Program. We started that program, we talked about it at 4 the last public meeting in October, and then we have data 5 through December. Ill discuss some of that data. So, 6 well begin, its a computerized program; we begin to build 7 up a lot of information from what were seeing in the field 8 with our employees.
9 Additionally, we continue forward with the 4-Cs 10 Meetings. Thats a group of meetings that I have each week 11 with employees for two to four hours, pretty open and 12 candid discussion of compliments and complaints and 13 concerns; and really has been proven, weve completed those 14 meetings and that with 318 employees at the site.
15 And finally, we brought in a team of Management 16 Assessment Firms that we talked about, who we assessed each 17 and every key supervisor. We committed that at one of the 18 public meetings. I want to tell you, were way above 19 that. We not only done the supervisors, done the managers, 20 done the senior management team; and even Bob Saunders 21 himself was out, interviewed with his management firm.
22 And we think what thats going to do for us is help 23 make sure we have the right people in the right job and we 24 have smooth programs going forward to ensure that we have 25 the right standards for those people. And, it was very MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
16 1 fruitful.
2 MR. GROBE: Lew, I want to 3 ask a question, two quick questions. Theres been a number 4 of times where we received inquiries from members of the 5 public on these various root causes. If I remember 6 correctly last August, you submitted a broad root cause for 7 what contributed to the head degradation; how you got 8 yourself into that situation. And youve been 9 supplementing that over the last several months --
10 MR. MYERS: Right.
11 MR. GROBE: -- with more 12 specific and focus root cause assessments in the Operations 13 Area, Corrective Action Area you mentioned today, and there 14 has been a number of other ones. Would it be possible to 15 have you submit those to us on the docket, as theyre 16 approved, so that the root cause that you submitted in 17 August can be supplemented and updated with more detailed 18 reviews that youre doing?
19 MR. MYERS: Yeah, we can do 20 that. No problem.
21 MR. GROBE: Okay, thank you.
22 One other question. The Management Team Alignment 23 Meetings, could you go into a little bit more detail on 24 what the focus of those meetings were?
25 MR. MYERS: You know, one of MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
17 1 the things that we did is, were changing our Leadership in 2 Action Program. Our Leadership in Action Program is the 3 Management Supervisory Development Program that we use at 4 FirstEnergy, at FENOC, if you will. We wanted to brief our 5 staff on some of the changes that were making there.
6 So, Randy Fast did some time in that area. Were 7 going to go back and do some more training. I think its a 8 full couple days of training or a day or so, with each, 9 with the supervisors prior to startup. This was sort of a 10 kickoff to that.
11 Additionally, each and every director came in, and 12 myself, and we went through our various plans; whether it 13 be the schedule of some major activities, reactor coolant 14 pump work we have going on, reactor cavity seal work that 15 were real pleased with, and some of the restraints that 16 were finding, if you will. So, we went through those type 17 of issues also.
18 Also, went through the, some of the various Building 19 Blocks on, how we got here and what we need to do for 20 improvement; for example, in the corrective action areas, 21 we spent some time there. So, it was just, it was 22 basically like a four-hour meeting to make sure that our 23 managers and supervisors and so many activities going on, 24 that were all vertically aligned and with the same message 25 going out. We asked for their feedback also. Thought it MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
18 1 was an excellent meeting.
2 MR. GROBE: Okay, very good.
3 Thank you.
4 MR. MYERS: There is several 5 other activities that we now have in progress. One of the 6 things we told you, the regulators, we would do is an 7 overview of our engineering area and then an assessment at 8 the end to ensure that we could support, sustained 9 operations from an engineering perspective.
10 That organizational review is going on now. We have 11 four of the top, we think top utility vice-presidents in 12 engineering at our site now and theyre helping us with 13 that assessment.
14 Additionally, we have, we have the Operations 15 Section Review, and the Functional Area Reviews, which and 16 various groups which will be closing out prior to restart.
17 Well close that out as part of Restart Readiness Review.
18 And, were using the industry performance criteria in 19 safety focus areas and management areas to help do those 20 assessments.
21 And, finally, weve done the pilot now for 22 Operability Determination Training that well be putting on 23 this next month. We think thats going to help us. Thats 24 going to be an Engineering Operations area.
25 I would like to talk for a moment about the MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
19 1 Management Observation Program. You asked us to discuss 2 that some once we had more data in there.
3 Right now were in the deep drain window of our 4 plan. Thats sort of a unique place that you can only go 5 to when the fuel is unloaded. Thats allowing us to work 6 on a lot of valves and equipment that typically you only 7 get to work on a few times in the life of the plant.
8 What we did to ensure that we had good management 9 oversight involvement in the containment, we assigned each 10 and every job in that area to one of our managers to 11 provide some oversight. So, thats well underway and doing 12 well.
13 Weve had good management response. Hundred percent 14 of the observations have been completed. We find that we 15 have a lot of, lot better interfacing, interacting with our 16 people, especially across organizational boundaries, were 17 seeing improvements there. And were really focusing on 18 standards and intrusive management involvement.
19 I think thats sort of a change at our plant. If we 20 would have done that maybe a little better, we may have 21 seen some of these head issues a little quicker. So, we 22 think the management observation is a key part of our 23 ongoing program.
24 The next slide. If you look what weve done, 616 25 observations in November. 4,195 safety attributes were MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
20 1 evaluated. 91 percent were completed satisfactory. What 2 that means is some things required some coaching.
3 Additionally, there is 3,910 standards verifications, 91 4 percent of those were completed satisfactory.
5 And finally, what are we seeing in, well, were 6 seeing problems, if you go to the next slide, some 7 housekeeping. People leaving tools around, and not leaving 8 the area in as good a shape as they should. The quality of 9 the observation documentation, gives some specific examples 10 of that.
11 Inconsistent use of the condition reporting system.
12 For example, you would think if you, our standards are not 13 real clear, were going to fix this. We would think if you 14 marked something unsatisfactory, that it would require a 15 condition report. So, we have to go back and clarify that; 16 so its telling us that.
17 Then, finally, preparation of activities. Were 18 seeing a lot of cases where were not as effective and 19 efficient as we should be making sure we have proper safety 20 gear and proper tools when we get to a job, so thats 21 causing delays and some confusion and keeping some of our 22 work from going as effectively and efficiently as it 23 should.
24 The next area that I was going to discuss somewhat 25 is the Operations area.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
21 1 MR. GROBE: Lew, before you 2 get into operations, could you give an example or several 3 examples of what you consider safety attributes that youre 4 evaluating and what are standards that youre evaluating?
5 MR. MYERS: Lets see if Ive 6 got that here. It wasnt a question that I thought you 7 would ask.
8 MR. GROBE: Predictable is 9 not the goal Im after.
10 MR. MYERS: You know, if I go 11 look at the safety type attributes, what we look for there 12 is a good prejob briefing practice. I mean, one of the 13 things we try to do, ensure when you go on a job, you have 14 the right tools, you know what to expect, you know what the 15 backout criteria is when you stop a job, things like that.
16 And, were, were probably seeing some procedure usage, 17 some things in that area.
18 MR. STEVENS: If I could add to 19 that.
20 MR. MYERS: Yeah, give us a 21 little help.
22 MR. STEVENS: Some of it is not 23 what we would expect and were reinforcing that. And the 24 standards, some of the observations Ive had and some of 25 the other folks that I know about, we dont have the proper MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
22 1 barricade. We dont have it, we may have the area roped 2 off, we dont have it roped off exactly in accordance like 3 with, there may be a piece of the sign is not labeled 4 correctly, its not identifying the barrier or were not 5 removing it when were done.
6 I was in the terminal turbine building this weekend. There 7 was a sign that said overhead work. That work was done.
8 There is no overhead work. That sign needs to be removed 9 and it wasnt broken down at the end of the job.
10 Those kind of observations are being followed up 11 with supervision. This new observation program is really 12 neat. I like it, because you can click on the individuals 13 that maybe you didnt contact, talk to their first line 14 supervisor. But then the superintendent or manager, you 15 can click off and send that observation to them and then 16 follow-up. Also, it goes into a data base; its easy to 17 find, easy to use and easy to look for common issues. Its 18 really a good data base.
19 MS. LIPA: You mentioned 20 three part communications; is that an expectation in the 21 maintenance department?
22 MR. STEVENS: Absolutely. And 23 we defined that clearly so there is no misunderstanding on 24 how we expect to do that and how it relates to the safe 25 operation of the plant.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
23 1 MR. GROBE: Possibly thats 2 vernacular that members of the public wouldnt be aware of.
3 Could you explain what three-part communication mean?
4 MR. STEVENS: Yeah, three-part 5 communication is where the message is communicated, the 6 receiver repeats that message back and then the sender 7 confirms that message. So, if I said, you know, were 8 going to work on core flood one problem. Understand, work 9 is ready to proceed on core flood one problem. Thats 10 correct. That would be an exchange of three-part 11 communication, and as well as the phonetic alphabet. It 12 ensures that we understand each other when were 13 communicating and dont get on a wrong component or dont 14 take an unintended action.
15 MR. MYERS: One of the 16 things I want to talk about, example of one of the issues 17 we found that was fruitful, was during our deep drain 18 window, Scott Wise, one of our operations shift managers, 19 was monitoring the work activity and repacking the valves, 20 stuff he found. One of the things that he went and did is 21 they changed the tooling out; and he went and got a 22 different type of baroscope boroscope that they could use to do 23 inspections with thats helping the mechanics get their job 24 done a lot better.
25 We wrote that up in one of our observations, and MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
24 1 its really a good catch, and helped us improve the 2 efficiency of the job or do stuff, everything else. So, 3 thats the kinds of things were looking for. So, that 4 worked out well.
5 MS. LIPA: I had one more 6 question for you, Lew. You mentioned Operability 7 Determination Training; whats the timeline for that 8 training?
9 MR. MYERS: I think were 10 going to have that done at the end of this month.
11 This month?
12 MR. POWERS: This month, 13 Christine, and going into early January.
14 MR. MYERS: Can you explain 15 that?
16 MR. POWERS: Much of that 17 training is going to occur this month and go into early 18 January. We piloted it this past week with a 19 multi-discipline class of both operations and engineering 20 sitting in and going through it and putting the Ops 21 Manager, the Design Manager, myself, and Randy Fast as well 22 were in there, and now roll it out to the balance of the 23 Operations and Engineering staff. So, there is a number of 24 sessions in it, and rather large classes, so its a major 25 training issue we got.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
25 1 MS. LIPA: Thank you.
2 MR. MYERS: The next area I 3 want to touch on just for a moment was the, we did the 4 overall Root Cause we shared with you sometime ago. There 5 were some specific areas we said we would go back and look 6 at; for example, Operations. We completed that root cause, 7 and one of the things, the major issue that we have there 8 is you go look at the senior management support for 9 Operations leadership role. And let me tell you that we 10 believe that Operations leadership role at our sites is 11 extremely important, to ensure we had safety; and that was 12 lacking somewhat.
13 So, were going back now, try to ensure that we have 14 the good Operations leadership model at our plant that we 15 need. We think we have some of that pretty well lined up 16 at our other plants.
17 You know, we brought Mike Ross in. Hes been 18 working with the crews. Ive been working with the 19 Operations crew myself; and Randy has. Weve been meeting 20 with all the crews. We have a standard order that weve 21 drafted, go to the next slide, to discuss what we consider 22 the leadership role of our shift managers. Trying to get 23 that drafted in a manner so its consistent at all three of 24 our plants. So, Im probably the holdup on that now.
25 With our new, with our new Ops Manager, were MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
26 1 receiving great feedback right now from the Management Team 2 that we brought in, that Operations is very much vertically 3 aligned from myself to Randy, and down through the Ops 4 Manager; and the organization morale seems to be pretty 5 good.
6 There is a high level of Operations involvement that 7 were trying to improve, and were stumbling sometimes, at 8 each one of our plants. For example, the System Readiness 9 Reviews, Operational Reviews, were involved in operations; 10 Latent Issues Reviews, Outage Modifications and Work 11 Support Center.
12 And, finally, if you go look at one of the things I 13 think weve done to improve the operational support at our 14 plant, you know, most of the managers we brought in are 15 ex-senior reactor operators or certified individuals. For 16 example, Ive had a couple SROs, you know, the maintenance 17 manager is a previous SRO; Steve Loehlein is a 18 certification that we brought in. So, many of our managers 19 that we brought in are very strong from an operational 20 standpoint. We think thats going to lead us ahead in the 21 future when we restart the plant.
22 MR. DEAN: Excuse me, Lew, 23 before you go on. As I recall from previous discussions, 24 you had brought in some outside mentors in the Operations 25 area. Are they still on site? What role do they play?
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
27 1 MR. MYERS: Mike Ross is here 2 with us today, yes.
3 MR. DEAN: What role are they 4 providing? Are they still observing on shift activities?
5 MR. MYERS: Observing on shift 6 activities, providing some benchmarking, everything --
7 You want to go ahead, Mike? You went to six plants, 8 I think, right? So, might as well call on him.
9 MR. ROSS: Im Mike Ross.
10 Yes, in the Operations Group, we benchmarked three 11 different facilities with a six-man team. We have a number 12 of activities in the Operations area designed to be totally 13 involved and move forward in the future and sustain 14 performance. I can go through a list.
15 MR. MYERS: We also have our 16 Ops Manager with us here, Mike Roder. Do you have anything 17 that you want to add in that area?
18 MR. RODER: I could, I dont 19 have anything specific. Just that Mike Ross is here, and 20 hes been an invaluable resource to me, as well as Randy 21 Fast.
22 My name is Mike Roder by the way.
23 But also, the industry peers, we have going out and 24 benchmarking. I have been visiting with my peers at both 25 the Beaver Valley Plant and Perry Station on a monthly MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
28 1 basis; involving our shift managers in that discussion, so 2 we can gain from their experiences. And we have, this week 3 we have industry peers through the Institute of Nuclear 4 Power Operators here on site providing some other 5 feedback.
6 So, as far as mentors, were looking for as much 7 input as we can get. Were doing a lot of benchmarking, a 8 lot of gathering of information.
9 MR. DEAN: Mike, if there 10 were two or three things you could point to as whether 11 theyre valuable lessons learned or insights that youve 12 gathered from this benchmarking that youre attempting to 13 apply here at Davis-Besse, what would those be?
14 MR. RODER: Really, the first 15 and foremost is looking at, you know, Lew had mentioned the 16 Ops leadership role, and our not meeting the mark 17 previously in that role. One of the best benchmarking 18 opportunities we had was to see how that is exactly, or how 19 thats exhibited at other facilities. Where does 20 Operations assert themselves? Where are the decision 21 points where Operations needs to be there?
22 And we have, like Mike Ross mentioned, we have 23 six-man teams for equipment operators, reactor operators, 24 senior reactor operators and management personnel that 25 went, visited three, actually four different sites; and we MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
29 1 were able to, to instill in ourselves the vision of what 2 Operations leadership means, not only in my eyes, but in 3 all my superintendents and several of my shift managers 4 eyes, so we can carry that forward.
5 MR. DEAN: So, youre 6 gathering insights in terms of how Operations can assert 7 itself in a leadership role. I mean, thats a nice 8 platitude. I guess in terms of practical application, what 9 are some of the things you can point to that you are 10 imbedding into your operational flaws that werent there 11 before.
12 MR. RODER: I can put one, 13 just moments ago before I came here, we had all of our 14 managers together in a manager meeting; and I am driving as 15 Ops Manager, I am driving several different issues within 16 the manager team to resolution, all directed towards plant 17 restart. So, from my role as the Ops Manager, we have 18 instituted at manager meetings, and were driving several 19 issues through that team, myself being a lead for that 20 team.
21 MR. MYERS: Also, I think we 22 have the management operations, you would not have a shift 23 manager out doing management operations of maintenance work 24 activities and documenting it in the past, I dont 25 believe.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
30 1 MR. RODER: Right. That was 2 very limited, and here we have several indications that our 3 shift managers are leading the way, both performance of 4 work and safety standards and upholding safety standards of 5 the site, not focused on operations necessarily, but the 6 standards of the site.
7 MR. DEAN: Okay, thanks, 8 Mike.
9 MR. MYERS: I think that was 10 an interesting comment, rather than Operations looking at 11 the small operations group, you know, they need to be 12 looking at the entire operations of the plant, and 13 broadening that perspective is one of the key things that 14 we have to do.
15 You know, I think that getting management team we 16 put in place has served as SROs, you know, is going to 17 strengthen that Op, that involvement of the Operations 18 group. For example, the Design Engineering Manager we 19 brought in, and Jim Powers also, theyre all SROs. First 20 thing that happens -- and thats a Senior Reactor Operator 21 License, by the way.
22 First thing that happens, we want something done, 23 automatically we can ask, can we get Operations involvement 24 in that decision now. Were doing that in the system 25 walkdowns, and these latent issues reviews, were even MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
31 1 trying to get them involved in that. So, I think youre 2 going to see a lot more operations mentality and ownership 3 when our station is started up.
4 MR. DEAN: It may be a little 5 premature now in the fact that youre still kind of in 6 analysis-engineering-maintenance type of mode of activity, 7 but I think we would be interested in seeing perhaps a 8 better description later on in terms of how Operations is 9 indeed integrating itself into other plant activities to 10 provide that leadership.
11 MR. MYERS: Maybe we can 12 bring one of our shift managers to one of the meetings and 13 provide us some feedback.
14 MR. DEAN: That would be 15 great.
16 MR. MYERS: Okay. The next 17 area well discuss is Mike Stevens. He will provide you 18 with some overview of our restart efforts, if you will.
19 MR. STEVENS: Thanks, Lew.
20 Im really excited about the amount of maintenance 21 thats going on at the Davis-Besse Plant. Our vision is 22 operational excellence. And in the Maintenance Department 23 weve come up with our mission is to provide planning and 24 scheduling and implementation of maintenance modification 25 activities that ensure excellent material conditions, which MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
32 1 we believe yet to have excellent material conditions for 2 operators. And thats what were doing at the plant right 3 now.
4 We took a unique opportunity and drained down the 5 Reactor Coolant System to go work 74 valves; walk off the 6 Reactor Coolant System. Theyre the first off valves.
7 Theyre the valves Lew just talked about with the 8 management observations. I think thats great. And it 9 will ensure that we have good, tight Reactor Coolant System 10 at those isolation valves. Also, it helps us be able to 11 take other valves out of service and do that vent free and 12 continue our maintenance activities.
13 We took the Reactor Coolant System cold leg resistant 14 resistance temperature detectors (RTDs) apart. We took them out of 15 the plant. We made a modification and resolved a 16 longstanding problem with very small minute leakage to 17 demonstrate to the folks involved with that, that were 18 intolerant of even the smallest reactor coolant system 19 leakage; and got that problem behind us. We did that by 20 welding in new thermal welds and installing new RTDs.
21 We performed an inspection of our high pressure 22 injection thermal sleeves. It was an industry problem out 23 there. We inspected all four. Were going to replace two 24 of them.
25 Our reactor coolant pumps; we took two of the MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
33 1 reactor coolant pumps apart and were resolving the 2 longstanding gasket leaks with the casing gaskets on those 3 pumps. Were going to install a new style gasket and put 4 them back together to make sure theyre leak tight.
5 MR. HOPKINS: Question on the 6 thermal sleeves, have you done some sort of evaluation and 7 determined thats Part 21 compatible?
8 MR. FAST: Thats a good 9 question. I dont know if I can answer that. If its Part 10 21. Its something that the industry has knowledge of. In 11 fact, its being treated as maintenance activity because 12 its a replacement item. We had one in the warehouse. We 13 had done nondestructive examination testing during the 13th 14 refueling outage using radiography, but we took this unique 15 opportunity to go in with baroscope boroscope, and we saw minor 16 cracks on the leading edge of those thermal sleeves.
17 That has been reported. I dont know if it was 18 reported through the Part 21 requirement. I can take that 19 action and find out. But it is an industry understood 20 issue. Its being replaced with a like for like. We had 21 the spare. We had one spare available and we procured a 22 second spare and that work is in progress to replace those 23 thermal sleeves.
24 MR. HOPKINS: I think it should 25 just be followed up. I mean, heres the question of MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
34 1 possibly of safety significance; you know, hearing minor 2 cracking, I havent heard anything that strikes me too 3 much, but yeah, I dont see any reason why youre unique 4 versus other plants in that regard.
5 MR. FAST: The only question 6 I cant answer is has it been actually recorded under Part 7 21; and Ill follow up with that.
8 MR. MYERS: These have been 9 replaced. We replaced one here before. I know of other 10 plants we replaced those also. So, well go look into 11 that. Thats a good question.
12 MR. THOMAS: Does your 13 maintenance program account for periodic evaluation of 14 these thermal sleeves? Youve identified, this is the 15 second time youve identified issues with these thermal 16 sleeves at this facility. Is there, is something in your 17 maintenance program to look at these periodically?
18 MR. FAST: Its integrated 19 into our in-service inspection program. It was done as a 20 routine activity during the 13th refueling outage.
21 However, as I said, we used radiography, which was 22 inconclusive. We took this opportunity to actually do a 23 baroscopic boroscopic inspection, so that was more telling in being 24 able to discern minute cracks.
25 MR. DEAN: I wanted to ask a MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
35 1 question about, Mike, you outlined a number of actions that 2 you have taken and are taking relative to assuring a 3 greater degree of leak tightness at the plant, as you 4 will.
5 These major issues that you described, are those 6 mostly an outfall of the effort after the plant shut down 7 in March to look at the integrated Reactor Coolant System 8 for leaks or some of these items that have been 9 longstanding issues that youre taking the opportunity to 10 look after now?
11 MR. STEVENS: I think its a 12 combination of both. There are some things we did to the 13 plant that have developed into more improvement safety 14 margin, improving the material condition. I think weve 15 gone above and beyond in some areas, like the emergency 16 sump. I think were demonstrating a model for the industry 17 there. I think we could have, were doing those kinds of 18 things to the plant that has been a part of the review, as 19 well as longstanding latent issues that we resolved.
20 MR. DEAN: I guess what I was 21 looking for, you know, in terms of a linkage between 22 efforts for the plant to go into some extensive discovery 23 mode to look for issues. I guess I was trying to get a 24 sense of these things that youve described, how much of 25 that emanated from that activity, and how much of these MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
36 1 things were already on the books as issues that, you know, 2 you were going to get around to at some point?
3 MR. STEVENS: The reactor 4 coolant pumps were already on the books. We put an extra 5 ring of packing and rechecked the packing in decay heat 6 12; extra ring of packing. That was something we did new 7 that wasnt out of a review or action, it just, since we 8 were taking the opportunity to drain the system, we drained 9 down and its one of the three valves that, in the deep 10 drain that we took an opportunity to go do as part of the, 11 over and above, the ensure that we dont have to come back 12 and address another problem later on; were very 13 comprehensive.
14 MR. MYERS: Let me add 15 though, we went into this outage, reactor coolant pumps, we 16 knew they had some seal leakage at the bowl, but they were 17 not in the outage. And we made a management decision, 18 myself and my team made a management decision to go replace 19 them. Go into two of these reactor coolant pumps and pull 20 the rotating assembly out.
21 Anybody in here thats ever done that, this is a 22 major job, the motors on these pumps are probably the size 23 of a normal room in a house. So, we had to pull the motors 24 and impellers and shaft, and go into the pumps. And it was 25 fairly costly, but we made that decision to go in two of MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
37 1 them, and well do two the next refueling also.
2 Thats the approach were taking right now. Once 3 again, we wanted to demonstrate a standard; we knew those 4 seals were leaking and it was an opportunity to go after 5 them. So we did that.
6 MR. DEAN: Okay.
7 MR. STEVENS: Next is the 8 completion of whats required for Mode 6. Mode 6 is when 9 we put fuel in the reactor and begin returning the plant 10 back to operations. Our operations, you asked earlier, 11 Dean, where the SROs and shift managers are setting the 12 standard. I think this is a good example where theyre 13 done taking the Mode 6 checklist and are actually driving 14 the rest of the organization for the standard of response 15 for some of the items that are holding going to that mode; 16 not just to close out the paper, but really drive what is 17 the resolution that were looking for, what do I need from 18 you to be able to close this item out; and theyre doing 19 that proactively.
20 We modified our main fuel handling bridge, so we can 21 move fuel more reliably and safely in the reactor vessel.
22 That was a pretty extensive modification. Its nearing 23 completion. We replaced the electrical components on the 24 bridge as well as the motors.
25 Emergency sump strainer. Were replacing that MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
38 1 strainer, putting in a whole new design. I think it will 2 be the model for the industry.
3 We have Reactor Coolant 46 and 47. Were not 4 satisfied with just replacing this drain piping, but were 5 actually going to modify it and change its design a little 6 bit, so we have good leakage, this line goes between our 7 reactor head seals; the inner and outer seal for the 8 reactor head; and that will give us good monitoring should 9 that seal start to leak.
10 Were installing the permanent reactor cavity seal 11 plate and setting a standard for excellence, and we wont 12 have Boron running down the walls should the seal plate 13 leak. Were going to remove that altogether.
14 Going onto Operational Testing. Currently, our 15 plans are to reload the core in mid January. Were going 16 to install the reactor head and enter Mode 5. Fill and 17 vent the Reactor Coolant System. That will be our first 18 opportunity to look for leakage on components, reactor 19 coolant pumps, some of these valves. Then well perform an 20 integrated leak rate test of the containment latter part of 21 January.
22 In between core reload and now, were looking at 23 fitting our reactor head up to the reactor vessel and 24 ensure that it will fit and our alignment blocks and all of 25 our measurements do in fact match, and reactor head is MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
39 1 good. And have it support some shielding for us while we 2 work in the reactor cavity and in and around these drain 3 lines.
4 MR. MYERS: Let me interrupt 5 for a second. One of the things we talked about is reactor 6 cavity seal mod that were making now. What that is, 7 during every refueling, you have your reactor vessel and 8 you need to flood the reactor vessel area or the reactor 9 cavity and canal, so you can refuel. You put about 30 feet 10 of water above the reactor flange or 21 feet to do that.
11 Well, you know, to do that, you typically go down 12 and put a temporary seal plate and you bolt that down in 13 place, its probably 14, 18 foot diameter, just guessing, 14 but its a pretty deep plate. Comes in section. You have 15 to put that in place. And its an obvious path for 16 some minor leakage during the refueling outage. That may 17 have been where some of the Boron on the undervessel where 18 water dripped down and went on the side of the vessel, 19 during the refueling.
20 You know, as Chief Operating Officer of the company, 21 and VP, one of the things I always said in my life when I 22 was a young help health physics technician and operator, if I ever 23 had the chance to get rid of this problem, I would do it.
24 So, install a temporary seal in the area, and its just, 25 theres just got to be a better mouse trap.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
40 1 Several plants have installed whats called a 2 permanent cavity seal over the past few years. Its a 3 permanent seal thats in place, so that you dont have to 4 install this every outage, which is a pretty expensive seal 5 to install, in the millions of dollars.
6 What weve done at our FENOC plans plants, all three of our 7 pressurized water reactors have permanent cavity seals in 8 them. This will be the final one. So, you know, I think 9 that puts us in good stead from a leakage standpoint, and 10 also, now that these questions are coming up about Boron 11 under the vessel, you know, will help us out.
12 So, Im pleased to sit here today and say that we 13 will start this plant up. And, if you look at all three of 14 our pressurized water reactors, all three have permanent 15 cavity seals when we start up. I think that puts us in 16 good stead as a company.
17 Im sorry.
18 MR. STEVENS: No, thats okay.
19 Thanks.
20 MR. MYERS: Im passionate 21 about these things.
22 MR. STEVENS: Thats okay. Next 23 slide.
24 Reactor Coolant System. Mode 4 and Mode 3. This is 25 where well heat the plant up without nuclear heat, and MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
41 1 perform our inspections. This is under decay heat pit 2 modification, will be completed. This is a good activity 3 in that. In the past weve had this pit, has a cover over 4 the top of it, bolted it up and checked it for leaks, and 5 we put sealant around it.
6 Its a very intensive task, time consuming, doesnt 7 look very good. And weve decided to take advantage of 8 this time and go put a modification in that will actually 9 seal that pit and protect the components inside of it.
10 That entails installing some quarter inch stainless steel 11 plate. We have about a quarter of a mile of welds to 12 make. We borrowed some procedures from Davis-Besse, 13 running them through our process. Theyre taking and 14 mocking that up with plexiglass sheets to ensure that, 15 because its easier to cut, and make sure that we have the 16 pieces fit correctly, and then were making it in the shop 17 and well take it into the pit and install it.
18 Emergency sump, Steve and them are doing a really 19 good job implementing the modification for the strainer.
20 Were putting W-4 beams across the top of the sump. There 21 is 9 of them. We have one installed. After the beams are 22 in place, well bring the strainer media in, complete out 23 the top piece. Jim is going to talk a little more about 24 the emergency sump.
25 I talked about the reactor coolant pumps and the MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
42 1 maintenance thats ongoing there. And the mechanics are 2 going to replace the reactor coolant pump seals; we have 3 them being rebuilt.
4 Containment air coolers, were pretty much 5 rebuilding that from the ground up. Weve got the motors 6 reworked. Weve got duct work out refabbed and going back 7 in. Weve got new cooling coil. Were going to start 8 fabricating the service water connection in the shop next 9 week. And, then well have everything we need to go 10 through that normal operating pressure and temperature 11 check. And to do that well have to complete our Safety 12 Functionality Reviews.
13 Next slide.
14 MS. LIPA: Before you go on, 15 Mike, you mentioned the Safety Functionality Review. I see 16 later in the presentation there will be some discussion of 17 System Health, so we can wait until later, but my question 18 is, how are you going to be addressing the safety, the 19 safety system health assurance problem on 3 and 4, whats 20 the plan for that?
21 MR. STEVENS: Well, any -- do 22 you want to answer that?
23 MR. POWERS: All of the issues 24 that weve uncovered as part of our discovery activities 25 that are related to modes 3 and 4 have mode change MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
43 1 restraints on them that have been applied by our licensed 2 operators. Each time we find an issue at the plant and 3 identify a potential concern, we document it in our 4 Corrective Action Program. Those CRs, as we refer to 5 them, go through the control room as far as routing 6 process, and the control room will take out a restraint on 7 a mode change if there is any question about the equipment 8 performing, its capability to perform its safety function.
9 So, weve got a rigorous process in place where we 10 know the list of things that need to be done and resolved 11 to clear Mode 3 and 4. Part of that is the Safety 12 Functionality Review that the systems will perform the 13 safety function.
14 MS. LIPA: You going to get 15 into that Safety Functionality Review in more detail later 16 today?
17 MR. POWERS: Yes, I will.
18 MS. LIPA: Okay, thank you.
19 MR. STEVENS: Thanks.
20 Next slide.
21 To do that test, well have to have a secondary 22 system back and be able to support pulling a vacuum in our 23 main condenser. Weve done that once already since weve 24 been down. You remember we talked about the leakage and 25 the way we put the new coating on the main condenser.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
44 1 Operations will complete the simulator training just 2 in time, and then well do our heat up. And this will be a 3 good opportunity for us to test all of our systems. Were 4 going to do that. And well cool down and do, and perform 5 any other necessary maintenance.
6 MR. GROBE: Mike, hang on for 7 a second. Is there something controlling the volume on the 8 microphones?
9 (off the record.)
10 MR. STEVENS: What I want to 11 close out with, before I turn it over to Randy is, when we 12 go to heat up, well have to have most if not almost all of 13 the plant systems required. And, weve been down for a 14 year. Were going to take the opportunity to run those 15 systems, make sure we understand how theyre operating and 16 that they do meet expectations and are in good operating 17 order. And if theyre not, well go perform required 18 maintenance thats necessary to get them to that point.
19 So, its a series of testing that will go on with 20 bringing this plant back, as well as, we talked, the seven 21 day duration of holding that pressure and doing the 22 inspections on the Reactor Coolant System primary.
23 MR. GROBE: Could you give us 24 a sense of how many mode restrictions there are in each 25 mode?
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
45 1 MR. STEVENS: I know there is 2 189 -- well, I have to change that up, because we have some 3 down. There is 160 some for Mode 6. 400, well, about 400 4 and some for Mode 5 -- 4. I just saw, Jack, I just saw 5 that performance indicator this morning; and the relative 6 peaks, there is more for Mode 4 and 3 than there are for 7 the others. And thats really where were going to bring 8 the systems back.
9 MR. COLLINS: Jay Collins. If 10 you could speak closer to the microphones on both sides, 11 there are some problems hearing in the back and that might 12 help with the distortion. Thank you.
13 MR. GROBE: Thanks, Jay.
14 MR. STEVENS: I could say this, 15 there is about a hundred and a half Mode 6. About three 16 times that for the next mode change to Mode 4. Mode 5, 17 there is a handful associated with the reactor head. And 18 Mode 2, there is about a couple hundred. And Im trying 19 to --
20 MR. MYERS: If you want the 21 exact numbers, we can get you the exact.
22 MR. GROBE: No, thats fine, 23 I just wanted to get a sense.
24 MR. STEVENS: Thats misleading, 25 because each one of the mode restraints condition reports MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
46 1 have an issue in and of itself that needs to be addressed; 2 and those, one of the guys that was pulling, pulling them 3 through report this morning, there is like 50 some odd 4 systems touched by this one mode restraint, and a hundred 5 actions. So, there is a significant amount of work.
6 But I think we can, I know were up to, were up to 7 it. Weve got the right logistics in the schedule. The 8 schedule is driven off these milestones. Were bringing 9 the systems back to the plant and well just have to go 10 through that.
11 MR. MYERS: Okay?
12 MR. STEVENS: With that, Ill 13 turn it over to Randy.
14 MR. FAST: Just looking for 15 those mode changes. I have them somewhere as well. Well 16 have to find those for you.
17 Thank you, Mike.
18 Good afternoon. Pleased to meet with you today and 19 bring us current with our status of Containment Health.
20 And, since we met last, we have completed all of our 21 scheduled inspections as part of the Containment Health 22 Plan, including the boric acid extent of condition, the 23 equipment qualification inspections, containment and liner 24 inspections and the containment coatings inspection.
25 The results of those inspections. 511 condition MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
47 1 reports were initiated by the inspection program.
2 941 of those were directly related to the boric acid 3 extent of condition. Now out of those items, no 4 significant material conditions existed, other than really 5 I think the most significant component or system that was 6 impacted were the containment air coolers. And the 7 containment air coolers is a ventilation system that 8 distributes air throughout containment, and so there was 9 degradation of that system.
10 But, if you look at some of the other, of the 11 evaluations, or excuse me, the significance, things like 12 the qualified equipment, equipment qualified components, I 13 think we target 159 inspections. All of the equipment 14 inspected would have met its design requirements. There 15 were no operability concerns for that.
16 Now, out of this population of inspections, we have 17 about 250 evaluations that are currently in progress by our 18 engineering staff. We have 478 of these evaluations that 19 are undergoing supervisory and management review. And 20 weve shored that up; we have several of our folks, in 21 fact, we had some of our senior reactor operators involved 22 with this process to ensure the corrective actions were 23 taking are appropriate. 181 of the evaluations have been 24 completed and 32 are closed.
25 So, as you see that last bullet -- Im a little MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
48 1 challenged with not being able to see the screen here --
2 but we did not have any equipment qualification that was 3 impacted as a result of these inspections.
4 Next slide, please.
5 MR. GROBE: Randy, before you 6 go on. Can everybody hear me? Is that okay? I saw a nod 7 in the back row there.
8 Im having a little trouble understanding the first 9 two bullets. 511 condition reports were initiated through 10 your inspection program and there is an additional 400 and 11 some condition reports that were initiated from some other 12 activity; is that my understanding?
13 MR. FAST: Jack, we go back 14 to the actual Containment Health Program had key elements 15 of it; one of which was look at extended condition, 16 degradation or impact on equipment, structures, systems and 17 components because of boric acid. As part of the 18 inspection additionally we did Alloy 600. So, any 19 connections. We did the upper head, the lower head, and as 20 well, general inspections, looking for any degradation or 21 any issues associated with material condition. So, those 22 were categorized a little bit differently, so the 23 population that you see, the 941, are directly related to 24 boric acid inspections.
25 MR. CHAMBERS: Randy, those MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
49 1 also -- my name is Tim Chambers. I just want to clarify, 2 those also include the inspections that we did outside 3 containment in the 941. So, those boric acid inspections 4 were outside containment, thats why that number looks 5 higher.
6 MR. FAST: Thank you, Jim.
7 Is that clear?
8 MR. GROBE: Yes, I have a 9 question regarding your next bullet. Help me understand 10 the level of activity remaining. Once you complete a 11 condition report evaluation, you identify what corrective 12 actions are necessary for that condition report; is that 13 right?
14 MR. FAST: Thats correct.
15 MR. GROBE: So, there is two 16 thirds of the these 941 that you have not yet completed the 17 evaluation on to identify the corrective actions.
18 MR. FAST: Thats correct.
19 MR. GROBE: Okay.
20 MR. FAST: As part of our 21 Containment Health Assurance Program, the ongoing work that 22 we have, the emergency sump screen. And I have 23 photographs. Im going to get into a little bit of detail 24 about what these items are, but as well Jim will brief us 25 on the design change process. The decay heat valve pit MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
50 1 Mike was talking about, and just in the way of correcting, 2 we actually got a welding procedures from Beaver Valley, it 3 was a mig process, which will really be a little quicker 4 for us and give us good results. So, we are mocking that 5 up with plexiglass, but well line that with stainless 6 steel.
7 The containment air coolers, as Mike had said, 8 effectively totally rebuilt. The outlook plant output plenum on the 9 dropdown dampers, the cooling coils, new motors and the 10 things have been completely reworked. We have pictures 11 that I think will help in that way as well.
12 Engineered coatings. As I said, our inspections are 13 complete. I dont have a good picture of the containment 14 dome, but if you can picture looking straight up in the 15 containment, there is an upper and a lower spray ring 16 header and from the lower header all the way to the peak of 17 containment is completed. In fact, that second coat has 18 been evaluated and dispositioned by our quality 19 organization and were moving on to the side walls or the 20 upper dome above the support platform for the polar crane.
21 So, that work is going well.
22 As well, weve done complete remediation on the 23 core, both core flood tanks. One is completed, the other 24 is completely tank removed, its been prepped and well 25 start painting on that tomorrow.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
51 1 The other thing that Mike talked about, the deep 2 drain valve work, the reactor coolant pump work is 3 ongoing.
4 Im just going to walk through, I think for maybe 5 the purposes of demonstrating, going through these pictures 6 and Ill point some items out.
7 Okay, we talk a lot about this emergency sump. This 8 is a pit right here. And under design basis accident, 9 youre flowing water into the containment building. And it 10 fills up from under vessel, and all of the water then, from 11 this elevation right here, which is actually the 565 foot 12 elevation of containment; it floods up about 18 inches 13 above that. Thats under design basis, the amount of 14 water, about a half million gallons or so that go into 15 containment.
16 This was covered with a screen, kind of a chicken 17 wire affair, if you will, that was not very substantial and 18 only forwarded us about 50 square feet of screenage. Why 19 thats important is that this water as it fills up then 20 comes through these two valves. Theyre whats called 21 vortex breakers, cruciform breakers, that allow 22 antivortexing of water thats going back into the cooling 23 system for redistribution back into containment.
24 This area was covered over. That has been 25 completely removed. This is a stainless steel backing MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
52 1 plate. There are structural beams. In fact, I walked this 2 down yesterday. Two of those beams that Mike is talking 3 about have been installed. Quite a substantial 4 configuration here.
5 This area, it will be called the top head. Now 6 were looking at a kind of 45 degree angle here, so this 7 top hat area has about three hundred square feet area of 8 screen that will allow at 18 inches above that elevation, 9 that will allow water to flow into that area and be 10 redistributed.
11 Now, on the far side of this sump is a cutout area.
12 Weve started that, that cutout now. Its about 18 inches 13 wide, about 30 inches long, and that will allow some 14 extension pipes, which are drilled pipes to go down under 15 the vessel, and well see another conceptual design. But 16 actually, when I was walking it down yesterday, one of the 17 pipe sections had been mocked up with a piece of 18 insulation, so the guys could actually figure out, will it 19 fit in there properly. That will add another several 20 hundred, about up to a total of 1200 square feet of 21 screen.
22 So, you maybe cant get a lot of picture. These 23 covers here, thats plastic. Its a foreign material 24 exclusion cover, so we dont want to get any grit or debris 25 in this pipe. So, theyre covered over.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
53 1 You see a chainfall here for lowering and raising 2 equipment into that sump.
3 MR. SCHRAUDER: Randy, I walked it 4 down this morning and theyve got four beams done.
5 MR. FAST: Oh. So, we got 6 two beams done since yesterday. Excellent. Thank you, 7 Bob.
8 Okay. This is the decay heat valve pit. Now, its 9 very difficult to get the concept here, but in this 10 recirculation mode, there are two valves here; Decay Heat 11 11 and Decay Heat 12. And they will redistribute water, 12 so these have to be able to be open after a design basis 13 event.
14 This pit or sump is 19 feet long, 7 feet deep and 15 about 7 feet wide. So, the walls of this sump will be 16 lined with stainless steel and sealed to allow proper 17 environmental controls after a design basis accident. So, 18 thats what Mike was briefing us on a little bit earlier.
19 This is the fan blades for containment air coolers.
20 Now, containment air coolers are basically like an air 21 conditioner for your house in that it redistributes air to 22 ensure proper environmental controls. In a design basis 23 accident, we recirculate air for making sure that the 24 temperature and the pressure in containment is minimized.
25 So, this is one of the fan blades.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
54 1 Im trying to give you a concept of how, theyre 2 about, I would say, 8 feet in diameter. So, these are 3 pretty significant.
4 These, this is the structural platform for the 5 cooling coils. You can see just, kind of see, you dont 6 get the whole piece of it. This would be one, like a 7 radiator from your car, so thats one cooling coil. There 8 is one, two, three, four sides of the box, so a total of 9 twelve.
10 Coming down and distributing service water, which is 11 the cooling medium for the containment air coolers are the 12 inlet and outlet piping. Thats what we have redesigned 13 and well be reinstalling this stainless steel improved to 14 ensure proper flow distribution through the containment air 15 coolers. This is at 585 foot elevation. This spans 16 basically from the 585 down to the 565 foot elevation.
17 Next slide. This is just looking up into the fan.
18 So, were down at 565 foot and youre looking up into the 19 fan. So, air is distributed from containment at 585 feet 20 through the cooling coil, down through the fan, down into 21 an outlet plenum and then back and redescribed redistributed back 22 inside of the D rings where the steam generators are located.
23 Not a lot to see here, but were using a sponge 24 blast process to remove paint from equipment in 25 containment. This happens to be core flood tank number MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
55 1 one. Its tinted. We use a sponge blast media. Its 2 pretty nonintrusive. It does remove paint. It preps the 3 surface, and we have pictures of what it looks like when 4 were done.
5 There is the tank painted bright white and 6 completely remediated. This is an engineered coating.
7 Now, why do I use the term, engineered coating? Its 8 because in reality this will sustain under design basis 9 accident, so its an approved long term, wont remove from 10 jet steam impingement or any conditions that would exist 11 post-accident.
12 MR. MYERS: Would it be fair 13 to say from a coating standpoint, we understand our 14 coatings better than at any plant you worked at now?
15 MR. FAST: We know a lot 16 about paint. Weve certainly, weve partnered with the 17 industry best and brightest and I feel good about the 18 condition that were leaving the condition in.
19 Okay. With that, Im going to turn it over to Jim 20 Powers.
21 MS. LIPA: I did have a 22 question for you, Randy.
23 MR. FAST: Yes.
24 MS. LIPA: Several meetings 25 back, we talked about the coatings on the conduits. Has MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
56 1 that issue been resolved?
2 MR. FAST: The coatings on 3 the conduit is unqualified. And let me go into a little 4 detail on that. When the plant was originally built, one 5 of the things that was done, you have galvanized, which is 6 a normal coatings process, on the conduit, but somehow we 7 elected to go back and paint it. And, that paint is not 8 qualified. So under design basis, some of that paint will 9 be removed.
10 Some of what were doing with the emergency sump 11 screenage will allow for some of that paint, as its 12 removed, will be trapped by that screen. So, well have 13 sufficient margin that right now, based on our engineering 14 analysis, we can have some coatings, unqualified coatings, 15 and still maintain margin for the sump.
16 So, the target areas we had was containment dome, 17 the core flood tanks, service water piping, and we do have 18 some other selected areas. We do have an initiative where 19 our Operations staff is taking a leadership role in 20 removing some of the coatings using other processes; not 21 sponge blasting, but just to remove some of those 22 unqualified coatings inside the D rings. But not all of it 23 will be remediated.
24 MS. LIPA: Okay. I think 25 that this is probably a good time for a break. I know MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
57 1 youre all ready, Jim, but well take a ten minute break 2 unless you had any questions.
3 MR. GROBE: I just wanted to 4 make sure I was clear on this. So, its your intention to 5 not removed the unqualified coatings from the conduit based 6 on the design margin sump?
7 MR. POWERS: Not entirely, 8 Jack. Thats correct. Ill talk a bit about the sump 9 after the break, but it adds a good deal of margin and 10 were factoring in whatever unqualified coatings remain in 11 containment will be factored into the design basis of the 12 sump, and in the last meeting we discussed making sure the 13 license basis reflects that as well.
14 MR. MYERS: Let me answer 15 that question. I met with a coating engineer last week, 16 and our intention, were going to buy some, were going to 17 try to sponge blast the stuff. Were going to buy some 18 stuff, I hate to say like you see on TV, where you put it 19 on and it takes the paint off.
20 The operators are going to do that. Were going to 21 get as much of that coating off that conduit as we can 22 before we start up. That will give us excessive margin.
23 From a design standpoint, its not a problem, but it just 24 doesnt do anything but gain margin, so were going to 25 remove as much of it as we can. Okay?
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
58 1 MR. DEAN: Let me ask, Jim, 2 are you going to get in a discussion of, you know, there 3 has been operability concerns about the containment air 4 coolers and the coatings; is that something you will have 5 an opportunity to discuss?
6 MR. POWERS: Sure, I can give 7 you an update on that. Were not entirely finished with 8 that, but I can give you an in-process update.
9 MR. MYERS: Now we have eight 10 minutes?
11 MS. LIPA: Okay, lets start 12 our ten minutes now. Its 3:23, be back at 3:33. Thank 13 you.
14 (Off the record.)
15 MS. LIPA: Okay, go ahead.
16 MR. POWERS: Okay. There is 17 two things I would like to update us on this afternoon; 18 one is the status of the System Health Assurance Building 19 Block and the other is an update on the NRC public meetings 20 we had at headquarters in Rockville on November 26th, both 21 about the emergency containment sump and the undervessel 22 incore nozzles.
23 The first issue I want to touch on is Containment 24 Emergency Sump. You heard quite a bit on it today by Mike 25 and Randy. This gives another perspective of the sump and MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
59 1 where its located in the containment, and what were going 2 to do to significantly expand our sump.
3 The normal sump, as shown up in the upper righthand 4 corner of the picture, there is a sump access area. Up in 5 that corner is where the existing sump pit is that Randy 6 pointed out in the photo graph. Thats where the 7 construction is ongoing.
8 Now were to go work from that sump and were going 9 to go down the stairwell. You can see there is a stairwell 10 tunnel that leads down to under the reactor vessel, and you 11 can see the bottom of the reactor vessel there on the left 12 hand portion of this three-dimensional figure.
13 Down along that stairwell is where the incore nozzle 14 guide tubes run. And they run down there. There is 52 of 15 them; very small diameter steel tubes that run down through 16 the tunnel, along the side of it and up into the bottom of 17 the reactor vessel. And well see those in more detail 18 just following this.
19 But there is room down there that we can use to 20 expand our containment sump strainer screen. And you can 21 see the lower strainer pointed out in the, in the picture 22 here as it runs down the stairwell.
23 Right now, we have 50 squares feet of screen in the 24 original design. That was removed. And were moving 25 towards expanding that up to 1200 square feet of a MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
60 1 perforated plate strainer structure. And most of what you 2 see here in terms of the strainer itself, all the piping 3 and manifold boxing thats shown will be perforated, so it 4 all contributes to straining out any sort of debris that 5 may be generated and providing plenty of flow to the 6 emergency core cooling system suction.
7 So, were going to place it as shown here. We 8 believe this is a model for the industry. And, thats what 9 we presented to the participants at the NRC. The desired 10 outcome of that meeting was to solicit any comments or 11 questions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff, 12 the Technical Reviewer staff. And they were very curious 13 about this development. We intend to resolve the generic 14 safety issue 191, as its referred to in the industry, 15 relative to containment emergency sump functionality.
16 Its an issue thats the industry has been grappling 17 with over several of the last years. Its been resolved at 18 the BWRs and we resolved it pretty effectively over at the 19 Perry Plant several years ago. And we brought many of the 20 same people that participated in that resolution to bear on 21 this resolution at Davis-Besse Plant.
22 So, we look at this as a model for the industry.
23 And our intent is to provide a demonstration for some of 24 our peer utilities to come and see how to effectively 25 resolve this issue.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
61 1 In the next slide, we show the reactor vessel bottom 2 nozzles. On the left you can see a photograph of the 3 bottom head of the vessel and where I talk about the incore 4 guide tubes leading up into the bottom of the vessel. Here 5 we can see them coming up into the bottom. There is a 6 metallic insulation layer thats been removed, so that we 7 can see them.
8 During normal plant operation, the reactor is 9 enclosed in metallic installation insulation, as you can see on the 10 righthand depiction here, that keeps the heat. The reactor 11 vessel is 500 degrees in temperature when we are in full 12 power operation. And to keep the concrete around it cool 13 and minimize the heat loads in containment, its all 14 encapsulated.
15 We stripped off all that insulation as part of our 16 discovery proceedings in containment to do a full 17 inspection of the bottom head. Weve conducted what we 18 believe is the most thorough bare metal inspection of the 19 bottom reactor head thats been done to-date in the 20 industry. And we inspected thoroughly with a crawler 21 remote robot, so we could look very closely and not expose 22 our staff to undue radiation. And we went and we cleaned 23 very thoroughly the head.
24 There you can see its post clean state. And once we 25 go up to do our pressure test, pressure and temperature MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
62 1 test, at full pressure and temperature for 7 days and come 2 back down, well be able to go in there, and if there is 3 any indication of leakage, it will show up by white Boron 4 residuals.
5 And, our plan is to do that test. Go in and examine 6 to see if there is any leakage. We dont believe that 7 there is any, based on all the work thats been done 8 to-date. But if there is, we have a repair concept that, 9 that is ready to go; repair thats been done on pressurizer 10 vessels very similar to these type of penetrations. So, 11 thats in the wings and ready to go should we need it.
12 One of the other firsts that were doing, as far as 13 this project, first U.S. installation of what we call our 14 Flus Monitoring System. This is a moisture monitoring 15 system that was developed in Europe and used in reactor 16 systems over there to monitor for any sort of leakage.
17 Its picked up as a change of moisture content in the air.
18 And well install the small sampling tubes within 19 the metallic insulation package. And you can see that, 20 its shown in the righthand side here in this figure.
21 Small tubes laid out in insulation. They will be 22 continuously sampling the air to determine if there is any 23 change in moisture. If there is, well then take the 24 actions that will be prescribed in the operating procedures 25 for this monitoring system.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
63 1 So, this is another first that well be installing.
2 When we spoke to you last month at the public meeting, we 3 werent sure at that time whether we would be able to get 4 this installed by the end of this outage. Now, based on 5 the work weve done with Framatone, our supplier, our 6 reactor supplier and the supplier of this monitoring 7 system, we believe we can get this installed prior to the 8 end of this outage. And, were working towards that goal.
9 MR. GROBE: Jim, before you 10 go to your next slide. I wanted to make sure I was 11 speaking into the microphone, and for a moment I forgot my 12 question. It will come back.
13 MR. POWERS: Im sure its a 14 good one.
15 MR. GROBE: But everybody can 16 hear that I forgot my question.
17 MR. POWERS: Ill move on to 18 System Health, and Im sure it will come to you.
19 MS. LIPA: I did have a 20 question before you go on, Jim. When we had the meeting on 21 November 26th, I think we talked at that meeting about some 22 tape that was on some of these lower nozzles. What did you 23 find about those?
24 MR. POWERS: What we found, 25 there was a few more pieces of evidence we wanted to take MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
64 1 to see if they could help us characterize the Boron stains 2 that were found at the bottom of the vessel. There were a 3 couple pieces of tape that were remaining, apparently from 4 original construction completion. And the tape was 5 enclosed in the portion of tubing that was hidden by the 6 insulation panels. And those are typically not removed, 7 those insulation panels. So, it really hadnt been found 8 until we did this complete removal and thorough cleaning 9 and inspection.
10 So, we took the tape samples off and sent them to 11 the lab. We also took some scrapings of the paint that was 12 on the side of the vessel, and sent that off to see if that 13 would help us characterize the results of the lab analysis, 14 the chemical analysis of the Boron samples we had taken.
15 And, in fact, they did the analysis. It didnt 16 really help us. It didnt clarify anything further, 17 Christine, in terms of knowing where the Boron, you know 18 confidently stating where the Boron originated from.
19 We believe it came from above, from washdowns of the 20 Boron that was on the head, and also from leakage through 21 our temporary refueling cavity seal.
22 One of the reasons Lew talks about so emphatically 23 enthusiastically about putting this cavity seal in, is that 24 its going to prevent leakage and prevent these types of 25 questions from occurring. And many of the stains we saw on MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
65 1 the side of the vessel were Boron deposits likely from that 2 type of leakage source.
3 The cavity seal, for your information, will go up at 4 the top of the sketch, where you see the concrete; there is 5 a gap between the concrete and reactor vessel at the top 6 level there. Thats the flange where the head comes off 7 the vessel during refueling. And, then you take the head 8 of the vessel off, then you put a seal plate around that 9 gap. That seals the cavity, the reactor annulus cavity.
10 Then you can flood up with water in a refueling canal and 11 pull your fuel out of the vessel and handle it for 12 refueling.
13 So, thats an important function; and once we put in 14 a permanent seal, then well have a high integrity water 15 tight barrier there, and we dont expect to have any more 16 leakage questions.
17 MR. GROBE: Jim, were there 18 any chlorides concerns that arose from discovery of this 19 tape?
20 MR. POWERS: No, there wasnt, 21 none that was reported, Jack.
22 MR. GROBE: Interesting.
23 I remembered my question earlier. I think youve 24 answered it to some extent, but you indicated a belief that 25 the bottom head penetrations are not cracked and not MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
66 1 leaking. Could you go into some detail on the basis for 2 that belief?
3 MR. POWERS: Well, the basis 4 really is that if you look at the flow trails, as we refer 5 to them, that came down the side of the vessel, there was 6 two different flow trails; one was a reddish colored, rust 7 colored flow trail on the one side of the vessel and the 8 other one was a white colored flow trail.
9 The reddish colored flow trail corresponded to a 10 location where the deconers, technical deconers staff at 11 the station had reported that when they were cleaning the 12 head, that some of the, some of the deposit had washed down 13 the side of the vessel, over the flange and down the side 14 of the vessel before they put in their cavity seal as part 15 of the initial stages of refueling when they were cleaning 16 the bolts to undo the reactor head bolts.
17 And the other trail came down from what looks like 18 on the other side of the vessel what would potentially 19 either be from the reactor cavity seal leakage, and we also 20 found as part of our inspections of this outage that there 21 is a couple of pressure detection lines that are associated 22 with the head and theyre used to detect the integrity of O 23 ring seals. And we found that those had been cracked at 24 some time in the past.
25 So, when the, when the refueling canal is filled MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
67 1 with water, they may have been drippings and some leakage 2 as well. And so, we believe that there is evidence that 3 these flow trails came from those sources.
4 Now, the chemical analysis that we did showed higher 5 levels of lithium and Boron in some of the nozzle 6 locations, which is interesting there is a higher 7 concentration of Boron and lithium, but the interesting 8 thing was that there is no constituents, activation product 9 constituents from reactor coolant that you would expect to 10 see if we had an actual leak from inside the vessel.
11 So, there was some contradictory information there.
12 Although it was, it was interesting that some of these 13 nozzles at higher levels of Boron, it didnt show 14 activation products that we would have expected had it been 15 reactor coolant leakage.
16 And, when you look at the size of the samples that 17 were able to be taken, how they were taken, you know, the 18 amount of material that the chemists had to work with for 19 their analysis and how it may have been, it may have been 20 affected by, for example, the paint that was on the side of 21 the vessel; thats one of the reasons we sampled it; 22 Scotch Bright pads that were used to remove, scrape off the 23 sample, the very small amounts we were able to obtain, led 24 to questions on whether, you know, the quality of the 25 samples, the conclusiveness of the chemical analysis.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
68 1 MR. GROBE: Have there been 2 any observed bottom head nozzle cracking in other plants in 3 the United States or in Europe?
4 MR. POWERS: No, not so far.
5 The French plants have surveilled, I think its 17 plants 6 have been surveilled since 1993. And, although their 7 bottom nozzles are a bit different than ours, they still 8 have the similar type of pressure boundary weld associated 9 with them. And they still have temperatures in the range 10 of the temperatures that we have.
11 These nozzles have been believed for a long time to 12 be less susceptible to cracking than many other nozzles in 13 higher temperature portions of the Reactor Coolant System.
14 The French have never seen any cracks. Domestic plants 15 have also done some inspections in recent outages looking 16 for any evidence of leakage from these nozzles and have 17 reported none observed.
18 So, no, there is no evidence thus far of cracked 19 nozzles.
20 MR. GROBE: One more question 21 before we get away from the bottom head. Did you observe 22 any apparent contaminants on penetrations that werent part 23 of the flow path that appeared to be coming down the side 24 of the vessel?
25 MR. POWERS: I believe every MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
69 1 one of the nozzles that we sampled was, was engaged or 2 involved in one of the flow paths. And we picked the 3 samples, the nozzles, there were twelve of them, based on, 4 largely on the appearance and, you know, tracking attention 5 of an area that should be sampled to see if there was any 6 conclusive evidence that would be available from a chemical 7 sample.
8 And, Bob, was that the case?
9 MR. SCHRAUDER: Jack, I dont 10 have a microphone, but there were some nozzles that had 11 deposits on them that were not evidently in a flow path.
12 MR. GROBE: Okay.
13 MR. SCHRAUDER: We did take 14 samples from those also.
15 MR. GROBE: Okay, 16 interesting.
17 MR. POWERS: Thanks, Bob.
18 Lew was asking me to talk about susceptibility.
19 This whole issues revolves around whats called primary 20 water stress corrosion cracking. Thats what started the 21 issue on the head. Thats been found in the industry that 22 the alloy was referred to as Alloy 600 metal thats used 23 for these nozzles is susceptible to cracking, given the 24 right set of circumstances, and its related to chemistry 25 and stresses that are in the material, and temperature is MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
70 1 one of the major factors.
2 And so, thats why we look pretty carefully when we 3 talk about susceptibility ranking and go through the 4 reactor system. The bottom head operates at a lower 5 temperature than the top of the reactor. The bottom head 6 operates at about 566 degrees; and the top head at our 7 plant operates about 604 degrees, for example.
8 The pressurizer also operates at a relatively high 9 temperature. And we took some, did some NDE on one of the 10 lines coming out of our pressurizer, a vent line, to see 11 whether it had showed any signs of potential cracking, and 12 it did not, as a matter of fact.
13 And, those are some of the reasons why we believe 14 these lower heads penetrations are not currently affected.
15 MR. GROBE: Okay, thank you.
16 MR. POWERS: Okay. Let me go 17 on to the System Health Assurance Plan update.
18 We completed our discovery for the initial scope of 19 the review of our systems. Weve been talking about this 20 in past public meetings. This morning in my office, I had 21 all of the reports completed by the engineers, reviewed by 22 our various reviewers, management reviewers, oversight 23 reviewers. And, were prepared to be delivered to Lew 24 Myers for his sign-out as completion for inspection, and 25 theyre all in his office now for his review and final MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
71 1 sign-out.
2 This really constitutes a milestone for us, 3 although, all along weve been identifying issues as we 4 found them within our Corrective Action Program. Finishing 5 these reports really turns a corner for us in terms of 6 completing a major portion of discovery looking through the 7 health of our systems.
8 What we found as a result of all the reviews that 9 have been done is there is a number of issues, particularly 10 in the design calculation area, that were going to be 11 following up on. Corrective action documents have been 12 written, based on potential issues. We need to determine 13 the validity of the issues, the questions that are asked.
14 And we know that there are some good issues here for 15 us to tackle. I have listed a few of them out here that 16 were currently working on. Instrument tolerances in 17 calculations, for example. We have instrument set point 18 drift and calibration accuracies, for example.
19 Instrumentation accuracy, built into calculations that form 20 the bases for our tech spec trip set point, set points.
21 But for other set points, we have not incorporated 22 this level of detail similar to other older plants the 23 vintage of Davis-Besse. And, were evaluating that now in 24 terms of what, the significance of that to our other 25 systems, and thats ongoing.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
72 1 The emergency diesel generator loading sequence is 2 being studied. We need to prepare a detailed calculation 3 on the diesel generator performance as its loaded with 4 step loads. You know, in a case where we lose our offsite 5 power from the gridlines, our emergency diesel generators 6 automatically start and automatically load in the plant to 7 drive our safety systems.
8 Those safety systems have some rather large motors, 9 rather large loads. And, how those sequence onto the 10 diesel generator is something the engineers study to make 11 sure that the frequency output of the diesel generator is 12 maintained during that loading transient and that the 13 equipment functions acceptably through it.
14 This type of analysis has been done at many other 15 nuclear plants with engines just like ours. So, the 16 engineers now are comparing how our plant compares 17 design-wise to them. Its a very common diesel generator 18 thats in use. And the diesels have been tested a number 19 of times and the analysis has been done at many other 20 sites, so were following through to prepare that analysis 21 for the Davis-Besse site.
22 Service water temperature, we talked about that a 23 lot before. There had been work in the past to address the 24 rising lake temperature in this region, and their affect on 25 the plant. As part of that work, we lost some margin on MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
73 1 our systems. As the temperature goes up from the lake, the 2 heat exchangers dont cool quite as well. So, in 3 addressing that issue, we did not address it in a manner 4 that we would preserve margins, and thats what were going 5 to go about now. Were doing a lot of reanalysis of the 6 capability of the system with some more recent tools, 7 analytical tools, to demonstrate we have margins we need 8 for safe operation.
9 The bullet here I have talks about high pressure 10 injection minimum flow, was an issue that came up as part 11 of the NRC inspection portion of the external oversight of 12 our system reviews. This issue concerns very, very small 13 leak in the reactor system and high pressure injection 14 system responding to it and injecting. In the very long 15 term, about 23 hours2.662037e-4 days <br />0.00639 hours <br />3.80291e-5 weeks <br />8.7515e-6 months <br /> after that type of situation would 16 develop.
17 If we would empty out our reserve water tank, and 18 switched over our suction to the emergency sump at that 19 point, there is a prescribed action to close the min flow 20 valve, the minimum flow valve that goes back to our reserve 21 water tank. And, there is a question on the table in terms 22 of whether the high pressure injection pump is protected 23 adequately for minimum flow.
24 And, for those of you that arent pump engineers, 25 the pumps need to have a certain amount of small flow going MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
74 1 through them, so that the pump doesnt vibrate and so the 2 water doesnt ultimately overheat. Just from the energy of 3 the pump turning will heat the water to where it boils and 4 forms voids and that can damage a pump.
5 So, in the industry we try to ensure the minimum 6 flow protection is provided. So, thats a comment we 7 received and were working on that issue now.
8 Then the last bullet is an issue that came up in our 9 service water review on heat exchanger code relief 10 protection. These are relief valves. Normally heat 11 exchanger vessels designed for the ASME Code are provided 12 with whats called code thermal overpressure protection.
13 Particularly, if its, for example, a fired boiler, where 14 the pressure increases, just as it would on your stove on a 15 teapot, there is a way for the steam, the pressure to get 16 out; theres small relief valves that do that.
17 In this case, our heat exchangers are not fired, 18 its not a large source of heat, so there is a question of 19 whether they need to have code relief protection; 20 something that many of them havent had since the original 21 construction of the plant.
22 So, were wrestling some issues here that are both 23 new in the case of service water temperature, for example, 24 and very old in the case of high pressure injection or heat 25 exchanger code relief protection.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
75 1 MR. GROBE: Jim, I just 2 thought of something on that last issue. Are you 3 interfacing with the state code pressure injection board on 4 that last issue?
5 MR POWERS: Have we 6 communicated with them? We havent drawn them into 7 discussion yet, Jack. Weve been looking at the licensing 8 basis and the code itself, but I think thats, thats a 9 good point of something we do need to engage them, because 10 theyre very active at the site and theyre one of our 11 additional oversight resource that we can use to bounce 12 this off of.
13 MS. LIPA: Jim, where do you 14 stand in your review of these issues for reportability, 15 past operability?
16 MR. POWERS: Well, all the CRs 17 that go through the process, as I mentioned earlier, are 18 checked off in terms of whether they involve past 19 reportability. And there are two of them that you asked me 20 to talk about; one was the containment air coolers and 21 emergency sump. We had talked about those before the 22 break.
23 And the, the containment air coolers, were in the 24 process of submitting a voluntary LER reporting the 25 condition of the containment air coolers that was found in MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
76 1 containment subsequent to the Boron effects on them, but 2 weve looked at the structural capabilities of those 3 containment air coolers, both the piping to them and the 4 coils, and the coil supports and the registers and such, 5 and believe that the structural integrity is good.
6 We have not taken the analysis through all the 7 thermal capability of them. There was some Boron fouling 8 of them when we took them apart, dismantled them for 9 replacement, we found that there was some fouling on the 10 water side, sludge and so forth in there. And so there is 11 additional issues we were assessing on the performance of 12 the CACs. So, were going to provide an LER reporting of 13 that situation to you. Thats in preparation now.
14 Were also providing a supplement to the report that 15 we made on the containment emergency sump. We had reported 16 the potential inoperability of that sump, based on the 17 qualified coatings in containment, unqualified coatings 18 that we found.
19 And, also based on an opening that we found in the 20 screenage of the sump, a relatively small opening, but 21 bigger than the quarter inch design opening. And we had 22 reported that to you in a relatively brief abstract last 23 month, and based on these facts, were providing an 24 expanded response that gives much more detail on what were 25 doing and what we found.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
77 1 MS. LIPA: What about these 2 five bullets that you have here; are those still under 3 review?
4 MR. POWERS: Yes, still under 5 review. Theyre potential issues, and as we review them to 6 determine, to determine the significance of them, then they 7 will be going through reportability assessment. Christine, 8 if theyre reportable, well report them.
9 And so, another point that goes with our, our 10 completion of the discovery for System Health is that were 11 moving into our extended condition reviews. We found some 12 issues here on the Systems Review. We want to make sure 13 that the balance of our, of our important risk significant 14 systems are healthy as well. So, from an extended 15 condition standpoint, were moving off as part of our 16 implementation plan, moving forward into building block to 17 go through additional systems, and well be communicating 18 that list of systems to you.
19 Thats moving forward as well. There is a total of 20 15 of our important systems that well be evaluating to 21 make sure they dont have similar issues in the design 22 calculation area, as well as several other topical 23 engineering design areas. Of those 15, 7 are already done, 24 so there is 8 additional systems that were going to be 25 working on over approximately the next month and a half to MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
78 1 determine their safety function capability.
2 MR. GROBE: Jim, before you 3 go on, you and I had a rather lengthy meeting this morning 4 discussing these issues. I just want to make sure I 5 understand a couple of things.
6 Youve identified issues regarding calculations as 7 well as a number of specific technical areas, like high 8 energy line break analysis, and seismic capability analysis 9 and several others, where you believe that you dont yet 10 have the extent of the problem identified. And if I 11 understand what you just said correctly, you were going to 12 broaden the scope of your review of the systems to address 13 some of those issues and further understand what kind of 14 problems might exist in the plant; and that will take 15 roughly a month and a half, is that what you said?
16 MR. POWERS: Right. We expect 17 in the range of approximately six weeks to do the initial 18 cut through the systems.
19 MR. GROBE: Okay. And, a 20 number of these deficiencies youve identified, either 21 youve concluded are operability issues or could be system 22 operability issues; and these are technical specification 23 systems that are required to be operable during plant 24 operation.
25 MR. POWERS: What were looking MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
79 1 at for the starters here, Jack, is the systems that 2 contribute greater than one percent of risk significance to 3 our core damage frequency value. And the 15 systems that 4 we have selected compose 99 percent of the value of our 5 core damage frequency code.
6 So, from a probabilistic safety assessment 7 perspective, we have, weve got the vast majority of the 8 important systems composed in a set of 15 important systems 9 at the plant. They also compose 98 percent of our large 10 early release frequency value. So, these are truly systems 11 that are important to safety at the plant.
12 MR. GROBE: I understand 13 that. The technical specifications however require all 14 systems to be operable; and, if you wanted to choose to 15 modify your technical specifications and remove some of the 16 specifications for other systems that are less risk 17 significant, I suppose you could go down that avenue.
18 But we talked about meeting in the regional office 19 later this month. I think we tentatively set the 23rd, for 20 you to go through in much more detail the logic path that 21 youve developed, where youve got some engineering issues 22 that youve identified that could effect the operability of 23 the systems, and how you chose the extent of the additional 24 reviews youre going to be, and how you are justifying the 25 need to not review all tech spec, technical specification MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
80 1 systems.
2 So, this is a very important area, and Im looking 3 forward to that dialogue. And, hopefully, by the time we 4 meet on the 23rd, if thats the final date, I think thats 5 firming up, you can have a much more clear understanding of 6 the operability impacts of these design deficiencies, and 7 we can get into a little more detail on that subject.
8 MR. POWERS: Okay.
9 MR. MYERS: Jack, I think its 10 fair to say too --
11 MR. GROBE: You need a 12 microphone, Lew.
13 MR. MYERS: I think its fair 14 to say, you know, a lot of these issues are just calcs 15 that 25 years ago we may not have or may not completely 16 understand, so we dont know that any of them really affect 17 operability this time. What we wind up doing is generate a 18 CR on any issues we find as we do these slices and then 19 doing an operability assessment of each one of those, you 20 know, as we find the issue; similar to what we do at other 21 stations.
22 Just because you may not have a calc; when you get 23 through you may have a calc and find out everything is 24 okay. So, thats where were at.
25 MR. GROBE: Appreciate your MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
81 1 comments, Lew. I wanted to make sure its not, Im not 2 being misunderstood.
3 Im not suggesting that youre required to do 4 reviews of all of your systems. Whats important to me is 5 to understand which of these engineering deficiencies had a 6 more safety significant impact on system operation, and if 7 there are engineering areas where you had a significant 8 impact on safety, what is your justification for the scope 9 you have chosen, and making sure that we clearly understand 10 that the standard that we need to come to, to approach 11 restart, is a reasonable assurance that the systems are 12 going to be performing correctly. And I want to start 13 developing that foundation for an understanding of how you 14 came to a conclusion that this plan will give you 15 reasonable assurance, and we need to understand that before 16 we can make any sort of a recommendation to our management 17 on going forward.
18 MR. MYERS: I understand 19 that. Thank you.
20 MR. GROBE: Could we go back 21 to slide 18 a bit? Actually 17.
22 I think, Mike, this was part of your presentation.
23 I wanted to get into a little more detail on the approach 24 to Mode 3; and particularly in the area of system 25 function. But first, I would like to talk, the third MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
82 1 bullet down on this slide has to do with the emergency sump 2 strainer. What is your expectation for completion of that 3 modification?
4 MR. POWERS: Mike, go ahead.
5 MR. STEVENS: Okay, the 6 emergency sump strainer modification was broken into two 7 pieces. We expect that the top piece will be installed to 8 support moving fuel. Thats what were working towards.
9 MR. GROBE: Okay. So, I 10 understand now. So, youre planning on doing the 11 modification which will increase the top strainer from 12 approximately 50 square feet, I think you said the number 13 earlier today was 300 square feet. That part of the 14 modification will be done, but the bottom section of the 15 strainer that goes down the stairs and around the corner, 16 that part of the modification wont be done at this point 17 in time?
18 MR. STEVENS: Thats correct.
19 MR. THOMAS: So, do you stop 20 doing the bore through the sump walls going down into the 21 undervessel?
22 MR. STEVENS: No, we havent.
23 MR. GROBE: Could you go into 24 a little bit more detail on how youre going to sequence 25 these things?
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
83 1 MR. STEVENS: Im not sure I 2 understand the question. Were going, the tech spec and 3 requirement for moving fuel is to have the emergency sump.
4 And we have a safe shutdown procedure that goes through 5 contingency plans and alternatives for having the flow path 6 through the, what is storage tank, and then back into the 7 vessel.
8 We intend to install the top piece. Were not going 9 to leave the hole there. We have to do something with 10 that. Were working through those contingencies.
11 Part of what is prohibiting us from moving forward 12 and finishing it will be the dose rates in the area and 13 well have to sequence that so that we can get in and back 14 out without getting into lock high rad areas.
15 MR. GROBE: Let me restate 16 that to make sure. I think I understand, I think I 17 understand what you said. Youre going to continue with 18 the modification work for the bottom section of the 19 strainer, but at the point in time that the plant is ready 20 to proceed with fuel load, youll somehow blank off those 21 strainer sections such that the sump has an integrity.
22 MR. STEVENS: Thats correct.
23 MR. GROBE: Is there going to 24 be some sort of post maintenance or modification test that 25 will be done at that point to ensure the integrity of the MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
84 1 sump? Its kind of an undefined situation.
2 MR. STEVENS: Thats why we 3 broke it into two pieces, so we could better define it. We 4 will do the operability reviews required to partially close 5 that portion of the modification, and all in accordance 6 with. Do I understand the question?
7 MR. GROBE: Did that answer 8 your question, Scott?
9 MR. THOMAS: Yes.
10 MR. GROBE: Okay.
11 MR. MYERS: I think one thing 12 that is important here, we have our plans right now to stop 13 somewhere along the way, but what we have to do is, and 14 blank it out; but what were going to have to do is we have 15 a condition report on that. Well have to do an 16 engineering evaluation. Once again, the people that 17 declare operability is our shift supervisors. We all need 18 to understand that very clearly.
19 So, what we have to do is go over to our shift 20 supervisors and convince our shift supervisors that this 21 sump for the conditions were at, that the straining module 22 will meet its intended function, you know, and that being 23 the support system for the sump. The shift supervisors, 24 shift managers will make that determination.
25 MR. GROBE: Okay, and thats MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
85 1 where it should be. I appreciate that.
2 I dont have your valve numbers memorized, but I 3 think a couple things came together for me as you were 4 giving your presentation, Jim.
5 This RC 46 and RC 47 drain piping cracking, those 6 are the valves that are on the lines that come from between 7 the O rings on the reactor head. Okay. And the crack in 8 the drain piping is a potential source of material that 9 might have flowed down the side of the reactor vessel?
10 MR. POWERS: Thats right, 11 because its down below the cavity seal.
12 MR. GROBE: Okay. Thank you.
13 Could we go to the next slide?
14 MR. MYERS: The answer to that 15 question was yes, for people who couldnt hear in the 16 back.
17 MR. GROBE: Right, you need 18 to use the microphone, Jim.
19 The next slide, on slide 18, you indicate core 20 reload in mid January. Are some of the systems that youre 21 going to be reviewing for extended condition design issues, 22 systems that are required to be operable for core reload?
23 MR. MYERS: Yes.
24 MR. GROBE: Okay. So, it 25 seems like there is kind of a convergence of activities MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
86 1 here. About six weeks of design reviews, which will 2 discover additional problems likely, and so, thats a 3 tentative date based on knowledge of what deficiencies 4 might be identified in these continuing design reviews?
5 MR. MYERS: I dont want to 6 peek for our operators, but what we know right now, if you 7 go through the operational check sheets, we have a 8 requirement that containment sump have some degree of 9 operability to, to support core reload. Thats not a tech 10 spec out, thats an administrative item we have in our 11 house.
12 We will look at that item based on having the 13 containment, the permanent cavity seal in place and make a 14 determination what we need to have in effect for core 15 reload. Then the next step is, you know, putting the head 16 on, going to Mode 5 and then Mode 4, and so on. And each 17 one of those plateaus requires different conditions.
18 Here for the ECCS system to be a systems, thats 19 where you get into the core of mitigation system, the ECCS 20 systems, Emergency Core Cooling Systems; thats usually in 21 Mode 4 runs with them, and I think thats 280 degrees 22 here.
23 So, at that point, you know, well have to have a 24 large portion of our systems operable. And, at that point, 25 right now were looking at mid February there. So, its MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
87 1 not as convergent as one might think.
2 MR. GROBE: Okay, I see. So, 3 Mode 3, youre looking at, and thats the next slide, slide 4 19, your target there is mid February?
5 MR. MYERS: Thats correct.
6 MR. GROBE: Okay. And then 7 after, at the time you get to Mode 3 is when youre going 8 to be doing that reactor cooling system normal operating 9 temperature and pressure test.
10 MR. MYERS: Thats right.
11 MR. GROBE: I understand.
12 Okay. I appreciate you bearing with me. A number of these 13 issues came together as you went through that 14 presentation.
15 I apologize. There is one more thing. Bob 16 Schrauder, you indicated that you had some contaminants on 17 bottom head penetrations that were not associated clearly 18 or easily visually associated with leakage coming down the 19 side of the vessel.
20 Did you have any digital photographs that were 21 generated of those penetrations prior to the cleaning? I 22 was down there, but its all been cleaned up.
23 MR. SCHRAUDER: I would have to go 24 back and check the database of the pictures we have. Some 25 pictures --
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
88 1 MR. GROBE: Yeah, if you have 2 digital pictures of those penetrations, I would be 3 interested in seeing them if you could email them to me.
4 MR. SCHRAUDER: Okay.
5 MR. POWERS: Okay, next slide.
6 Just wanted to briefly talk about one of the 7 engineering focuses then on restart. Mike talked about 8 Mode 6 at the time we took out this number of our CRs, we 9 were at 189 Mode 6 condition reports that provide 10 restraints going to Mode 6. So, there are issues that need 11 to be dealt with. Those are actively being worked on.
12 Were prioritizing work at the site by mode change.
13 So, Mode 6 being the first one. Were focusing a lot of 14 attention on bearing down. And then the ongoing 15 modifications that support fuel reload and containment 16 health. I listed a few of them here. Although, there is a 17 lot of work going on to improve the plant, as Im sure a 18 lot of the people there would tell you all.
19 So, thats it for the engineering update. Unless 20 there is any questions, Ill turn it over to Neil 21 Morrison.
22 23 MR. MORRISON: Thanks a lot.
24 For those of you who dont know me, my name is Neil 25 Morrison and Im the Owner of the Program Compliance Plan MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
89 1 Building Block. As Lew mentioned, I am on loan from Beaver 2 Valley.
3 Today Im going to provide you a brief update on the 4 current status of my building block and also some future 5 actions that FENOC is going to take in the area of program 6 reviews.
7 As many of you -- well, as the board members may 8 know that the Program Compliance Plan Building Block 9 consists of two parts. The first part, which we would 10 characterize as a Phase 1 Program Review, is for programs 11 that were not associated with the degradation of the 12 reactor vessel head. And we do a program review that is 13 similar to a coached self-assessment that gets some 14 independent oversight actions on the back end of it.
15 The second review that we do is a Systematic 16 Detailed Review; and thats primarily focused on programs 17 that were associated in some manner with the degradation of 18 the reactor vessel head or programs that management has 19 asked to have a detailed review on.
20 Currently, we have completed 65 Phase 1 Program 21 Reviews, which is our intended target population. Of those 22 65, 19 are complete, paperwork is all signed off, 23 approved. And the remaining 46, were working through to 24 close those out.
25 For Phase 2, which is our Systematic Detailed MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
90 1 Review, we had six programs that we intended to complete 2 that are on the Restart Checklist. Four of those six are 3 complete. Youll see them listed there; the Boric Acid 4 Corrosion Control Program, the Corrective Action Program, 5 the In-Service Inspection Program and the Operating 6 Experience Program.
7 In addition to that, we had a pilot that we had 8 performed prior to starting this activity, and it was 9 Probabilistic Safety Assessment Program. And that report 10 is in draft status. We will complete that action in 11 January.
12 MR. HOPKINS: When you say 13 complete; what does that really mean? Im interested in 14 how many actions you may still have coming out of it or 15 what?
16 MR. MORRISON: My Building Block 17 is a primary focus type of building block. We will go in 18 and evaluate a program and document concerns or issues that 19 we may have in a program using a Corrective Action Process; 20 and out of that, then the program owners take those 21 Condition Reports and resolve those issues and they develop 22 an Implementation Action Plan to pull those issues together 23 and manage them and resolve them and put the programs in a 24 condition to support the restart of the facility.
25 MR. HOPKINS: Okay.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
91 1 MR. DEAN: Neil, do you 2 identify any of those actions as, in a manner of mode 3 restraints as weve heard discussed with other?
4 MR. MORRISON: My building block 5 does not do that. We provided initial characterization 6 whether we think the issue might be considered as a 7 restart, but then the Restart Station Review Board would 8 take that condition report and confirm that evaluation one 9 way or another.
10 Those issues that may affect operability of a 11 component would get run through the control room and they 12 would assign a mode restraint if appropriate.
13 MR. DEAN: You talking 14 restart, youre talking overall recovery of the plant, not 15 just the core?
16 MR. MORRISON: Thats correct.
17 So, currently we have two additional programs that 18 are under review right now at this time and theyre near 19 completion. We expect to complete them before Christmas.
20 Thats the Modification Program and Radiation Protection 21 Program.
22 In addition to that, under my Building Block, I know 23 this is one that I think the NRC has a lot of interest in, 24 we are developing a Reactor Coolant System Integrated 25 Leakage Program, which does include unidentified leakage.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
92 1 And, while the program is under development, really arent 2 in a position at this time to go into great detail. I can 3 give you a couple of features we have under consideration 4 for that program.
5 One of the unique things that were looking at doing 6 is, when a plant heats up into Mode 3, which is normal 7 operating temperature and pressure, but no nuclear heat, as 8 mentioned earlier, we intend to do a baseline plant 9 leakage. Whats good about that is, youll do this leakage 10 calculation to determine what your baseline value is. In 11 conjunction with that, you do a VT-2 walkdown, which is a 12 normal activity coming out of refueling, which would 13 confirm that you have no pressure boundary leakage.
14 Another thing were looking at doing later on this, 15 in 2003, were going to heating the plant up and well be 16 sitting in normal operating temperature and pressure for 17 approximately 7 days. And at that time, this program that 18 we have under development, were going to pilot that.
19 Were going to do some calculations at that time, and were 20 going to instill through some normal piping systems a known 21 inventory loss in the cooling system and see how sensitive 22 our methodology is to that, looking at small numbers. Make 23 sure that we will be able to identify leakage at low 24 numbers.
25 MS. LIPA: Question that I MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
93 1 have is, I guess I thought that one of Phase 2 Programs 2 Reviews was the QA Program. Did that change?
3 MR. MORRISON: The QA Program, 4 there is a detailed review going on and thats not really 5 being managed under my Building Block. Thats being done 6 independent of my Building Block. And that is in fact 7 ongoing right now.
8 MS. LIPA: What Building 9 Block is that associated with?
10 MR. MORRISON: I dont think its 11 associated with any specific Building Block. Its being 12 done through QA themselves.
13 MR. MYERS: Management/Human 14 Performance.
15 MR. MORRISON: I stand 16 corrected.
17 MS. LIPA: Trying to keep it 18 all straight. Thank you.
19 MR. GROBE: Neil, before you 20 go on, Jim had talked earlier about the installation of the 21 Flus Monitoring System. And, I have two questions. One 22 concerns experience on installation testing, preoperational 23 testing of such a system, and calibration of such a system, 24 and whether youre going to use this time frame, whether 25 this Flus System will be in operation at the time of this MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
94 1 first NOP/NOT test, such that you can baseline that and 2 perform the preoperational testing at that time?
3 MR. POWERS: Our thoughts on 4 that, Jack, is that we know that the insulation package has 5 to be tight in order for that Flus Monitor to work well.
6 And, our initial concept is, we would want to provide some 7 sort of test to see if we could detect very small amounts 8 of moisture with the Flus, but its not linked at this 9 point into the Integrated Leak Testing Program tests that 10 Neil is describing here, which would be more, the Flus is 11 very, its localized to the lower reactor vessel area, 12 where what Neil is talking about, were really surveilling 13 the entire Reactor Coolant System and we need to be able to 14 detect leakage in steam generator cubicles, for example, 15 and pressurized cubicles, beyond just the bottom head.
16 MR. GROBE: Is the Flus 17 System going to be part of the RCS Integrated Leakage 18 Program?
19 MR. MORRISON: Yes, it will be.
20 MR. GROBE: Okay.
21 MR. MORRISON: Overall, the 22 Integrated Leakage Program, we are trying, we are in the 23 process of putting together, we want it to be a model for 24 the industry, something that they can take, you know, after 25 we got it in place, and pattern their own programs after MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
95 1 it.
2 MR. GROBE: One other 3 question is, is there, where these Flus systems are used, I 4 have no experience with these systems at all; are you able 5 to use those on top head installations also?
6 MR. MORRISON: Yes, we can use 7 them on top heads also.
8 MR. GROBE: But youre not 9 planning on doing that at this time?
10 MR. POWERS: Not at this time, 11 since we got essentially an unused new head installed, 12 were not planning that at this time, Jack, were mostly 13 focused at the bottom head region.
14 MR. MORRISON: The last thing I 15 wanted to talk about this afternoon has to do with Program 16 Reviews. Im sorry.
17 MR. GROBE: One more question, 18 Neil, I apologize.
19 MR. MORRISON: Thats quite all 20 right.
21 MR. GROBE: Im very 22 interested in the section of your RCS Leakage Procedure 23 that deals with VT-2 Testing and Inspections. Ive seen 24 quite a variety over the years of approaches to those types 25 of inspections; some are comprehensive inspections, some MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
96 1 are less effective. Is there going to be guidance in this 2 leakage procedure on VT-2 Inspection Procedures, or is that 3 in your ISI Inspection Procedures?
4 MR. MORRISON: Thats an 5 interface with the ISI Program, but we will be looking at 6 that interface pretty hard and make sure that the 7 inspections are appropriate for what our goals are.
8 MR. GROBE: Good, because 9 its a particular area of interest of mine.
10 MR. MORRISON: Okay.
11 Moving on. The Program Reviews that weve been 12 working on, weve seen a lot of benefit from those. One of 13 our intentions is, an outcome of my building block is to 14 make this an ongoing effort for Davis-Besse.
15 So, were in the process of developing a procedure 16 thats more attuned to doing this for an operating plant, 17 and were going to pilot that here doing program reviews.
18 And, once weve got this working well for us, our 19 intentions are to make this a FENOC-wide initiative.
20 And, to do that, well take this piloted program 21 procedure that were developing right now, turn it into a 22 NOP, which for FENOC is FENOC-wide procedure. And, we will 23 initiate program reviews through the Nuclear Services 24 Department, which is based in Akron.
25 And to help support that activity, were going to be MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
97 1 developing a list of what we characterize as Priority Plan 2 Programs across the FENOC fleet. And, we will select 3 several of these programs and evaluate them every year 4 FENOC-wide.
5 And the goal here is to look at these programs and 6 look at them on a regulatory compliance perspective, how 7 weve addressed industry guidance, interfaces and 8 hand-offs, and we want to look at the implementation and 9 verify it is being implemented successfully.
10 And, really, this whole thing all ties back to the 11 root cause effort that occurred back in March. If you 12 think back to the technical root cause effort that we had 13 at Davis-Besse, one of the things that we identified was 14 there were a number of barriers that had not provided the 15 level of protection that we had expected. Those barriers 16 were really plant programs. And, there was a population 17 had let us down.
18 So, with this FENOC-wide effort, we want to go 19 back and look at what we think are important plant 20 programs, use as process to make sure they are actually 21 providing the level of protection that we are expecting of 22 them.
23 So, unless there is some other questions, Im going 24 to turn this over to Clark Price. I think Clark is going 25 to talk about the O350 progress.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
98 1 MR. MYERS: We already have 2 a self-assessment process. In that self-assessment 3 process, we lay out a yearly schedule of, say, what were 4 going to do. I would see this rolling in from a corporate 5 standpoint into a program reviews yearly to improve the 6 year before, for each side, and well do that across the 7 sites.
8 And for some sites, you know, like we do have one 9 boiler, boiling water reactor, we have a few pressurized 10 water reactors. So, look at it on a site specific basis.
11 So, Boron evaluation probably will not be a concern too 12 much at the boiler.
13 But what I anticipate, a yearly group of programs 14 that we would look at, and weve identified 65 programs or 15 so now. Well pick those and make sure theyre giving us 16 the performance they think, we think they should be. So, 17 thats sort of the way we see this plan now. Okay.
18 MR. PRICE: If there is no 19 other questions, Ill continue.
20 Im Clark Price. Im the owner of the Restart 21 Action Plan.
22 One of the things I would like to talk about today 23 is our overall progress on our 350 Restart Actions that we 24 have at Davis-Besse, and how were accomplishing those in 25 our Return to Service Plan.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
99 1 Starting off with that, I would like to go back to 2 our basic Building Blocks for a moment and talk about those 3 Building Blocks. There are seven Building Blocks that we 4 started off with in our Return to Service Plan, that were 5 designed to address all the areas, the causal factors that 6 we identified in our original root cause on the head 7 degradation.
8 This Building Block Plan, these Building Blocks have 9 served us very well and continue to serve us very well; 10 however, as you saw, and Christine talked about it earlier, 11 the NRC 0350 Panel developed a set of Restart Checklist 12 items that really, that is what we need to focus and 13 address for restart.
14 Next slide. So, we started off with Building 15 Blocks. Then we go to the Checklist items, and Ill be 16 talking about a chart here shortly that weve designed to 17 monitor both of those.
18 We developed a number of Davis-Besse O350 Restart 19 Actions to address each of the 0350 Panel Restart Checklist 20 Items. And, primarily those were derived from our Building 21 Block activities. Although, as you heard here today, there 22 are a few items that are outside the Building Blocks that 23 are on the Checklist.
24 Weve also developed performance indicators and 25 monitoring tools also to help us monitor the progress of MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
100 1 our plans and also help to schedule the inspections with 2 the NRC. We want to make sure that were ready for their 3 inspections when they send out the inspection teams, and we 4 continue to monitor that as we go.
5 One of the things we also did -- you can go to the 6 next slide. One of the other things we did, was in our 7 plans, we have, we took our plans and divided those into 8 basically a discovery phase and an implementation phase.
9 The Building Blocks were primarily designed to be discovery 10 phase building block items, but our overall plan not only 11 has to address the discovery phase, but also the 12 implementation of anything we find during that discovery.
13 And thats where we kind of combine all of that effort into 14 the overall restart checklist and our restart actions to 15 support that.
16 What you have in front of you right now on the 17 screen is a monitoring tool that we use both on site with 18 our senior management team and our owners of all the 19 Restart Checklist Items and we also use this as a 20 communication tool with the NRC to communicate our overall 21 progress.
22 This report is designed, the lefthand column, the 23 colored bars is our discovery phase activities. The far 24 left -- and its very difficult to read. We tried to get 25 all of this on one page and it gets kind of small. But in MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
101 1 order to do that, we have all the Restart Checklist items.
2 We have the owners weve assigned at the plant for those 3 Restart Checklist items. And then we have the discovery 4 phase and the colored bars, the implementation phase, and 5 then final closure of the Restart Checklist items.
6 The green identifies those items that we are 7 complete with from a discovery phase. And, as you can see, 8 we have a number of completions. Since our last meeting, 9 we have completed discovery, and Randy Fast talked about 10 this in his presentation. We completed the discovery in 11 the Containment Health Discovery Action Plan area. Weve 12 also completed discovery in the Containment, or Containment 13 Emergency Sump items. And were pursuing now the 14 modifications associated with the Containment Sump.
15 Also, weve completed, another item was our 16 inspections of our Boric Acid Systems outside of 17 containment. This was another area in our extended 18 condition, and we just recently completed those. So, were 19 making great progress.
20 Another one thats a major milestone and a lot of 21 work and effort went into this, was the completion of our 22 System Health Readiness Reviews and Latent Issues Reviews 23 on our systems. Jim talked about those. That was a major 24 effort. A lot of people involved in that on site. And we 25 just finally finished those up. As a matter of fact, Jim MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
102 1 said he was signing some of those this morning and theyre 2 all with Lew Myers for final approval, and then theyll be 3 ready for final NRC inspection.
4 I would like to address just a little bit on the 5 discovery area where were not complete yet. The blue bar 6 up there is an activity in our Management Organizational 7 and Human Performance area, that we still have a few items 8 that we are working on right now. We talked earlier about 9 our Engineering Assessment thats going on right now at the 10 plant. Thats an activity in there.
11 One of the activities in there that is complete, a 12 number of them is, we talked about those too, was the 13 Management Root Cause, in addition to Corrective Action 14 Root Cause, the Operations Root Cause; there is some items 15 that are complete in that area; however, we still have, 16 like I said, Engineering Assessment, and then we have a 17 collective review of all those assessments and root causes 18 that well be doing, pulling all the things together to see 19 if there is anything from a collective significance 20 perspective that we have missed in any of the individual 21 reviews, and that will be the final activity that will 22 close out that particular item.
23 If you go down further about midway down, youll see 24 an item thats labeled 3 Charlie 1 or 3 C-1. Yes?
25 MR. MYERS: Were working the MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
103 1 plan there. Thats exactly what we would expect right 2 now. Its not a deviation.
3 MR. PRICE: Thats correct.
4 MR. MYERS: Okay.
5 MR. PRICE: Also, we worked in 6 our plan, we just talked about this one, the next blue bar 7 down, which is our Quality Audits Program Review. Now, 8 this was not in the Building Block for Program Reviews; 9 however, we are using a Phase 2 Program Review, our 10 approach for that for this review.
11 We completed a root cause of the Quality Assessment 12 Organization, and now were in the process of doing a full 13 Phase 2 Review, utilizing the Phase 2 Program that was 14 designed underneath the Building Block, but it is not 15 necessarily under that particular Building Block. Its 16 underneath the Management/Human Performance Building Block, 17 as Lew stated.
18 Carrying right down, the two that Neil just spoke 19 about that are still in progress, which are the 20 Modification Program and also the Radiation Protection 21 Program. Those are going to the Program Review Board this 22 week and next for final review. And we will, were 23 targeting to have those completed before the end of the 24 year.
25 The last one, down at the bottom that is noted as MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
104 1 5 C 1, or 5 C, or 5 Charlie, is our Functional Area Reviews 2 and those are still ongoing. Those are part of the 3 Management and Human Performance Improvement Plan and a 4 specific activity that we have in that area.
5 Any questions on that?
6 MS. LIPA: The column over on 7 the right, not to the far right, but there is a column 8 about four columns over that says, Ready for Inspection.
9 So, that, do you plan to fill in that column so we can use 10 this as a tool?
11 MR. PRICE: Yeah. One of the 12 things before its ready for final inspection, its 13 important to know, Christine, there is a column there that 14 has yes in it or its blank; if thats the one youre 15 referring to?
16 MS. LIPA: Right.
17 MR. PRICE: Bottom, basically, 18 we have a process we go through as part of the Restart 19 Action Plan, which includes a closure package and 20 validation of those closure packages. And until thats 21 completed, which requires Lew Myers signature, it is not 22 ready for inspection. So, even though weve completed the 23 phases, some of these items Lew has not had the final 24 sign-off on. When he does, which will be very shortly, a 25 number of these, the yes will go in there and well be MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
105 1 ready for the final inspection from the NRC.
2 On the right side we have another -- Im sorry. Go 3 ahead.
4 On the righthand side, we have a number of actions 5 that are going on in the implementation phase. Many of our 6 implementation actions are, go on concurrent with 7 discovery. We dont wait until were completely done with 8 discovery before we start correcting what we found.
9 And, as you can see, we have a number of actions 10 that are, a number of areas that are progressing quite 11 well, as a matter of fact.
12 MR. GROBE: Yeah, Clark, I 13 appreciate you bringing this slide forward. As youre 14 aware, we meet once a week on this slide, about a half a 15 dozen or eight pages go behind it that provide a lot more 16 detail, but this is probably very difficult for the folks, 17 the public to consume.
18 I would suggest that between now and next month, you 19 come up with a way to better portray the same data. I 20 think its a great way of tracking whats going on, but 21 better portray the same data, but in a more human friendly 22 atmosphere.
23 MR. PRICE: Okay.
24 MR. GROBE: So, it can be 25 understood more easily.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
106 1 MR. DEAN: I guess I would 2 offer in some earlier meetings, we had had some performance 3 matrix, individual performance matrix, individual graphable 4 display; that seems to be pretty reasonable.
5 MR. MYERS: Weve got those 6 too.
7 MR. PRICE: This is just one 8 of high level overview monitoring tool that were using.
9 We also have our performance indicators. And, I guess one 10 of the things I would like to say then, Im going to talk 11 about some performance indicators here shortly, is one of 12 the most significant things I feel with our discovery being 13 essentially complete on what weve completed today, is we 14 have completed a lot of material issues, the discovery and 15 material condition issues of the plant.
16 As you saw, most of the open items in the discovery 17 phase are in the Management/Human Performance area, Program 18 Reviews. And we pushed through the discovery phase in the 19 system areas so we got the work identified, the issues 20 identified, and now we can go address and resolve those 21 issues. That was a very important phase that we needed to 22 get through in our Restart Plan.
23 On this next slide here, were talking about again 24 completion of discovery. Were nearing that completion.
25 We have a number of open restart condition reports and Im MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
107 1 going to get up in a second and address very briefly those 2 graphs that are hanging on the back wall.
3 And, but let me just continue on here with the 4 Operational Performance Indicators. We have a number of 5 indicators in what we call Operational Performance, which 6 are places where we look at workload, backlogs and those 7 types of things. And were holding steady in those areas, 8 which is good. Were identifying an awful lot of work, but 9 yet were keeping up with that work.
10 The Organizational Readiness Performance Indicators 11 are all showing steady to improving. And those performance 12 measures tend to be the areas where were looking at 13 Quality and Human Performance, and were seeing steady and 14 improving trends in those areas.
15 One of the things thats very fundamental in our 16 whole Building Block effort and our Return to Service Plan 17 is the use of our Corrective Action Program. And through 18 that process, we have identified many conditional reports 19 that have documented the issues that we have found during 20 our discovery phases of our activities. And then we also 21 then have corrective actions that come out of that.
22 If I could, Ill try to speak loud enough for 23 everybody to hear. Ill give everybody an opportunity to 24 stretch a little bit.
25 We have a number of charts and these are some that MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
108 1 Ive shown in previous meetings. One of the things that we 2 saw in previous meetings is we were in the upwards incline 3 here, which meant we were still discovering more than we 4 were fixing. And this is an, all these graphs here 5 represent, or charts represent open condition reports and 6 open corrective actions.
7 The first two here are the total population 8 condition reports that we have that are open right now that 9 are classified by restart, classified as restart. The 10 Restart Station Review Board, which Bob Schrauder carries, 11 classifies all condition reports and all corrective actions 12 that come out of the condition reporting process, as 13 whether or not theyre required for restart.
14 This is the total population of restart actions. It 15 actually is greater than just the O350 population of work 16 that we have. This is all things that weve identified 17 that we desire to have completed prior to restart also.
18 As you can see and whats very important, 19 management of the site and employees look at these curves, 20 because what weve seen in the last about a month ago, we 21 finally peaked and now as we completed the discovery phase, 22 our closure of those evaluations on those condition reports 23 are now seen incoming, and were now in decline, were 24 working those off, to restart.
25 What you see basically is, these are, this is a MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
109 1 total, the next three sets are major building block areas 2 for our, that we discussed. First is System Health 3 Reviews. The next is the Program Compliance. And the last 4 is Containment Health.
5 Those are all the different major Building Blocks 6 that generated the majority of the condition reports and 7 the discovery items that we found prior to executing the 8 plan.
9 So, this is a good news story. Were now catching 10 up with the, with our workload. Were driving these curves 11 down. We have a lot of effort in this area of focus 12 getting through our evaluations. Because, as probably Jack 13 would tell you, he considers some of that still the 14 discovery phase. And, and it is through true, through 15 those evaluations, we could determine that there are more 16 areas of work that we have to do. Thats why we need to 17 get through those quickly, get the corrective actions 18 defined, and get those into the schedule that Mike has to 19 make sure that we got all those, that we can, all those 20 scheduled out for restart.
21 So, I believe thats all I had to share today. I 22 think one of the things, I think we made significant 23 progress in the last month. Weve really been working hard 24 to get some of these discovery activities to closure, and 25 we made good progress in the last few weeks in MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
110 1 accomplishing that.
2 MR. GROBE: Before you go on, 3 Lew. Clark, I appreciated the way you described the 4 completion. And we would agree that the head resolution 5 area is essentially complete and our inspection was 6 recently issued on that topic and Containment Health is 7 essentially complete and we issued a report recently on 8 that.
9 Youve described today two of the six programs are 10 yet to be completed, and I think the chart accurately 11 depicted that. And Management/Human Performance, you still 12 have the corporate oversight and the engineering function, 13 root causes, as well as collective significance; and I 14 think your chart accurately depicted that.
15 The thing that I want to make sure is not lost, is 16 this meeting later this month on engineering design issues 17 is critically important. And I view the eight additional 18 reviews and any further activities you determine are 19 necessary to be discovery, and youre going to identify a 20 significant number of issues, as you have already 21 identified in each of your prior design reviews.
22 So, there is no doubt in my mind that there will be 23 many condition reports coming out of those reviews, and 24 this may not, you know, we have to discuss the extent of 25 that review; and well do that hopefully on the 23rd.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
111 1 MR. MYERS: Right. We would 2 agree with that. You know, I think what we want to show 3 the public, if you go look at our basic Building Blocks 4 right now with the first slide, from a System Walkdown 5 Standpoint, Containment Inspection Standpoint, 6 Management/Human Performance Standpoint, we got a lot of 7 the discovery done. In fact, most all of it is done. But 8 we didnt wait to finish all the discovery, theres 9 actually been a lot of work done in containment stuff.
10 So, we didnt wait to finish all discovery. You see 11 that turning green, over to the next column is 12 implementation. You see that implementation is well under 13 way also. So, if you walk away with those two things, of 14 that whole chart, thats all that we wanted to 15 demonstrate.
16 We made good progress on discovery. We also made a 17 lot of implementation progress also. You can see that in 18 our containment, the system walkdowns weve done, the valve 19 repacking program now, and the draindown window, reactor 20 coolant system. So, there is a lot of implementation going 21 on. Okay?
22 MR. DEAN: Let me offer one 23 observation and perhaps a question.
24 Having been involved with plants in the past that 25 have gone through a significant discovery phase, I dont MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
112 1 disagree this is kind of an important milestone when you 2 get to the point where your work-off rate starts to exceed 3 your discovery or input. That is a milestone.
4 But its easy for us to get captured a little bit 5 about looking at things like corrective actions and your 6 hardware related issues, but we have to go back to the fact 7 that a major factor in this whole issue at Davis-Besse 8 revolves around safety culture related issues. And I think 9 it would be important at future meetings to be able to 10 present performance indicators and things that you are 11 monitoring that indicate in some objective sense progress 12 that youre making in terms of addressing the safety 13 culture related issue.
14 MR. MYERS: Okay.
15 Next area we have is, we want to take a few moments 16 to talk about some recent changes weve made at the plant, 17 and from a FENOC alignment standpoint. Bill Pearce and I 18 will talk about that.
19 In general, if you go look at our Building Blocks, 20 we talked about the discovery phase, you know, coming to an 21 end, and those latent issues areas.
22 What we want to do now, were focusing on reloading 23 the core, pressurizing the containment, pressurizing the 24 RCS later on. Thats on the near horizon for us. In order 25 to get there, weve got to do is, weve got to make sure MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
113 1 our plant management staff, if you will, is in good stead; 2 and that gets back to that safety culture issue.
3 So, what we did recently is, we had some significant 4 reductions I think in contrator work force. Ive heard a 5 lot about that. In general though, what I want to tell you 6 is, we reduced like 380 contractors at our site, and there 7 is still another 900 there now. So, from a staff 8 standpoint, there is still a lot of people at our site, 9 over and above our normal 800 people that we have.
10 And, so we had some things that we wanted to 11 accomplish. First, we have certain contractors that are 12 fairly large contractors, engineering groups that we do 13 business with; FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company, we 14 want to make sure that we were aligned with those 15 companies.
16 So, as we took this effort, it was to realign us 17 with the companies that we normally do business with and 18 their management; engineering companies, companies that 19 supply us craft support, companies that supply us health 20 physic support, training support and all that. That was 21 one of our goals.
22 The next thing we want to do is align us, so we 23 could be more operations focused, if you will, then we 24 could assess our own internal performance. For example, 25 weve had this group together called Restart Senior MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
114 1 Management Team. Well, its time to quit calling it the 2 Restart Senior Management Team, and really have the senior 3 managers that we brought into this plant take a leadership 4 role in moving the plant forward.
5 So, sometimes weve had some of our contractor 6 groups reviewing things. We intend to put our managers 7 more in the line organizations; and youll see us making 8 that shift.
9 Then finally, you know, we wanted to make sure that 10 we had the contractor level in an area that we could manage 11 effectively. One of the things weve done for each 12 Building Block now is, weve gone through the discovery, 13 were trying to get the work done for example in the 14 containment.
15 Weve taken our key contractors and aligned the key 16 contractors with the Building Blocks. What that helps us 17 do, what that helps us with is to focus on that key 18 contractor, whether it be an engineering contractor or a 19 maintenance contractor, to ensure, like for instance on 20 these draindown window, that we have one group of people 21 thats focused on that work and we can do the work 22 efficiently and effectively.
23 So, those are the three objectives that we try to 24 accomplish. We think that aligned us well with our other 25 FENOC stations, and we think that also sets us up to make MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
115 1 the next step in loading the core, pressurizing containment 2 and then finally doing the, the hot operational testing.
3 If we can do all that well as a management team and 4 error free, then that helps regain public confidence about 5 our ability to effectively manage our plant. So, that 6 worked okay.
7 While were doing this, we realized it would cause 8 some management concerns, so weve asked oversight to take 9 a look at the effects of that, and Bill Pearce will discuss 10 that, how were doing that.
11 MR. PEARCE: Okay. When we 12 made this change, I guess our concern in the Quality 13 Assurance Organization was that any time you have a change, 14 youre at risk to introduce some things you didnt mean to 15 introduce with it. So, the QA manager and myself decided 16 it would be prudent for us to increase our level of 17 oversight during the period of this change.
18 So, we decided what we wanted to look at, was to 19 look at the new makeup of the Engineering Assessment Board, 20 the effectiveness and quality of the Engineering Assessment 21 Board review of Latent Issue Reports, and the quality of 22 System Health Readiness Review Reports without with that 23 Engineering Assessment Review Board.
24 So, thats in addition to what we had been looking 25 to previously. And, some of the things that we did, is for MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
116 1 the Restart Station Review Board, we had an increased 2 quality assurance oversight level and we increased the use 3 of QA Evaluators with operations experience to give them 4 more broader view of what were looking at.
5 We revised, we looked at the revised membership on 6 the review boards. There were several review boards put in 7 place initially to get through some of these latent issue 8 reviews. So, we tried to look at the membership of those.
9 We examined them for their background and their 10 credentials. And the activities and results of the board 11 meetings, we are carefully observing to make sure there is 12 no loss of quality as the boards have changed.
13 What I brought you today, this has gone on over the 14 past few days, so I have some fresh information about what 15 we found in doing these things. We not only made a plan, 16 this is what we seen on the front end of the 17 implementation.
18 As part of our review, we talked to the EAB members 19 to discuss their qualifications, and found that based on 20 their background they were knowledgeable in the subject 21 areas they were looking at. And, at least two members on 22 the Engineer Assessment Board Review Team for Reactor 23 Coolant System were long time Framatone personnel. One is 24 currently system engineering manager there.
25 Three, four permanent Engineering Assessment Board MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
117 1 members participated in and observed the review of Aux.
2 Feedwater on the fifth of December. As a recent one that 3 they all participated in, so that was kind of a carry over 4 for them.
5 Says, probing questions were asked by all members of 6 the EAB team, which demonstrated they had time to review 7 the reports ahead of time so they were knowledgeable about 8 what they were reviewing.
9 Placed emphasis on operating experience to ensure 10 that the latent issue team members properly captured what 11 was required. That was a comment that was made. And one 12 of the EAB Panel Review members for the Emergency Diesel 13 Generator Team was the plants station blackout diesel 14 engineer, which its the same engine; one is emergency 15 diesel, other is blackout. So, it had a lot of information 16 and expertise in the area that they were looking at.
17 His line of question reflected his own experience, 18 presenting the station blackout diesel generator report 19 previously to the EAB. So, theyre utilizing the 20 experience they gain.
21 I guess one perception we have in the Quality 22 Assurance Organization, is we did a pretty good job of 23 making the transition, and that the people that we have 24 presently doing those assessments, seem to have the proper 25 qualification and background to do them, and that the MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
118 1 quality of the assessments is not going to suffer because 2 of the change. That was what we were really trying to come 3 to the conclusion of.
4 We increased our oversight because of that. And 5 now, since the change has transpired, well go back to our 6 normal plan. But, we just wanted to tell you that we did 7 look harder because we made the change, and weve looked, 8 I think we tried to see if there was going to be any 9 problem associated with that, and it seems like everything 10 went pretty well.
11 Okay, Lew.
12 MR. GROBE: Bill, I wasnt 13 associated in this level of detail with Davis-Besse three, 14 four years ago, as I am today, but my sense is that this 15 sensitivity exhibited by the quality organization may not 16 have existed several years ago to being responsive to 17 changes in the station and increasing oversight. And I 18 really appreciate the fact that your organization is 19 functioning in a real time nature to balance your level of 20 confidence with an application of resources in areas where 21 you wanted to make sure that things are going well.
22 And certainly a time of transition is a time where 23 you could have problems, so I really appreciate that.
24 We performed a number of inspections over the last 25 several months and reported on them last month. One of MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
119 1 those was in the System Health area. And we likewise would 2 probably be performing some additional work as you go 3 through these additional design reviews to also regain 4 confidence that the, the new people and the new structure 5 are working as good as the prior reviews had worked.
6 MR. DEAN: Bill, I have a 7 question. In looking at the things, the assessment of the 8 impact in terms of the new makeup of the board, 9 effectiveness in quality, the quality of the System Health 10 Readiness Reviews; you talked about the impact of the 11 Engineering Assessment Board, but what have you done in 12 terms of looking at the quality of the System Health 13 Readiness Review about the EAB review.
14 MR. PEARCE: We reviewed those.
15 I got some information here, although its -- we think that 16 the quality of the reviews have not changed since the board 17 has not done the final inspection of them any longer and 18 its being done in the line management. Were looking at 19 the final product now.
20 There is a lot of them are already done and went 21 through the board, so weve got, there is a template thats 22 kind of been put in place of what acceptable and what is 23 not. And the new ones going through now are the same 24 quality level, fit the same template, got the same types of 25 information in them, and seem to go to the same depth as MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
120 1 they were previously when the board was reviewing them, 2 Bill.
3 MR. DEAN: Okay. Is your 4 intent, I didnt quite gather from your comments whether 5 you feel like youve completed your assessment efforts to 6 look at this transition or do you still intend to have some 7 enhanced observation in QA activities to monitor?
8 MR. PEARCE: Well, we were 9 involved all along in the boards that were going on, and 10 did overviews, but in this, for this case, the last five 11 latent issue reviews, wasnt it five, I think it was five 12 that went through; we went through all of them. We had 13 somebody at each one of them, sat through the entire 14 thing. We just didnt do sampling, we sat through the 15 entire thing, and watched that.
16 So, well go now back to our baseline level review 17 where we do sampling, and look at it in that regard.
18 MR. DEAN: Okay.
19 MR. PEARCE: The comment you 20 made about looking for change, I remembered a quote, and I 21 got this actually from a quality assurance guy about 15 22 years ago. He told me that "Change is the mother of 23 trouble and trouble is the mother of change." And I think 24 that that is, you know, you think about that, it is like 25 that. And, we need to be sensitive to change.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
121 1 MR. MYERS: We need to make 2 it.
3 MR. PEARCE: We need to make 4 it.
5 MR. MYERS: Are you ready for 6 conclusion?
7 MR. GROBE: Absolutely.
8 Any other questions?
9 Go for it.
10 MR. MYERS: Good, thank you.
11 You know, we talked about our reactor head today.
12 If we go to the next slide. Reactor head is on the stand.
13 Its painted. The electrical lines are on the head.
14 Everything is ready to go. Its our intention to set the 15 head up, fit in the near future. Demonstrate that it fits 16 well and everything. So we made progress there and thats, 17 thats going forward.
18 Our System Readiness Reviews are complete. Theyre 19 on my desk. That might take a week or so, because my 20 intention is to sit down with a large group of engineers 21 and eye-to-eye and go through the System Readiness Reviews 22 before I sign them. So, theyre basically complete.
23 Containment Health is good. The emergency sump is 24 moving along. We think that its going to set an industry 25 standard. Integrated Leak Rate Test Program establishes a MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
122 1 new standard also for this industry. We think well have a 2 procedure process and way of identifying leakage and 3 formalize that, so that well be a model for other plants 4 to come and look at.
5 Additionally were installing the Flus Monitoring 6 System, which is a new piece of technology that no other 7 plants in the United States has. And we think thats going 8 to make us sort of unique too.
9 So, Containment Health is good. Walk in our 10 containment now, material condition looks very good, we 11 think, compared to other containments Ive been in, in the 12 United States.
13 Preparations are underway for core load in the near 14 future, January. Containment testing. Then operational 15 testing. And its our intent then not just to bring the 16 plant up and pressurize it, but we have an integrated test 17 procedure were putting together to go look at our 18 equipment to make sure its going to function well. A lot 19 of our equipment hasnt run in about a year; steam pumps, 20 steam dumps, things like that.
21 We intend to give a good baseline so the plant will 22 be ready for restart, during this plateau. Then well cool 23 back down and go look for any potential leakage that we 24 might have, and do some more maintenance.
25 Thats a change of the initial plan that we had from MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
123 1 several months ago. So, we think its a good approach. We 2 find something, we fix it.
3 Per Management/Human Performance, we talked about 4 safety culture. Let me spend a moment on that. You know, 5 I think that were well under way of creating a Safety 6 Conscious Work Environment at our plant, where people can 7 bring issues forward. I wont say were perfect by any 8 means, but were taking good steps there to make sure that 9 process; that I have an open door policy, my managers have 10 an open door policy. Weve been trying to train them, 11 people in safety conscious work environment, so they know 12 how to address problems. Were trying to get them in a 13 more proactive role.
14 We talk about that at all of our 4-Cs meetings. We 15 talk about that at our group meetings. Weve done 16 training. So, we feel were making good progress there.
17 One of the best things from safety culture 18 standpoint is in my mind, is find and fix problems. We 19 have a whole bunch of routine problems that we probably 20 didnt have to fix at our plant. You look over at our 21 graph, thats way over and above the 350 process. Find and 22 fix problems.
23 I love the valves and the draindown, the window we 24 went after, because we wanted to as a management team.
25 Nothing in the 350 process told us to go put in a reactor MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
124 1 cavity seal plate. Thats a tough model, we did that on 2 our own. Thats the right safety culture. And were 3 driving to make sure that safety culture is in place.
4 Strong operational leadership. You know, most of 5 the managers we have at our plant now are previous SROs.
6 Bill Pearce was my shift supervisor when I was a young boy 7 at another plant. So, life is a lot better now.
8 If you go look, down to our maintenance manager, 9 hes a previous SRO. The quality manager that we have in 10 place, certification. So, our management organization has 11 a very, very high respect for operational issues.
12 And, for example, a lot of the issues in the 13 Corrective Action Process, I spoke up during this meeting; 14 we write a condition that we think is an operability issue 15 or question, then its up to us to go back and convince the 16 shift supervisor that we have this bounded. That 17 atmosphere didnt exist, and were going to make sure it 18 exists when we start the plant back up.
19 We have CRs generating. The person thats going to 20 make that operability calls is the shift managers, like it 21 should be.
22 I want to talk about our people for a few moments.
23 We brought in a management assessment firm and theyve 24 looked at our people. You know, Ive worked at several 25 plants in the United States myself. Ive worked at plants MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
125 1 where the population is a 30 mile radius amongst two 2 million people or so. You didnt know each other very 3 well. The community was very large. This is not a large 4 community.
5 Ive worked at plants where weve brought people in 6 from the outside and they became part of the community over 7 the years, but they werent from the community, they were 8 outsiders.
9 One of the things as a management firm we brought in 10 told us, I think is a strength, is that the people at our 11 plant, you know, are from this area. Many of them got out 12 of high school and went off to college, and got their 13 degree so they could work at this plant. Theyre not 14 move-ins, theyre people that are from this area. They are 15 the community. They are the community.
16 And we have meetings scheduled now with our people 17 to go out in the community as we start returning the plant 18 to service, and I think we have like 17 meetings scheduled 19 in the next month or so, to meet with community people.
20 And weve been doing that all along to show to them, 21 demonstrate that were ready to restart the plant.
22 We paid all this money for a consultant. I want to 23 tell you who it is. I went to my barber over in Port 24 Clinton the other day. She said, I could have told you 25 that without going to a management consultant. Most people MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
126 1 I went to high school with, two of my best friends went and 2 got their college degrees just so they could work at 3 Davis-Besse. Just so they could work here.
4 My message again is, I think we have good people at 5 our plant. The issue wasnt a safety culture thats bad 6 with our people, it was that we didnt implement from a 7 management standpoint a strong safety culture. There is no 8 balance between production and safety, its the gate you go 9 through. And what were doing is demonstrating that every 10 day at work. Thank you.
11 MR. GROBE: Any other 12 questions?
13 Well thanks, Lew.
14 Each month as weve met, weve seen progress.
15 Sometimes the progress was learning how to do discovery 16 correctly. Sometimes the progress has been much more 17 substantial. And this month is not a change. We continue 18 to see progress.
19 The three areas where we have the largest amount of 20 inspection work left are in the Systems and Design Area, 21 the Programs Area and Management/Human Performance. Your 22 Programs Area is further along. Well be probably digging 23 into those areas again in detail in January.
24 I think we have the dates for our next three 25 meetings. I dont know that weve announced them MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
127 1 publicly. January 14th, well be here. Thats, these are 2 Tuesdays. February 11th and March 11th. Im not sure if 3 well be in this facility. This is the first time here.
4 Were going to evaluate the adequacy of this facility after 5 were done, make sure it meets our needs, and see what 6 their schedules are and see whether they can support us in 7 the future. Well be back here in the local area, January 8 14th, February 11th and March 11th, and we look forward to 9 those meetings.
10 Again, I want to emphasize, a very important meeting 11 on the 23rd, tentatively, and well be announcing that 12 publicly as soon as its firmed up. It will be in Region 13 III. Thats somewhat unique for us. We try to have as 14 many of our meetings as possible here at the site. Because 15 its going to be at Region III, well be video 16 teleconferencing to our headquarters office where folks can 17 observe it there. Obviously, folks can come to our Region 18 III office, there will be a public meeting there in 19 Chicago. Well also have telephone hookups, so if anybody 20 is interested wants to patch in by phone, well be doing 21 that also.
22 Why dont we take a very short break. Its 10 23 after, according to my watch. Ill have to synchronize 24 with Christine here, and take a five minute break and well 25 reconvene for the public section of our meeting in five MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
128 1 minutes. Thank you.
2 (Off the record.)
3 MR. GROBE: What we would 4 like to do now, I appreciate those who are left, having the 5 staying power for this meeting. I think it was quite 6 informative.
7 What were doing now, is entering a time where the 8 NRC is going to meet with the public, and were interested 9 in your thoughts, your feedback, any questions you have, 10 any suggestions you have for us. Were open to, to 11 anything.
12 What I would like to do is proceed and ask local 13 elected officials if they have any, or representatives of 14 local elected officials, if they have any questions or 15 comments, they want to come forward first, I would 16 appreciate that.
17 And if he we could each limit our questions to a 3 18 to 5 minute time frame, we could get to everybody and have 19 time to get to dinner too.
20 Hello, Jere.
21 MR. WITT: Hi, Jack.
22 Jack, I am older than you, so I have a prepared 23 statement, so I didnt forget to say what I wanted to say.
24 My name is Jere Witt. I am the Ottawa County 25 Administrator and a member of the Restart Overview Panel.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
129 1 As a member of the Restart Overview Panel, I have been 2 intimately involved in the process since the beginning and 3 have learned more about nuclear power than I ever intended 4 to know, but I appreciate the opportunity.
5 I also have been involved with the Davis-Besse 6 nuclear power plant almost since its beginning, because I 7 have been in this position almost 25 years and have worked 8 closely with the plant over the years. I am not a nuclear 9 expert and never will be, but I believe I bring a common 10 sense approach to the panel along with the ability to ask 11 tough questions.
12 The biggest stake holder in this process is Ottawa 13 County. It affects all of us in many ways, especially the 14 families of the employees. Safe operation of the plant has 15 and always will be my first priority. It is obvious that 16 Davis-Besse and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission both made 17 mistakes as part of this incident; and they have admitted 18 so.
19 The Restart Overview Panels function is to provide 20 independent oversight and review of plant activities in 21 regards to restart. This panel is made up of industry 22 experts and myself as a representative from the county.
23 They probably have asked the toughest questions of 24 anyone in this process and will press on until all issues 25 are resolved satisfactorily.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
130 1 The Restart Overview Panel has been in containment 2 and will go back, because they are committed to this 3 assignment.
4 All of the members of the panel have added 5 additional expertise in some manner during this process.
6 It was never intended to be and never will be a rubber 7 stamp.
8 I believe we must evaluate the value of the 9 continued operation of the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power 10 Station in terms of safety, and value to the community.
11 Mistakes were certainly made in regards to the head 12 incident, but there have been many good things happening at 13 the plant over the years.
14 We must ensure that this type of incident never 15 happens again, and get back to operating the plant safely 16 and as a benefit to the community.
17 This has been a monumental task for everyone, and 18 the process to get there is unbelievable, but I believe 19 that the indicators show that we are moving forward. Let 20 there be no mistake, there is a lot of work to do yet, but 21 I believe you are getting there.
22 The management team and the process is in place to 23 make the right decisions and lead this process to 24 completion. The employees are a dedicated group that live 25 here and want to do what is right. Its been a tough MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
131 1 process and they have worked long and hard to get to where 2 they are today.
3 I congratulate you on the improvements you have 4 made. Keep up the good work.
5 Davis-Besse has made many improvements that go above 6 and beyond the required O350 process. Unfortunately, the 7 public will never see all the improvements and changes that 8 have been made. The process has been long and tough, but 9 the end result should be a good one.
10 There has never been any effort that I am aware of 11 to not address an issue, but to the contrary, they are 12 going above and beyond to address issues.
13 The plant has also planned for improvements that 14 will continue to be made after restart. I believe it is 15 now time to move forward with the safe restart of 16 Davis-Besse at the time when the plant and the NRC has 17 addressed all of the necessary issues appropriately.
18 I urge everyone to give the Davis-Besse team and the 19 Nuclear Regulatory Commission the opportunity to make it 20 happen, and work with them to get there.
21 I believe you can safely operate this plant in the 22 future, but also believe that close scrutiny must continue 23 by Davis-Besse, the NRC, FENOC, FirstEnergy, the County and 24 the public.
25 My family lives here along with my grandchildren, MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
132 1 and I would never suggest restart if I believe a credible 2 safety risk is involved. It is time to move forward in the 3 process, and restart with safety as the number one and only 4 goal. Thank you.
5 MR. GROBE: Thank you very 6 much, Jere. I did notice earlier that another member of 7 the Restart Oversight Panel was present at this meeting.
8 He left a bit ago. That is Christopher Bakken. Hes Chief 9 Nuclear Officer from Merit American Electric Power Corporation.
10 And, of course, Bob Saunders, President of FENOC is 11 here.
12 I attend as well as some of the other NRC staff 13 those meetings each month. And Jere is right, theyre a 14 challenging committee and I appreciate their contribution.
15 Yes, sir.
16 MR. KOEBEL: Thank you, Jack.
17 My name is Carl Koebel. Im President of the Ottawa 18 County Commissioners, and Im here today to represent the 19 feelings of the Commissioners toward what got us here.
20 Davis-Besse, as weve seen today through its 21 management and its staff has worked extremely hard to get 22 to this point. And I think what I heard today and what was 23 stressed today was change. And I know from previous 24 experiences in other departments and with the county staff, 25 change is difficult. Change is always consistent, but its MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
133 1 difficult.
2 And, especially when you look at change in an area 3 like Davis-Besse Nuclear Power, where it can affect the 4 people, it can affect the community, and its from the 5 people that live and work, that work there, live within the 6 community, that stress has to be very, very high on them.
7 And I commend the staff of Davis-Besse for doing 8 what theyre doing. And I commend them for the progress 9 that theyve made today, both the staff and the 10 management.
11 Davis-Besse is very important to Ottawa County.
12 There is no question. And I appreciate that Davis-Besse 13 over the years has kept the county very well informed of 14 what was going on at the plant. And the NRC has been very 15 helpful in keeping us informed of whats been going on 16 during this oversight review.
17 I also would like to commend Davis-Besse for 18 allowing us the opportunity to have representation on their 19 Restart Overview Panel by allowing us to have Jere Witt sit 20 on that panel. Its been very, very helpful to us.
21 One thing we know is that our expectations are that 22 that plant must be operated with safety as priority one.
23 We heard that today from Mr. Myers. We heard that at 24 previous meetings. And I really believe that there is a 25 definite commitment from management and employees at MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
134 1 Davis-Besse that priority one is safety, priority one will 2 be safety and that priority one safety will build again the 3 confidence that weve had in the past of Davis-Besse.
4 We lost some of that confidence. Were gaining it 5 back every meeting, every meeting, every meeting. Today, 6 my confidence gained more than it did the last month. And 7 I think next month it will gain even more, because were 8 seeing a move toward restart. And we know how important 9 that is.
10 Why is it important? Think of the contributions 11 that Davis-Besse has made to this county. We just went 12 through a tornado. Because of the Davis-Besse siren, we 13 were able to warn the people. And, although we lost a lot 14 of property, we lost no life and we had no serious harm to 15 anyone. And that was, one of the reasons were the people 16 were able to be notified. Why were they able to be 17 notified? Because of the siren system for Davis-Besse.
18 We also were able to expand that siren system 19 outside of the ten miles going around Davis-Besse, and to 20 the rest of the county, thanks to the help of Reggie 21 Strauss, one of the employees of Davis-Besse. We were able 22 to get those, and we know there is a hundred percent 23 coverage of every home in the county. We could not have 24 done that without the quality of people that are, were 25 presented to us through Davis-Besse.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
135 1 One of our, one of our members ran into an 2 individual that worked at Davis-Besse, who informed them 3 that Davis-Besse allowed them off work to work with the Red 4 Cross during this last tornado. Most industries wouldnt 5 do that.
6 Our funding for our EMA through Davis-Besse has 7 allowed us to have training for things that we have to live 8 with on Davis-Besse because of where we are. Things like 9 floods, many of the other natural disasters. Through the 10 Davis-Besse training, we have been able to handle those 11 disasters much better than we would without Davis-Besse.
12 Of course Davis-Besse is our largest employer. Not 13 only does it provides jobs for our people, it provides 14 taxes for our government to run and it also provides 15 business opportunities for the other businesses in the 16 county.
17 One of the examples that nobody thinks about is, 18 small things like funding the radio system for our law 19 enforcement and our fire and our EMS. This is being done 20 by Davis-Besse. And theyre not tooting their horn.
21 Theyre not going out bragging about it. And there is so 22 many other things like this, that we could go on for hours, 23 but I dont have the time and Im sure that everybody else 24 is as hungry as I am.
25 So, what I would like to do is say, what do we get MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
136 1 if we dont start Davis-Besse? We get a mortar and brick 2 building that contains radioactive material, and thats 3 good for no one. If we restart Davis-Besse with priority, 4 safety as priority number one, we get jobs, we get dollars, 5 we get a well run plant, we get growth in this county, we 6 just get everything that we need thats positive.
7 Thats where we need to go. Thats where I think 8 were headed, and I commend you all for getting us to this 9 point. Thank you.
10 MR. GROBE: Thank you, Carl.
11 The charts over on the wall describe hardware and 12 software issues, program issues, but I thought Bill Dean on 13 my left asked an excellent question, and that is that we 14 need to get a little more into the issues that got 15 Davis-Besse into the situation they were in; and that is 16 the cultural issues.
17 We heard a little bit today about the cultural 18 changes that are going on in Operations, and we ask that 19 that be expanded on in our next meeting, and thats good.
20 And Bill asked that we get some additional information on 21 the Safety Culture, Safety Conscious Work Environment, any 22 performance indicators that the company is using. And 23 there is several of them, as well as we had talked 24 previously about safety culture, I believe it was the 25 meeting at the Davis-Besse Administration Building.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
137 1 And Bill Pearce indicated that they had planned an 2 additional survey of the staff to, to evaluate the 3 attitudes and views of the staff. And in meetings last 4 evening with Lew, I understand that FirstEnergy is planning 5 a little bit broader assessment concept of Safety Culture 6 and Safety Conscious Work Environment. And, that will be 7 on our agenda for next month also.
8 Carl indicated that Davis-Besse folks may have lost 9 some peoples confidence in their performance that led up 10 to the discovery last March. He was generous in not 11 focusing too much of his comments on the NRC. The NRC I 12 think also lost some public confidence. And, I hope each 13 of you thats been able to attend these meetings has been 14 able to see how we do our job and get a better perspective 15 and understand the efforts, the self-assessment efforts 16 that were going through.
17 Last month, Art Howell, who is my counterpart in 18 Region IV in Texas, presented our own self-assessment and 19 corrective actions were taken. There will be a commission 20 meeting I believe sometime in January where the 21 commissioners are going to hear the results of that 22 self-assessment, what corrective actions were implementing 23 to improve our performance.
24 Are there any other local elected officials or 25 representatives of elected officials that want to come to MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
138 1 the microphone? Yes, sir?
2 MR. OPFER: Good afternoon. I 3 appreciate the opportunity to testify today. My name is 4 Darrell Opfer. For ten years, I was a County Commissioner 5 during what I call the middle period at Davis-Besse. For 6 nine years, I was a State Representative, and the point 7 person of my caucus on the discussion and eventual adoption 8 of deregulation. Currently, Ive been for two and a half 9 years the Director of the Ottawa County Improvement 10 Corporation, which is the Economic Development Agency for 11 Ottawa County and its various subdivisions.
12 A couple of comments that I would like to make today 13 with regard to the importance of Davis-Besse to our 14 community. And I do this, because when I was in the 15 Legislature, a number of my fellow Legislators found it 16 difficult to understand why I was supportive of nuclear 17 power, and the Davis-Besse Plant in particular.
18 One of the things that you need to understand is 19 that within a few miles of where youre sitting, actually a 20 few thousand feet, Ottawa County for a number of years had 21 a major employer; and that was the Erie Ordinance Depot and 22 the Erie Army Depot which employed thousands of people and 23 brought thousands into the county during, especially during 24 and after World War II. That no longer exists, and were 25 still struggling to try to increase the amount of MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
139 1 employment at that site to a portion of what we previously 2 had.
3 Next door, we have the Uniroyal building, which used 4 to have four to five hundred employees. Thats now sitting 5 vacant. We had the Standard Products in Port Clinton, 6 which had four to five hundred. Now vacant. We had the 7 Celotex Quarry, which closed up last year, 150 employees.
8 Last Friday, the Metaldyne Company, which is in the Erie 9 Industrial Park closed, laying off approximately 80 to a 10 hundred people.
11 This county has been consistently declared by the 12 State of Ohio and the federal government to be a labor 13 surplus county, entitling us to certain benefits in terms 14 of tax credits and so on, but nevertheless, we are one of 15 the few counties in the State of Ohio outside of Appalachia 16 to be considered a labor surplus county.
17 Besides being the major employer in Ottawa County, 18 one of the things that is fairly easy to understand is the 19 taxes that the Davis-Besse pays to the school, the 20 township, the county, and also we shouldnt forget the 21 State of Ohio. It is also a major attraction of folks to 22 utilize our seasonal or particularly especially when they 23 have the, refueling in the nonsummer season, attracting 24 people to utilize our hotels, motels, restaurants and other 25 facilities.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
140 1 It has, Carl has mentioned our EMA. It also 2 provided, when I was County Commissioner, a facility in the 3 courthouse, which although its not the highest cost 4 facility, it certainly represents an excellent facility 5 that does us proud, not only with regard to Davis-Besse, 6 with floods and tornados as well.
7 The radio system was mentioned. It was not 8 mentioned that we, we have some roads in the area that 9 because of flooding were built up by Davis-Besse, so that 10 employees and emergency personnel could get to and from the 11 plant, and the area.
12 It has not been mentioned that Davis-Besse has 13 provided a great deal of environmental support for the 14 area. That the wildlife is important to our area as a 15 contributor of habitat to our bird migrations, the eagles 16 and so on. This county relies very heavily upon the 17 wildlife, the other things to bring folks in.
18 One of the concerns that some of my fellow 19 Legislators had on occasion was, well, you know, why dont 20 you go to wind power, why dont you go to coal, and so on.
21 Im not sure how many acres are in Ottawa County, but the 22 estimate is that it would take 140,000 acres of windmills 23 to replace Davis-Besse. And Im not sure that we have 24 that, that much acreage to spare in Ottawa County.
25 The obvious concern about coal is the other MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
141 1 pollutants that it produces, and were spending 2 considerable time, energy and expense now to try to 3 mitigate that.
4 Im also concerned about the cost of electricity and 5 the capacity of our electric generation for the future.
6 When I was in the Legislature, we were very careful not to 7 duplicate California and its problems, which we had 8 anticipated, but I am concerned about the year 2006, which 9 will be the end of the market phase of deregulation in this 10 area, and what this will do when we go to the marketplace 11 and have true competition, as to what will be the price of 12 electricity and whether there will be adequate supplies to 13 take care of our needs.
14 Some of my fellow Legislators thought that gas 15 peaking plants were the solution. They are not a long-term 16 solution. The use of gas during already high consumption 17 periods concerns me, especially since my gas bill is five 18 times what my electric bill is, and we havent had any 19 peaking plants put on line in the area yet.
20 Im also concerned and wondering about the national 21 emergency. Those who oppose nuclear power constantly talk 22 about terrorists attacking a nuclear power station. My 23 concern after knowing the type of security that there is at 24 the Davis-Besse Plant is not about terrorist activities 25 there, as much as what happens if there is a terrorist MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
142 1 activity in one of our surrounding cities, and do we have 2 the transmission line or transmission capability to provide 3 electricity in that kind of situation.
4 My concern is that -- and I do want to commend the 5 NRC, commend FirstEnergy, and other folks that are working 6 on this particular issue. My concern is that we not get 7 into a finger pointing issue, or an argument of a did too 8 or did not, and that the plant closure not be delayed as a 9 result of that type of activity.
10 I followed the progress of the various committees, 11 and am certainly impressed with what has happened.
12 A question that I have is, we have a number of local 13 business people and political leaders who were not able to 14 be here today. For example, the Mayor of Port Clinton 15 called and said that he had a council meeting this 16 evening. My question is, can the meeting feedback form be 17 used by folks to make comments to the NRC without 18 necessarily being present at the meeting?
19 MR. GROBE: Absolutely.
20 Thank you. Youre an excellent segue. In addition to 21 these cards, if you have a comment, we also have meeting 22 feedback forms. You dont even have to put a stamp on 23 them. Just fill them out and send them back to us and they 24 get right back to my desk.
25 MR. OPFER: Thank you.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
143 1 MR. GROBE: As well as a 2 number of other people.
3 MR. OPFER: I appreciate that, 4 Jack, and I do have some emails, copies of emails that Ive 5 received from local business and political leaders, and 6 will present those this evening, if that is acceptable.
7 MR. GROBE: That would be 8 very good. Thank you.
9 MR. OPFER: Thank you.
10 MS. LIPA: The other thing I 11 would like to offer too, Jack, is on the back page of the 12 NRC newsletter is the email address and phone numbers and 13 names of our Public Affairs Officer. So, you can also 14 email questions to us at this email address on the back 15 page.
16 MR. GROBE: Very good. Are 17 there any other local elected officials or representatives 18 that are here this afternoon?
19 I would now like to open the floor to any local 20 residents, members of the public from the local area. The 21 rest of you are just dedicated listeners?
22 Yes, maam.
23 MS. LINCOLN: My name is Connie 24 Lincoln and Im a contractor at Davis-Besse. And I have a 25 question. I think what, Ive gone to all the hearings and MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
144 1 heard different things and you clearly see today that were 2 really on the road to recovery, and people are feeling 3 pretty enthusiastic, feeling good about where we are. You 4 can see the curves are turning down. Were getting the 5 work done. So, were sort of at a pivotal point.
6 So, I think about it, and I think in your shoes, you 7 have the keys to the plant. And you also are taking a look 8 at it, hopefully from a bigger look and a strategic 9 viewpoint on what has happened.
10 So, in sitting back and looking at it from the 11 bigger picture, what I ask you is what havent you heard 12 that you want to hear from Davis-Besse, and is there any 13 showstoppers that you see that we need to be thinking 14 about?
15 MR. GROBE: Excellent 16 questions. Ill make a couple of comments and Ill let 17 Bill think and see if he has some thoughts that he wants to 18 add.
19 First off, we dont have the keys to the plant. Lew 20 Myers has the keys to the plant. And theyve always been 21 with him.
22 Were observing, were your representatives, making 23 sure when this plant restarts, it can restart safely, and 24 also that safe operation could be sustained for the long 25 run.
MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
145 1 I think there is two areas that are of continuing 2 concern, but before I say that, let me step back. The 3 tenor of the meeting and nature of the comments this 4 evening has been interesting to me, because I havent seen 5 a whole lot of difference in this meeting than Ive seen 6 over the last several meetings. Each meeting there has 7 been steady progress. Each meeting there has been 8 demonstration of what I call the right stuff, over the last 9 three or four months.
10 Just because those curves have peaked. Those of you 11 who go over and study those curves closely will notice that 12 some of those curves feed other curves, so as one goes down 13 the other goes up. Thats good news. It means discovery 14 is beginning to come to an end and resources can be shifted 15 to fixing the problems that have been identified.
16 There is still a substantial amount of work to be 17 done. Just bulk work. Thats one area of focus that I 18 have.
19 Second area of focus is the design issues. Thats 20 an important outstanding question. Discovery is not done 21 in that area.
22 And the third area is the one that Bill mentioned 23 earlier, and thats the Safety Culture and Safety Conscious 24 Work Environment at the plant. It wasnt any of these 25 hardware issues that caused the head to corrode for four to MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
146 1 six years and not be identified. The indicators were 2 clear. It was the safety culture of the plant that caused 3 that to happen. And we need to make sure that we get our 4 arms firmly around understanding FirstEnergys view of that 5 safety culture and how its been changed.
6 There is a lot of expertise out there that can 7 provide assistance in measuring the safety culture. And 8 lots of times people think that thats not something you 9 can measure because its, its not, as most of us engineers 10 relate to, its not something I can put a calculator on or 11 use a micrometer on or anything like that, but there are 12 indicators that you can develop and monitor safety 13 performance.
14 So, those are my thoughts.
15 Did you have anything you wanted to add?
16 MR. DEAN: Yeah, what I 17 wanted to add, two things I guess. One is, plants that 18 find themselves in this situation where theyre in an 19 extended outage due to notable performance issues and a 20 significant type of event that occurred here, there is a 21 definitive life cycle.
22 Both Jack and I have had experience with other 23 plants that have gone through similar sort of evolutions.
24 And I dont disagree with you. I think I made the point 25 during the presentation, that looking at those curves, that MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
147 1 is a milestone along the way. But I think as you heard 2 Jack say, there is a lot of work that needs to be done.
3 First of all, you know, we have to get a sense for, 4 you know, you asked, what are the things we need to see.
5 Okay. Weve got to get a sense for, in toto, what is the 6 significance of the issues that are on the plate now in 7 terms of, you know, is there a collective significance to 8 that and what has to be done to ameliorate that collective 9 significance, so we have a comfort level that the plant has 10 addressed those issues at least from a hardware perspective 11 that support safe restart.
12 I applaud the Licensee for taking on some mobile 13 modifications and, that are not associated with the vessel 14 head degradation. I think you heard Lew talk about some 15 today. We talked about others in the past, you know. And 16 so thats the type of indications that we want to see that 17 maybe get towards more the safety culture. Okay. What is 18 the approach that the plant is going to take relative to 19 the application of its resources, the use of its capital 20 investments, in terms of making the plant safe or making it 21 robust and making it capable of being able to operate on an 22 ongoing basis safely.
23 Okay. Those are the things, the demonstrations we 24 have to see. We are only seeing, what have they done to 25 identify issues. Now we have to see them resolve these MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
148 1 issues, weve got to see them more importantly resolve 2 those issues related to, I want to get this place, in its 3 place to begin with, which gets to the safety culture 4 issue.
5 And thats going to be a challenge area. Its going 6 to take some sort of qualitative assessment. And, to be 7 honest with you, those issues are not going to be resolved 8 if and when the plant restarts. Okay. Those are going to 9 be long term issues that going to need to be addressed and 10 monitored for a period of time.
11 MS. LINCOLN: Thanks.
12 MR. GROBE: Okay, thank you 13 very much. Excellent question.
14 Floor is open. Anyone here thats not a local 15 resident or worker at the plant that has a question or 16 comment?
17 MR. DEAN: We have another 18 floor show at 7.
19 MR. GROBE: I dont know if 20 you heard that. Bill said, we have another floor show at 21 7. And we do. Those of you that have additional questions 22 that you think of over dinner are welcome back at 7:00.
23 I just want to make one final observation. As Bill 24 indicated, he was associated with the Millstone facility 25 and the restart effort there, and Ive been associated with MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
149 1 a number of restart efforts. And most of those took 2 years.
3 And, one of the differences that I see at 4 Davis-Besse is that they brought in a strong management 5 team with a good focus. And that doesnt solve the 6 problem, but that allows the problem to be, problem 7 resolution to begin. And, that was done very early on.
8 Were eight months into this, nine months into this, 9 something like that. And, as I said, youve seen steady 10 progress over the last several months. I think thats 11 noble. Restart is not going to be next month. But there 12 is steady progress being made, and I guess Ill close with 13 that.
14 Thank you very much.
15 (Off the record.)
16 - - -
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO
150 1 CERTIFICATE 2 I, Marie B. Fresch, Registered Merit Reporter and 3 Notary Public in and for the State of Ohio, duly 4 commissioned and qualified therein, do hereby certify that 5 the foregoing is a true and correct transcript of the 6 proceedings as taken by me and that I was present during 7 all of said proceedings.
8 IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and 9 affixed my seal of office at Norwalk, Ohio, on this 16th 10 day of December, 2002.
11 12 13 14 Marie B. Fresch, RMR 15 NOTARY PUBLIC, STATE OF OHIO 16 My Commission Expires 10-9-03.
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 MARIE B. FRESCH & ASSOCIATES 1-800-669-DEPO