ML19309G286
| ML19309G286 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Crane  |
| Issue date: | 04/06/1979 |
| From: | Zewe B METROPOLITAN EDISON CO. |
| To: | |
| Shared Package | |
| ML19309G281 | List: |
| References | |
| TASK-TF, TASK-TMR NUDOCS 8005050512 | |
| Download: ML19309G286 (15) | |
Text
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WA V4I STAFF INTERVIEW
.c r/77 r
Bill Zewe 1015 Hrs. April 6,1979 Conducted By:
GPUSC Investigation Team ZEWE:
This, I believe, is the fourth time I've been taped.
I have been taped with GPU before with Long and Repoert and also I was interviewed with the NRC individually, a man who inte views a group and the group session I thought was much better than tha rest of them because we were all doing different things and looking at things a little bit differently and that at the time that interview more than anything else helped us to bring it more into a time perspective because personally, I was very far off in the times. Times were much longer and I felt that they were much shorter.
l As it ended up, we sort of got a better perspective of what times these things happen more so than what we had at the beginning.
Even individually, we were all fairly close to the times that we thought that we had and once we got together we seen that the times were quite a bit different and judged on a few of the graphs and things that we have seen, we have noticed that the times there were a lot different than what we have previously imagined.
TEM:
We are finding out also in reviewing the strip charts and whatnot, the things like looking at the original interviews, the times didn't. jive with what the real report was doing.
.!WE :
Probably the time that we compressed the most as a group were the time of the emergency feed actuation.
I could have sworn that we had an emergency feed gcing within 2 minutes and we actually had it going and everything that we seen was more like 8 minute periods, and I still can't believe that but it's true, because it has to be true and plus other people entered the control room at about the 6 minute point and they remembered that we didn't have it on at that point, so that was one area in particular that it just seemed like that it could have been that long.
TEM:
Could you tell me what times to your recollection the atmospheric dump valves l
were opened?
l ZEWE:
I purposely had the atmospheric valves opened up but it was quite sometime.
It was sometime just before we broke vacuum.
I went down to two cire water pumps which automatically forces the turbine bypass valve controls to shift to the atmospheric dumps so I did that on purpose on only the A side, because I had what I thought at the time was a confirmed leak at the B steam generator, the secondary side, and I didn't want that activity to be discharged into kg the atmosphere, but we had lost steam from the aux boilers from Unit 1 he"e ing the seals to the Unit 2 turbine, and I had a choice either of degrading that or going to the atmospherics and I was reasonably sure that the A gen-(
erator was still intact.
I didn't have any reason to believe any problems
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from the A so we did get onto two cire water pumps and then go into the at-l mospheric dumps, the A valve only, until we regained the boilers from Unit 1 I
and then we re-established seals for the Unit 2 turbine, and then we went back onto the turbine bypass valves.
We did break vacuum and it took us a considerable amount of time to get steam back from Unit 1 and draw a vacuum again.
We did have vacuum off completely for quite some time, and that would probably approach well over an hour or two hours, but we did shut the
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turbine bypass valve going to the atmospheric sometime before we re-established vacuum and came back to the condenser but I'm not sure the time frame there.
TEM:
Could you put it into perspective with respects to running the 2B reactor coolant pump and getting some of the radiation alarms and breaking vacuum and dumping through the atmospheric.
ZEWE:
I doubt it.
As close as I can remember somewhere around 6:30 or so, we decided to feed the B steam generator and also to try and start a reactor coolant pump.
We did these rather closely together as I remember, we fed the steam generator and shortly thereafter we tried to start any coolant pump that we could. We first tried the 1A, IB, 2A pumps and we were not able to get them to run, so finally we got the 2B I believe to run but it only drew about 100 amps. We were not sure that if the purg was actually running or not, so we went and checked the amperage of the areaker, and it read just under 100 amps, which was what we read up in the control rocn.
TEM:
Was the B steam generator isolated before we ran the coolant pumps?
ZEi.'E :
Yes, as far as I know.
We had it isolated up until that time just before we started the coolant pumps.
But we did.unisolate B as far as feeding it goes, just before we started the coolant pumps of which 2B was the only one that we were successful in getting to run.
Shortly thereafter is when we really had the first signs that we had a problem with radiation levels. The off gas condenser monitor came into alarm and then we started to see all the alams for the auxiliary buildi~ngs, and the fuel handling buildings, everywhere then I
it started to come in at once.
Prior to that the only real alarms that we had that I can remember, and I looked at it pretty hard, was the intermed'. ate 1etdown coolers. They were in high alarm fairly early after the accident, but they had a very low setpoint and they were very susceptible to background, they are right down by the RB sump themselves. So I did not figure that that was too much of a problem because they are usually in alert, in high alert, during normal operations. We have proven that as we escalate power background comes up on these monitors. That alarm came in long before we stopped the four RCP's.
l TEM:
Around the time you started the 2B pump, were the reactor coolant sump pumps running?
ZET.'E :
No.
It was approximately 45 minutes after we tripped, the operator informed i
me that the high sump alams were in for the reactor building. So I had the control room operator contact the aux operator in primary side to turn off the reactor building sump pumps.
So I turned them off and at that point it was i
probably quarter to five in the morning.
Somewhere before 5:00, but they had been on previously to that because the alarm that we got up in the' control toom is to keep the pump running up on the computer.
TEM:
We know that you let down on the leg would that have given you the alarm?
j We're trying to figure out why you got an alam in the auxiliary building.
ZEWE:
I don't know. We did confim later on in the next day that the operator did turn off both sump pumps so they weren't in automatic start, they were off.
I would have to assume that nobody returned them to normal or started them prior to that.
I don't know that would be the case.
l 3-f O'CONNOR:
Would the computer '. ave printed that out if they did?
- WE
' If the pumps would har s come back on the computer should have picked that up, and I'm not sure if the status on the computer is true or net in that respect.
O'CONNOR: The computer lost about an hour or so of time, it wr ; t.urned off or out of commission or something.
ZEWE:
I don't know that.
TEAM:
After they were shut off, I could find no other reactor building sump pump alarms on through the rest of the day either on or off.
It went off at 38 minutes.
ZEWE:
That's what I thought because he said that it was approximately 45 'dnutes after the trip that he turned it off so we said it was probably quarter to five o' clock, so 38 is probably in the bellpark.
TEAM:
Wat time did the aux building have radiation alarms?
ZEWE:
Not until just before we declared.aite emergency at ten to seven.
So I'm saying that they started the come in somewhere between like twenty to seven and ten to seven.
Long after we already had the sump pumps off. We thought that maybe we had gotten water in somewhere from the letdown system. The letdown relief valve goes into the miscellaneous waste holdup tanks, and that tank, as far as I know, never got higher than 7.4 feet, so it never over-
,( x flowed. So there are other reliefs like on the makeup tank that thet one goes into the bleed tanks, but there are some down stream of makeup pumps themselves which go directly to the floor One of those could have been blowing or something else that I have not determined yet.
But I felt sure than and now until somebody could prove me that somebody turned on these sump pumps, plus the sump pumps should have been lined out to the miscellahecus holdup tankg, and we never overflowed it to my knowledge. You can put it into the sump 81ut it should have been lined up to the miscellaneous waste holdup tank.
TEAM:
Which tank did overflow? How did we get the water on the floor?
ZEWE:
Aux building sump and the aux building sump tank.
TEAM:
Where did that water come from?
IEWE:
That's what I don't know.
I-TEAM:
Wherever that water came from that's the same place that the airborne activity came from, and I'm just not sure where the source is.
IEL'E :
I don' t know at this time. The operator, after he turned off the sump pumps he had been in the basement of the aux building after that.
I'm talking about probably 45 minutes to an hour after that time he was still in the aux building and the drains were not backed up to where we had found them after we had all the alarms.
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TEM:
Is this when Terry D. went down there?
flu $
' EWE:
He was there and also Don Miller was there because I/sent him down to the valve alley to check the pressuri:er level there by'NtPr-17.
Both these valves are in the basement there and there was no water coming out of the floor drains at that point, and it looks like all the water was concentrated around the floor drains and the water just came from the floor drains them-selves, but where it was from I don't know at this time. Maybe somebody else does, but I haven't found that out yet.
O'CONNOR:
Where do the reactor drain tank pumps pump to?
IEWE:
We direct that to the bleed tank.
O'CONNOR: Do they pump automatically?
ZEWE:
No.
We manually do that on high level, manually throttle a valve and it is put into the bleed tanks, and we were not doing that to my knowledge at all.
TEM:
Were you letting down most of the time?
ZEWE:
Yes we were. We were trying to determine why the pressuri:er was going up so rapidly.
I had my shift foreman assigned to makeup system in the pres-suri:er level.
I let him and the control room op.erator try to handle that
- while I was trying to work with emergency feed; hot well level an_d tryingjntMd d
to isolate a leak in the turbine building plus I had heated tver the other shift. supervisors that were onsite, Ken Bryan to the control room. So with my foreman there and the control room operator plus Ken and the other control v
room operators, I was trying to get some.of the other things wrapped up.
s We had lost the feed pumps and the one feed pump didn't have its turning gear on it and I diverted alot of my attention to.those items while they were looking at the primary plant.
I did not know why the pressuri:er level was indicating so high or why the pressure was holding low, but we seemed to be fairly stable in all other indications, and I. left the control room probably 15 minutes after it happened to go down and try to recover conden-sate to reject from the hotwell.
We were flooding out the hotwell. We had leaks down by the condensate pumps and so forth and I had gone down there to,
try and get the bypas: around polishers open and find out some other details and when I got back to the control room, and I'm not sure how long that I was gone, we were joined by George Kunder, whom we had called right after it tripped. George was there then within about 20 minutes after we tripped.
With George and Ken and Fred and Ed and Craig in there, I was still trying to wrap up some other things. We just were trying to put our heads together to come up with the weird indications ;; hat we had. The high le"31, and it really didn't dawn on me or anyone else at that point, that we had really transferred that bubble. We were just trying to ecme up with alternatives and the problems in checking out our pressuri:er levels on the computer, compensated, uncompensated, local and remote compensated levels, and our reactor coolant system temperature than looked real good to us at that point.
We didn't really have a lot of problems until we began to get some flow oscilations on the reactor coolant pumps. George and I agreed that we were close to the net positive suction head of the pumps plus the fuel pin com-pression limit.
Then we secured the B coolant pumps, and then it was probably 20 minutes or so later that we tried to go on natural circulation and secure the last two pumps and fed up the A steam generator up to about 85-90%.
- l.,
O O
TEAM:
When did you take the sample of cooling system for boron?
j, EWE:
I'm not sure of the exact time, but as soon as we tripped, we had informed l
the lab that we tripped and they would have to start to take samples.
The first sample result that I got back was about 750 ppm boron. _ This didn't ygzg, make any sense to me at all.
I said that it had to be longlecause we Yad been on high pressure ejection from the BWST for awhile, and the boron con-i centration had been over a thousand to begin with.
So then they resampled end they came up with 400.
TEAM:
What time does that event related to when they came into 400? Do you think of any other things that were more around that time?
ZEWE:
Not really.
I'm not sure of their exact sample time.
i TEAM:
Were all the cooling pumps off?
IE!.'E :
Pnen I finally got those samples, yes they were.
I was joined in the control room, and I'm not sure on the times, by several other people, Mike Ross, Brian Mehler, Joe Logan and I'm not sure exactly where we were when I got those samples.
I'm sure that our pumps were off.
TEAM:
They were in the control room at that time?
ZEWE:
Oh yes, the people that were there other than the normal sh'ift, Ken Bryan was there, probably 5 or 6 minutes after it happened, and George was there within 20 minutes and then Mike Ross and Brian Mehler were there at probably s
( r-less than an hour at the most when they were there. Joe Logan and several
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other people showed up at varying times and I'm not sure.
TEAM:
Did you ever determine what was the reason for the bad boron analysis?
ZEWE:
I think that we were actually flashing in the letdown line and it was evaporating the letdown sample, and leaving the baron behind.
I think that's what it ultimately was.
TEAM:
Do you know when you shut RCRV 2?
ZEWE:
I had isolated the B steam generator.first of all because I had some indications that I had a steam leak off of it, because the pressure in the B steam gen-erator was about 300 psi less than A, and we had a building pressure of somewhere around 2 psi. So I went and isolated the B steam generator and the. pressure stopped going up and it started to come down on the RB pressure, so I thought, Oh, that was it.
But then a short time later we shut RCV 2 the block for the electromatic and pressure took a market drop right there.
That would be timed on the building pressure recorder but I'm not sure of the exact time.
TEAM:
You saw a unique change in the reactor building recorder?
- EWE:
Right away.
I did see a change when we isolated the B steam generator but not near of the magnitude as when we shut RCV 2.
..AM:
Would that be about 6:15?
IEWE:
It could have been.
Yes. We had checked the relief valve discha7
- tempera-l
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' tures very early, as soon as Ken Bryan got Unit 1.
I asked him to look over the computer alarm to help us out and then had him check the discharge tempera-tures of the relief valves, and he said you know the RCRV 2 is a little 0
high, about 30 higher. We knew that it had lifted so we felt that it was still cooling down, so that's why I went off the RCRV 2 problem and back on something else.
I felt from that that it was alright.
I should have went back to it, but I didn't until Brian Mehler and Mike Ross was there, and Brian was looking over the computer again and he said, "it was a little high, well let's try to isolate it".
All it was then was about 2280 or something 0
like that, and they had been running around 190 and knowing that it had lifted was the reason we had the higher temperatures, I didn't see that that was such a problem. So we didn't go back to it at that point really not knowing for sure but saying, let's isolate it and see, and that was the problem.
TEAM:
What happened then, did you push the high pressure injection pumps on after you isolated RCRV 2?
ZEWE:
We had partial high prmare injection most of the time. We had high pressure injection within you xnow of a couple of minutes of the problem, a complete actuation, we bypassed and then I told my foreman to try to establish normal pressuri:ing levels and he went and was throttling back on 16 valves and he turned off the makeup pumps. We went on one makeup pump and tried to establish that, and that's when I left to go over to help with the emergency feed, because it was just about that time that the operator said that we were still in 10 inches, and at first, he did not have full open indication on the 11 valves.
I told him to take manual control and open them up all the way be-cause it looks like we were not feeding.
Socc as he had full open indications on those, we looked and he still didn't seem like he was feeding, so then we. checked real quick and found the 12's were shut. He found them just as I walked over to where they were controlling the pressuri:er again and he yelled, "the 12's are shut", and I said, "why did you shut the 12", he said, "no they were shut", they were not opened up, so we opened them up right away.
I was with him for awhile tr/irg to' establish a good level at about 30 inches, which we had considerable problems trying to maintain level because, B steam generator wanted to go high on us.
It seemed harder to control it, so somewhere down the line, we ended up cycling the EFV 5's, the header isolation valves up-stream to control flow going to these generators.
Even with 11B and 12B shut, l
the B steam generator is still increasing.
TEAM:
Was this happening about 30 minutes after the trip.
ZEWE:
I would think so, yes. As far as I can remember, yes.
TEAM:
Once you come up to pressure then were you starting to worry that you over-pressuri:ed?
ZEWE:
We were watching it closely at that point to make sure that we did have some controlled pressure at that point.
I really wasn't worried about overpres-suri:ing at that point, I was just glad that we had some pressure back. We went through a couple evolutions, one we tried to come up and compress the system up, and then after that then we thought to come down and try to float the core flood tanks on the reactor coolant system so that we opened up and sprayed down all that we could, to try to get down to get the core flood tanks in and also get down low enough in pressure to go on decay removal.
But were
3 o
o not able to get down any less than about 410 or 420 psi or so, so we weren't able to do that so we sat there for some time and then we decided to just inject again and try to go back up and compress the bubble again and try to rerun the reactor coolant pump at that point. Now we are talking about the early afternoon, I'd say about 3:00 PM.
TEAM:
Were you lifting atmospheric dumps at that time? About 12:30 is when they stopped, and that's when Gary Miller and all had to go meet with the Governor.
ZEWE:
We had it opened only when we broke vacuum and for a short time after than then we shut them, even though we did have them vacuum, we didn't open them again until we re-established vacuum again. Again only the A side was ever affected. We never unisolated B again after we had unisolated it to feed it just before we started the pump, and we had unisolated it to feed it just before we started the pump, and we had all the alarms and I reisolated B as soon as we had the problem. The B stayed isolated I think until right now.
It was still isolated just as we left.
So it was unisolated for really a short period of time whenever we had the off gas monitor. We went and iso-lated it and didn't use it since then, neither the atmospheric dump nor the turbine bypass dump.
TEAM:
The off gas monitor came in before you ran the reactor coolant pumps?'
ZEWE:
No, it seemed like we fed the generator and started that 23 pump, shortly there-after, after we did both of.those, the alarms all came in, we had off the pump. The pump was only running for 15 minutes at the most, but as soon as i/
we got the alarms, we went and isolated the a steam generator again and we already had the coolant pump off at that time, but it was after we started the pump t' at we had 'the problems.
I TEAM:
So you rai the B stea~. generator isolated for awhile then you unisolated it and fed it, and started the B pump and that time steamed off the steam generator to the condenser.
ZEWE:
Yes. We still had vacuum control for quite sometime after that. We were able to run with one aux boiler while trying to fix the other one up and finally we lost them both, and our primary had been supplying our turbine with sealing steam. We were down cool enough now to where we were losing that because our pressure in the steam generators was very low. A was down very low, B was about 350 psi or so.
TEAM:
That's why I was wondering why you had the A atmospheric dump open when the steam generator pressure was low.
It is a manual valve?
ZEWE:
We can operate it from the control room at the Bailley station.
TEAM:
For the first hour or so was there any reason for not going on natural circula-tion.
IEi!E:
No, not really, as long as we had coolant pump flow, I really did not think to go on natural circulation.
.EAM:
When did you notice the source range and counts increase?
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- EWE:
I noticed that after all the pumps were off, and then since we seen that we started to inject boric acid into it and I believe then is when we started to get the sample back about the 700 ppm boron.
Because it confused me at the time. We had j.ust done a shutdown margin cal'culation and they said that they were 6% shutdown. The count began to come up and I knew John Flint would stay at that point too, and the boron samples were coming back low, and I said "it's real", the counts are increasing, the boron is low, the shutdown margin isn't what it is so we started to inject boric acid in it. We secured the pumps somewhere around 5:45 or so.
At that point, we had quite a few people in the control room there, and I remember John Flint was there at that point, I believe. We had several people there but I just didn't understand why the boron was so low, we had been on high pressure injection, we were 60%
shutdown, but John said the explanation of it, I guess that's about what happened.
TEAM:
Just try to establish whether it occurred before or after the pump stopped.
IEWE:
I'm almost positive it was after the pump stopped. Also we noticed a rapid change in the source range and intermediate range levels whenever we started the 2B pump. The counts were going up and as soon as it started it came right down.
TEAM:
At 4 o' clock when this started, was there any switching going on, were they going to try and shift the condensate pump? Was the dispatcher, does he normally do something at 4:00 o' clock, it seems strange that at exactly 4:00 o' clock this whole mess started and that we lose so many things in such a short period of time, condensate pump, feed pump, turbine, and the differ-ential trip and everything all happened within the period of just a second, and it usually doesn't on a loss of feed trip.
ZEWE:
At that point as far as the electrical goes, it is normal.
Running normal equipment. Only real problem that we had was resin stuck in the line between the #7, polisher and the receiving tank. We had tried to unclog that from about 4 PM the previous shift. That was like 12 hours1.388889e-4 days <br />0.00333 hours <br />1.984127e-5 weeks <br />4.566e-6 months <br /> trying to free up resin from that #7 polisher.
TEAM:
Were you running on fewer than normal polishers than you normally do?
ZEWE:
No.
TEAM:
Same number?
l 7EUE:
7 polishers with one standby and it was standby 1 that we were transferring t
l out, we already had a charge for it to put back into it, but we couldn't get all the resin out of it, but I don't know.
Why we actually tripped, I felt j
sure at G time after I tried to start the condensate pump in the control ream and couldn't get one started. We reset the breakers and I finally got one to start and then we could not get suction pressure over to the booster pump and the booster pump wouldn't start. We had good discharge pressure from the condensate pumps, so then I said, "well the only thing between them is the polishm", so I tried to open up the bypass valves from up in the control room but it wouldn't come open, and that is when the operator called and said that we had a bad leak on the section COP 2A booster pumps.
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_. _ _ _ _. _ -.~__. __.__ _ _.
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So I went down there, we isolated that leak and I looked at the polishers
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and all the polisher valver were failed shut.
So then I went up, the hand-wheel was off in COV 12 it had fallen off behind the ventilation duct so I sent an operator for a wrench so that we could open it up manually.
Hot-1 wells were out-of-sight high at this point and we could not reject the water.
So when he went for :he wrench I was looking around for another handwheel to use and I found that t.no laying.down behind the duct work so I got up there and opened it partially aad called the contn1 room and had them open up all the way, and then we started to reject the hotwell back to storage tank. At the time that I was out of the control room, I felt that the problem was that the polishers that isolated themselves and it was until several hours later that we received on the computer printout that the condensate pump had tripped first. We were rejecting the hotwell once we had COV 12 open, we took manual control of the reject valve and rejected to the storage tanks.
Up until Friday,.we didn't even overflow a bleed tank.
O'CONNOR:
Somebody mentioned to us that the power to the seal injection pumps for the rad. waste pumps was lost. Could that have caused the water on the floor?
1 ZEWE:
When I came in, I guess it was quarter to four Thursday morning, I looked at.
the bleed tanks, I noticed that the bleed tanks were at a lower level than they were when I had left the night before, and we were still putting water into j
the sump somewhere. Either one of the tanks was leaking, but it looked like all the bleed tanks were showing it.
It had to.be something rather common, so then in a couple of minutes, we figured out, we had lost bus 32A and 42A, at 4 o' clock the afternoon before, on March 28. They were still trying to re-i store it; they had restored partial loads to it and the control room rator t
Ed Fredrick was checking through all the loads off of there and he sa 'i the seal water pumps are off there to.
Probably all the pumps were dra'. ng back through their seals, so then we had an operator go through the aux building and restore the sealing water units, and things like the boric acid pumps and the oil pumps for reactor coolant pumps, aux sump pumps, and aux sump tank pump.
TEM:
What time do you think it was that you started to get water coming up out of the drnin in the Unit 2 aux building?
i EWE:
When I first knew about it it was from the alarms about 0640 or so.
Prior to that point, they had seen a little bit of water collected around the drains, very minimal amount. One of the Rad / Chem techs checked the water with a radiation detector and found minimal activity.
I think that may have been boric acid from the boric acid pump relief valves, and that was before we found a great deal of water on the floor.
TEM:
You shut off the reactor cooling sump pumps at 0438. Why did you do that?
IEWE:
The sump goes up to six feet, whenever we talked to the operator, we asked him what the level was and it was off-scale at 6 ft.
I knew that we were not in good shape as far as primary inventory goes, the aux building sump end sump tank were rather full to begin with, and I did not want to bring over any more water and overflow to the sump.
I knew we could not handle it.
What was in the building, I wanted to keep there.
I knew at this point that we either had the RC drain tank's relief valve open or the rupture disk had blown, but the highest pressure that I had seen in the plant showed about 2360 psi.
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U That's as I had seen on any instrumentation.
CONNOR: Did you say that both the reactor building sump pumps were running when you had this high level?
ZEWE:
They should have, yes.
I don't recall asking if both of them were on or not, but I knew that the sump pumps were on when I said let's go ahead and shut them off.
O'CONNOR:
It would have to be a very substantial leak for one pump not to handle it.
Apparently one pump kicked on and the level continued to go up.
Right?
What is the capacity of one pump?
ZEWE:
If I remember right the aux building pump operating band is only like 117 gallons. We are not talking about a great volume from when the pump starts and s tops. We are talking about just over 100 gallons normally, so to have them both come on isn't really a great deal of volume.
O'CONNOR:
Does that happen periodically?
ZEWE:
Yes, because we know that the RB coolers have a pencil stream condensate water coming out of their drains all the time. This and any other leakage that we have in the building from the seals for the letdown monitors on the inter-mediate side, they leak quite a bit. With all this draining into the sump, periodically the RB sump pumps come on; I'd say once a shift normally just to pump that water down, which is really non-radioactive waste water that goes into the sump.
.TEMI:
I was trying to make something of both pumps running at the same time.
It looks like a big leak there, one pump couldn't handle it so the second one had to turn on.
You say that's routine?
ZENE:
Well normally only one would run but I knew that we had a problem with the RC drain tank it was blowing the water out of the RC tank normally we have about 75 inches of water in there.
TEAM:
What volume would 75" equate to?
ZENE:
Don't know off hand. It's a hori: ental tank, and it lays on its side.
I don't recall the volume, but there's a chm that correlate inches with volume.
TEAM:
Didn't the pumps run a lot longer than you expected?
IEWE:
They normally don't run long but I really don't have a feel for how long is l
nomal.
Really I didn't dwell on the fact that the sump pumps were on for j
so many minutes, I didn't even realize that they were on as long as they i,
were.
I was just going by the fact that the RB sump was full and I knew I
-that they should be transferring water over to the aux building.
I turned it off regardless of how long they were on or how much was in there, until I had room for the water.
'E#t:
There was a remark made that you had an intermittent alarm of an electrical nature before 0400 and you were not certain whether it was spurious or not.
There was a coment made that they couldn't see any problem off the aux transfomer. They couldn't see any affect. Does that ring a bell?
l..
s TEAM:
Do you know of any pressure trip breaking off of one of the waste gas decay tanks?
.iWE:
No, I knew that we did have considerable transfer of waste gas directly to the aux building from some unknown source because everytime that we tried to vent the makeup tank, we would have a pretty good release in the aux building, meaning that either the line was open, a valve was leaking by, or one of the relief lines to the waste gas header was open, The makeup tank was nomal. The makeup tank normally has about 18 to n pounds of hydrogen overpressure in it and we were maintaining that. We weren't venting it at the time. The real problem that we had with the makeup tank was later on when we were trying to degass the reactor coolant system and we couldn't control the pressure in the makeup tank. That was quite sometime after that, which resulted in the release that we had on Friday.
The relief valve between the makeup tank and the makeup pumps opened, and overfilled two out of the three RC bleed tanks before we teminated that. That happened about 7 o' clock in the morning I guess it was on Friday morning.
TEAM:
When did you finally get the hotwell pumped down?
ZEt'E :
Well, we were rejecting pretty heavily before I came up in the control room and I assigned an operator down there to just reject as much as he had to to get level back in the sight glass.
TEAM:
Do you remember that approximate time you lost your heaters in the pressurizer?
ZEWE:
Well, we started to get heater grounds sometime approaching mid morning, but I'm not sure. Whenever we first had the problem and the pressure was lower than I thought it should be, I suspected then that we may have had some problems -
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with our pressurizer heater capacity. We hand blown the reliefs and it had been a problem in the past that whenever the M20 area or the control building area west, gets warm, that we have considerable tripping of the pressuri:er heater breaken, and I felt during that. time period that we had lost some heaters.
I asked an operator to be dispatched down to check out the heater breakers, but as far as the grounds and everything goes, that was considerably later.
I would say mid morning, my best recollection.
TEAM:
You said when you~ dispatched the operator down there, did he report back that you lost heaters breaker at that time?
ZEWE:
As a matter of time, I don't remember him reporting back at all. At that point, I just didn't follow up on it anymore.
I really didn't ask the operator myself, I asked the control room operator to have it done as soon as he had somebody free, and I'm not sure whether he did check it and report to the operator. The operator didn't tell me, I don't remember any details of it, and I really didn't pursue it any further.
I didn't think about it much after that.
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TEAM:
Before the initial trip, were ycu operating three booster pumps and two con-j densate pumps?
l ZEWE:
Three booster pumps, no.
There were two condensate pumps, two booster pumps and two feed pumps.
TEAM:
When the one condensate pump tripped and the two feed pumps tripped, do you i
recall whether the booster pumps also tripped?
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i; ZEWE:
Well, when I first saw that we had a pzeblem, I came out of my office and I looked, I saw that the turbine had tripped and the reactor had tripped.
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I announced the trip to let everybody know to get my shift foreman back L
to the control room, it was just about that time that I reali:ed what caused the turbine trip.
I didn't reali:e that we had lost feed. My one control room operators said that he was trying to get emergency feed on, and I reali:ed that the cause of the turbine trip was loss of feed. When I looked, we didn't have anything running, no condensato pump either one of them, no booster pumps and no feed pumps.
TEAM:
Do you have an idea when that was?
ZEWE:
I'd say just a couple minutes, into it.
Craig yelled out that we had lost all feed, but I hadn't looked at it for maybe two or three minutes later, to verify in fact that everything was off.
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TEAM:
That was then 'about half way to the time that you reali:ed that they still weren't feeding, ZE!.'E :
I really don't know, but I assumed it had tripped when the condensate pumps had tripped on their low suction pressure trip.
Both the booster pumps and the feed pumps have low suction pressure trips.
So I assumed tha: would trip them.
TEAM:
What were the booster pump suction pressure set at?
ZEWE:
They are at about 20 psi. Normally we run with a booster pump suction presspre of 50-60 psi and the suction to the feed pumps at about 400 psi, and the feed
.I pumps trip at about 280 psi they stagger between 275 and 280. A and B aren't exactly at the same point, they are separated by about 15 psi so that one trips sooner.
I wouldn't know why the booster would rcn after the condensate pump was off.
TEAM:
I think the suction pressure stayed up.
ZEWE:
The suction pressure stayed up.
TEAM:
Did you ever have a bang like that on a loss of feedwater pump?.
IEWE:
We have isolated the condensate before while running one condensate pump and one booster pump on feedwater heating; the polishers had isolated themselves.
During one such incident we had a tremendous water hammer when they went shut, the pumps were only running at about 2500 gallon then. The flow rate that we l
had on 3/28/79 was about 16000 or 17000 thousand.
I'm sure that the surge was a lot worse.
I really didn't heer t!.e water hammer.
I did hear what I thought were reliefs going off on the feedwater heaters.
l TEAM:
Ok, back on the steam generators and the emergency feedwater pumps, did you take the steam driven pump off line?
ZEWE:
After we established approximately 30 inches in the steam generators, the opera-tor did secure the steam driven feed pump and one electric driven feed pug, and we were just feeding on one electrical feed pump at that point.
-.EAM:
You indicated that the steam generator atmospherics and turbine bypasses, all opened initially right, and assuming all those safetys were set at the right i
points you probably lifted 6 or 8 safetys on each generator. After you started coming back down you dropped off code safetys and then came back on the atmos-pheric dumps, did any body take control of it manually then?
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,.i ZEWE:
At this point, we should have been just on the turbine bypass valves to the condenser, and we should have been in automatic and controlling at 1010 psi as far as their set point goes.
TEAM:
Were you doing that?
ZENE:
Yes, as far as we know we were in automatic the whole time. Until we began tc isolate the B steam generator, then we changed it.
I TEAM:
When you isolated B, you changed it?
ZEWE:
We isolated the B turbine bypass valve also.
TEAM:
How many times did you attempt to establish natural circulation? Did you feed up the generators to try to establish that?
ZEWE:
As soon as' we tripped the pump and we began to feed up to 50% on the operada range, 21' on the A side only because B was still isolated. We felt that that
, probably would not be enough so we started to feed up A higher since we only had one generator that could be used.
B was still holding level at soma point, and I'm not sure what, but the B steam generator kept on coming up and finally it leveled off at some point.
I'm sure it's on the strip charts.
TEAM:
When you isolate a steam generator, what valves do you close?
ZEWE:
We isolate normal and emergency feed to it, the normal startup valves, the normal feed regulator valves, the block valves, the 14 valves automatically go shut when the startup valves go shut. We isolated the main steam valves, 4's and 7's.
Isolated the turbine bypass valves too".
TEAM:
What did you attribute the B level control problem to earlier, do you have any ide.cas on it?
ZEWE:
Yes, well we had some problem feeding the A from the standpoint that we found that it is a little hard to control.
It seemed like the 11 valve, the auto-matic valves were not controlling level at 30 inches so had them in manual.
We found out that we had to overfeed and underfeed to hold the desired levels that we wanted to hold, and after awhile, we ended up with levels going high on us and we ended up shutting the 11's, shutting the 12's and finally cycling the EFV 5 and B to try to control levels. And then sometime thereafter, we lost the breaker for the EFV 5 B; it must have tripped on thermal overload.
Sometime thereafter we went to normal feed using the one condensate pump, feeding it through the normal startup valve, and that's how we spent most of the day, past midmorning using normal feed.
TEAM:
Did you do that between 1000 or 1100 hrs?
ZEWE:
May even have been a little earlier than that, but in that neighborhood.
I'm l
not sure. The operator automatically did it and informed me later on that he isolated it, he had lost that breaker, and he was going back on normal feed.
At that point, I didn't have any obj ections to it, and he could control better.
At that point,.we were down rather low in generator pressures anyway.
. DAM:
Is there a procedure for feeding a dry generator, that is different from feeding a generator, with 30" inches or more?
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' EWE:
Yes, the thing was that at the time, I never considered it to be a dry gen-l erator.
<. EWE :
Everytime I looked I had greater than 10", normally we considered a dry steam generator 8" or less.
If I had reali::ed that it had taken us 8 minutes to establish that feed which I didn't, I would have known it had to be dry.
L But even on the operating range, it indicated like 5% or 6%, and it showed L
10" to 12" on the startup range, and I didn't think it was dry. We were actually holding some level before we seen any significant increase.
But knowing that it was actually an 8 minute period that we were talking about it would have gone dry.
TEAM:
When did the reactor building done high radiation alarms come in?
ZEWE:
Right around the same time that all the other alarms went off. That's when I noticed the dome monitor.
I really don't remember seeing very much up until that point and everything kinda came in at once, the first one that I noticed was the 748, the offgas monitor, because I felt sure that we did have a problem with the B steam generator, and once we fed.it and it came in, I was sort of keyed to that one anyway.
TEAM:
Did the alarms come in before or after you ran the B reactor coolant pump?
ZEWE:
It seemed to be after, but we did one and then the other one fairly rapidly.
Just a few minutes apart, we fed started the pump and it was a few minutes after that everything came in. We had started another pump sometime after i (
this. We started that 2 B pump and then we'were concerned that it was really running and we checked the amps and knocked it off. Then we tried to start another pump which as an A side pump, sometime later, I'm not sure of the time frame, it may have been an hour later. We tried to start another one, that one acted normally at first.
It started and th~e amps were real high. Normally l
the amps are off scale for about the first 10 seconds and then they come down to about 600 amps or so, but for the first pump that we had on I never really seen the starting current go and come down, but on that pump, the starting current came up and in ten seconds, it dropped back down, but it kept on going down to about 100 amps. We felt sure at that time, that the 2 B had been actually running.
TEAM:
When did the high radiation alarm come in?
ZEWE:
Sometime after we started that 2 B ptmp.
TEAM:
After the 2 B pump?
ZEWE:
That's as how I remember it.
TEAM:
The last pump?
ZEWE:
The first pump.
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' TEAM:
Oh, the firs t pump...
WE:
Yes, that as how I remember it, because there was sometime between the first pug start and the second pump start, I'd say maybe an hour TEAM:
Is there any power dispatcher records that would show when the RC pumps were started?
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' EWE:
There is a possibility that the Lebanon dispatcher might, I don't remember.
. TEAM:
Any other questionst OK, that ought to do it.
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