ML19309G317
| ML19309G317 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Crane  |
| Issue date: | 03/30/1979 |
| From: | Faust C METROPOLITAN EDISON CO. |
| To: | |
| Shared Package | |
| ML19309G312 | List: |
| References | |
| TASK-TF, TASK-TMR NUDOCS 8005050545 | |
| Download: ML19309G317 (12) | |
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O O-rat st^rr turz vita Craig Faust 0400 Brs.
!! arch 30,1979 Conducted By:
R. Long and D. Reppert LONG:
This is Bob I.ong.
It is appro.*imately 0400 hours0.00463 days <br />0.111 hours <br />6.613757e-4 weeks <br />1.522e-4 months <br /> on 30 March '79.
Don Reppert and I are talking with Craig Faust.
We will ask Craig to identify himself and his job function.
FAUST:
I'm Craig Faust.
I'm A Con ~ trol Room Operator and I was in the Control Room at the time this incident occurred.
LONG:
What we would like you to do, Craig, is start maybe an hour or so before the turbine trip with what you vere doing, then we continue your recollection cf the sequence of events.
FAUST:
0.K.
Ily job function for the night was as a switching and tagging CRO.
Abuut an hour before this happened I thought I might take data entries required as far as tech. specs. are concerned - system dailies, and megawatt readings off the panels.
That's what I was doing.
I was completing the dailies up to the point where I was finishing off the shift.
For an hours time, that was about all I can say I was doing.
At the time I wasn't aware of anything unusual.
There was something that happened later that Ed Frederick, the CRO, told me happened that I wasn' t aware of - it was a problem with the 7
bus voltage - which you will get from him.
I found this out way down
/
the line.
I saw nothing abnormal in the plant paraceters that I was m
looking at.
Ihat's really about all I could say about it without going into detail; in fact, it's not worth going into.
The logs would tell what! it was showing.
The next step came when I was walking over to t::y desk - nine faces the control room panal - Ed at this time was standing with his back to me.
He was turning from the make'up panel to look at me and we were shooting the breeze about something when I caught the first alarms coming in.
Now when I say, " Caught the first alarms coming in," I was far enough away that's all I could say.
I pointed and at the same time said, "We're in trouble; something's going wrong in the plant."
I headed over, and on the way over I saw rad bottom lights come on.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed there were alarus coming up over on the electrical board.
I assumed, at that moment, it was a turbine trip followed by a reactor trip, because I saw the rod bottom lights come on.
I was thinking of the steps required to go into our emergency procedure for a reactor trip - which was shutting MUV-376 - that's letdown isola-tion and starting the makeup pump right away.
Then we started to get a trend on the pressurizer level to see which way it was going.
At this time Ed stepped over and was looking at pressurizer level.
He took a quick look at that, and I don' t know what else he did at that point.
I had tried to start the "A" makeup pu=p twice; I went to hold on the firs t time, and I believe what I did was let off too soon; there's a few seconds time delay that requires you to hold it over.
But I was in i
a rush to get from there over to feedwater, because that's another place that hurts us, hurts us right away if its not checked for proper operation.
k C
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U Page 2.
),ST: (cont.)
The make up pump did not start on the first try.
I s tepped right back and grabbed the switch, though as I think you will see in a computer printout e mewhere, a trip on a make up pump is listed as a trip, but it i.ever started. And I hit it again, held it a little longer, and I got on a red light; but when I let the switch go, the pump went off, which I didn' t understand.
At this time, I saw the ' red light come on, I was backing off when the pump light went to green.
Ed looked over then apparently and saw that the pump wasn' t on yet.
He reached back and grabbed it and held it, too, while he was monitoring pressurizer level.
It was pretty fast.
i At this time, when I saw he grabbed it, and I saw the pump did come on, I went i= mediately over and I was checking the steam generator levels coming down, which showed proper direction for going on low level limits.
I figured we would go on low level limits.
Steam pressure, of course, was going up when we were lif ting the reliefs.
It slowed up then. When steam generator levels were coming down also I looked over and I saw both feedpumps off, and I looked down and verified that all three emergency feedpumps were on and I looked up and saw that the 11 valves we opened; visual indicators were dual indication, going from red to green, and I figured the valves were traveling.
So my first assumption was levels are going to low high limits, and I proceeded over to the turbine panel to finish those
}
reactions over there on the initial trip - which were to trip the L
turbine, verify tripped and place in P.T.L. generator breakers and j
the field breaker - verify that our Govenor and Throttle valves went
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shut and the extraction steam isolation shut and the turbine drain valves went open.
I verified that; that didn' t take long to do.
I i= mediately started back over to the feedwater station.
I didn't look over at anything else on the turbine panel except to verify that the turbine valves had closed and that the turbine had tripped. These took place...
ICNG:
These things that you are doing here - these are your normal emergency procedures?
FAUST:
Emergency procedures for verifications on the trip and manual actions.
LONG:
Were you doing this from memory?
FAUST:
Yes.
This was from memory at this time.
I came back over to the feed station...
LONG:
Let me ask you one other question.
You've been through a turbine trip before? This wasn't the first time?
FAUST:
Yes.
I know what I'm supposed to be looking for, and I was looking for those signs.
There are some other things I was to follow up with; these could have been left for later. As far as I'm concerned, once the turbine is down I don't have a source of steam going out there - so I'm safe there as far as pulling anymore heat off or too much heat out of i
the core.
The reactor starts cooling herself, so the idea is just to stabilize out down at saturation for about'547F temperature.
O.K?
l s
o O
Pi e 3.
d FAUST: (cont. )
I came back over and the first indication that something was wrong with feed was the generator levels were 10 inches in both generators -
which indicated to me that the generators went dry.
I looked at header pressure first; I figured if header pressure was down, that would be an indication of dry steam generators.
Well, header pressure was still up, so I started looking at the feedwater valves, I reached down and grabbed the 11's right off, and went full open on the demand signals to the M.
Then I looked at the indication and I saw they were dual indications, but I figured something else was wrong.
It was about that time that I looked down and I saw two valves in our system that were supposed to be open, but were shut.
These are EF-V 12A and 12B.
I voiced this at the same time and opened the valves.
Bill Zewe,*
vur supervisor, mentioned something while I was opening the valves, and I just started establishing feedwater to the generators through the emergency feeduater valves.
I stayed there for awhile.
I was spending quite a bit of time now watching steam generator levels and pressure.
Steam generator pressure was cycling as if it was coming off a relief instead of going through the turbine bypass valves. Tha t's the way it was looking at me.
It on1*/ looked like it got to 1100 psi.
Reading specifics on the gauge is hard right now.
I was looking for areas, and watching pressure going up and down, which was still indicating to me that we didn' t blow the generators dry yet.
I continued to feed
()
the maximum I could to establish a steam generator level - I established first in A; B trailed behind.
For the longest time "A" was coming up -
I got up to 25 inches in it and I started backing off on "A" "B" was lagging behind.
Time vise - all I can say is that during the first 10 minutes of the accident I was actually at the feed station.
Later I looked over, and I saw flow in the reactor coolant pumps had come down - it looked like it had come down about 80%. We had alarms on all four pumps up there - vibration alarms - which I figured indica-ted that we were going through a pretty good transient here. Maybe they just come in and they're not in time to go over there and try to clear them.
I went over - looked back over the pressure - the level in the "A" steam generator was coming up O.K. and I noticed we were having problems controlling "B" steam generator.
I shut off the 11 B valve, but my level ended up around 45 inches - I wanted to level out at about 30 inches at this stage of the game - because with feed water flow you want to establish low level limits as long as we have our. feed pumps.
They ended up establishing about 100 inches in the "B" generator before I finally got back over to reshut EF-V-12B to get it to stop coming up.
Soon the 11B valve was just leaking by.
The pressure that I was looking at was on the trend recorder more than the header pressure on the gener-l ator - I was watching "A" at the time. We have two other pressures in there and they were pretty much going line in line - they were pretty 3
i much staying together.
So I was still watching "A".
At the. time I didn' t think anything was wrong as far as I was concerned,. I was remov-l ing the heat.
i i
I
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Page 4.
LONG:
At uhat point - it sounds like somewhere in this ten minute interval -
did you decide there was something abnor=al?
FAUST:
The RC pumps were bothering me.
I didn't understand why I would see a decrease in the flow in the RC pu=ps at that time.
I started thinking -
something passed through my mind at the ti=e - was it possible that we were possibly getting a steam bubble in the loops, maybe cutting down the flow on us? I don't really even know if I... I'm trying to think now if I actually thought that, or if I'm piecing that into my memory now, further down the line here.
LONG:
Were you fellows talking to each other or were you pretty much doing things independently?
FAUST:
I was calling out to Ed, and Ed was right over beside ne.
I don't know where Fred Schiemann came in.
I looked over and Ed was, I believe, on the makeup pumps.
And Fred was on the end of the pressurizer panel, the right pressurizer heater.
I knew they had problems; I heard Ed saying that we had a high level on the pressurizer.
I knew we had started the pumps and I knew he was shutting one of them off somewhere along there to try to control pressurizer level.
I figured we were just jamming a lot of water into the pressurizer.
I was telling him I lost flow and I was telling
- him I'reestablishsd generator levels.
I said, "I still had ten inches indicated, but it was possible 'that we boiled
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dry."
But I was saying that we still had indications of pressure in the generators.
Then I yelled out about the 12's to him.
I think I said, "We haven' t been feeding.
12 A and B are shut'". And I reopened them.
He was trying' to page and get out and cover behind us to look at the overall plant.
The natural thing would be to get them open.
By the time he looked at it I was opening then and telling him that I was doing it.
REPEERT:
Those valves, they're supposed to be normally open.
How do they open?
FAUST:
They are electrically operated valves; but there is no function to shut them except by manually going up and operating a sw1tch.
The thing tnat I think helped block them out - since the lights were on - the twitch controls are by each other.
Here's the panel, here's the lights.
I'm leaning over controlling two Bailey stations up here, further up in the panel and there is a tag over one.
I first was looking over there below me to see if anyone was away, because the next thing we had was FD 32 and 33 valve that I can bypass, when something is wrong with 12 and 11, l
and start feeding out that way.
That was my next game plan, but I found the problem right away. It was just as easy to open it, in fact I would have had to open it.
Well I wouldn' t have had to, but, looking at it this way, it's one valve compared to two.
l l
We knew we had a problem with the pu=ps; amps seemed to be going.
I wasn't really looking at the acps; I looked at the flow, I saw flow was going down, and.I s' aid, "Ue're cavitating the pumps or something -
something's going wrong."
Somebody said, "Let's try to ' keep the pumps j
on the A because we have spray control there."
We took B pung off and l
flow dropped further than it should - in half - and it held there.
Ed I
was still working on trying to control pressurizer levels.
I finally established "A" steam generator up around 23 inches in the interim that
l.
O O
Page 5.
FAUST: (cont. )
this was happening.
I took the 1B and 2B pump valve and I went back over and was watching the feedwater level, but since I was feeding there, went back over and made sure I didn't miss anything over on the turbine. During this time is where I'm having a hard time remem-bering how I got over there, but I was sort of bouncing to the stations -
if I saw it was 0.K. - I went over to see if I could help out somewhere else.
We had ES actuation, high pressure injection.
We lost the A makeup Pump; we lost the B makeup pump, which is normal.
We picked up the A and the C on ES field trip off.
0.K.,
that was fine and dandy.
Once again, we had an ES actuation and all ue were thinking was that we had to stop - we were going solid.
I don't think I thought at the time that we had a steam bubble in there, but we knew we had problems with the makeup pump and RC pumps.
Fred was still on pressurizer temperature - the pressurizer level con-trols right there.
I was going around him listening to what he was saying; and then I took off - I get over there and I ended up taking off the "A" makeup pump.
This was - I don' t know why - because Ed moved out of the area - right - he was doing something - I wasn't following exactly what he was doing.at the time. Pressure cama down and I think, instead, it came back up at that time.
And we didn' t lose it right in that interim again.
That period of time, I was starting to get fuzzy.
1 I'm trying to remember because I ended up temporarily over there stopping one of the makeup pumps. We saw we were solid.
We figured we had level high and we were holding pressure; we didn't heed that makeup pump shoving water in there on us again just creating more problems. At the time that's the way it seemed to us.
As far as I know from what we see now, this bubble apparently had already transferred. We were hard up in the pressurizer; the bubble was over in the loops. We were sitting there trying to figure out how the heck we were going to cool this thing down - get that thing back - without aggravating our problem.
It was a littis bit before this, too, that when I looked at Bill I said, j
" Pump flow went in half," - when we stopped the first two.
0.K., tha t's where Ed went.
Ed was on the RC pumps then.
And Bill was there too.
And Bill said take off the RC puces.
This is before I lef t the feedwater, uhich I did and established natural circulation - which was still low, down to 25 inches in the steam generator, so I had to start feeding them up.
I was trying to establish 50% in the ~ operating range.
Ihat makeup l
pump to me was way out of line yet.
I'm getting ahead of the game here.
I was probably busy for a good half hour on the feedwater flow without moving out of that area.
Others were going in and trying to determine levels; we were having a heck of a time trying to determine temperatures.
We were reading about l
550F steam generator temperatures.
Ed was over reading.the primary at this time and the big hangup was that Tav was staying the same.
Tav stayed at 570 and wasn't moving, and we were looking at Tc's.
Tc's were cooling down.
v O
O Page 6.
FAUST: (cont. )The next step that came in here were the pressures on the steam gener-ators.
"A" steam generator was holding up and "B" was coning down.
That got me into the point where I decided we had a leak. Just prior to this we tried one of the pumps - we didn't think we were establishing any cooling.
So we're not getting anything.
So we figured we would try to - this was a little hassle - we were arguing back and forth how to go about starting the pu=p - leaving it on or just jogging it.
We had a little bit of a question and answer session there. We were still watching everything, trying to correct, just keep going in the right direction, hopefully, and we tried to start the "A" loop pumps. We went to start them and they wouldn' t pick up.
We finally got down to the point where we got the 2B reactor ce61 ant pump, I believe it was, back on.
At this time - this was quite awhile now - I'm having a hard time with times. We sat for the longest time where we were a 570 Tav.
The situation was that we were holding pressure and were trying to hold pressurizer level low; but it was high.
We had problems verifying, "Are we actually seeing what we are seeing?" By this time Ken Bryan V
was in there verifying the computer points saying, "That is actually what you see in there." A lot of time was passing during this period.
I think what we reached at this time was - we were just stagnant. We were just sitting there - we figured it was in the loops.
LONG:
This is still prior to the site emergency?
l FAUST:
Yes.
This is prior to the site emergency.
The thing that I correlate to the site emergency happening is when we tried to start that RC pump and got one running.
What seems obvious to ce now is that the steam generators were cooling down.
I was steaming off any heat I was getting out of the sides there.and I was cooling down.
Then we started the RC pu=p which picked up enough that it showed. We were also having prob-le=s with the possibility of going critical again. Well, this was another thing - we figured we got this thing to jog.
LONG:
What do you mean problems of going critical again?
FAUST:
Well, counts were trending back up.
We had started emergency borating way back - right as soon as we started seeing trouble.
Before the time we started seeing any problems that would tell us to start emergency borating as far as reactivity was concerned - associated with the NI's
- Bill said, " Start emergency borating - get boron going into that thing."
Several times through this we were seeing increasing counts, and one time, just prior to moving the pump, the counts actually came up to where we were seeing it on the intermediate range again.
That's why I'm saying it seems we were heading critical.
They told me that we've got to get boron into the core and we started talking about trying to get a pump on.
Trying to move some water into the core, back to the core to try l
co get some heat out of there.
So that's when we went through the pumps -
we weren' t getting any on - finally we got the 23 pump to run.
Christmas i
trees, you know? All over the place there. A site emergency was de-clared.
The only indication before that we had any radiation problem -
that's not saying we had one - was that the intermediate letdown - the intermediate c'losed system - was showing alarms on the back panel alarm.
Ihe alar = in that system we were attributing probably to a lot of crud which we broke loose. We might have even gotten a leak into the this is my line of thought - gotten a leak into the letdown coolers.
We wanted the tubes...
O O
Pegn 7.
L6NG:
That's not been verified yet?
FAUST:
No, as far as I know, we haven' t verified it yet.
It's something we should look into, I'm sure.
It may be one of the problems leading to the radiation levels in the Auxiliary Building that we're seeing.
We're having problems with letdown - we may have a leak. We think we8 re solidified; I think we're solidifying a lot of crud that build up into the letdcun coolers.
With all the boron that we got in there now we just may not be seeing the leak through it.
I think that might be a possibility that that might be the source, because that was one of the first ones we got.
Like I said, when we started that other pump, that's when, or shortly thereaf ter, I started seeing B steam generator pressure dropping of f.
That's when brian Mehler had come in and we were starting to talk about the possibility of having a leak in the steam generator.
Ihe level was coming up, the pressure was going down.
It sure looked like it to me.
We went into an isolation procedure to try to wrap up the "B" steam generator. After we got this isolated, we received a latch on that generator, which...
LONG:
At anytime during this sequence did you or anybody else check the e=ergency procedures, the written procedures? You use those as a guide; obviously you started out on the job from memory - which you needed to do.
FAUST:
Ken Bryan broke out the emergency procedures and we were going over them, going from one thing we thought was a casualty procedure - into dual pq things - to where it is hard to piece together things'.
But we started
\\_!
and isolated the steam generator.
The next thing.was samples to try into a steam line rupture, for which we took *ka. immediate steps on that to determine for sure that it was the generator.
You know they were in the process of doing that - once again there is time passing here.
At this time we were also into a site emergency.
REPPERT:
What triggered the decision to declare a site emergency?
/
FAUST:
We were seeing increasing reactor and auxiliary building levels so we passed the word to evacuate. As soon as we had the alarms, we had the auxiliary building evacuated.
Bill Zewe passed the word to declare a site emergency, I believe.
I could be wrong on.that - just which one he was passing at the time.
I guess it was about 1-1/2 to 2 hours2.314815e-5 days <br />5.555556e-4 hours <br />3.306878e-6 weeks <br />7.61e-7 months <br /> into it that this came about. From there Ed and I, Fred and Bill were still trying to control the plant and, by this time, people were coming in and we were trying to look back, and you couldn' t see through the control p-room anymore.
There were people all over the place back there carrying out the e=ergency procedures - as far as a site emergency - and making it into a general emergency.
It became a general emergency soon after that.
I wasn' t paying attention, as far as that goes.
I was really watching the plant.
LONG:
Were you giving directions to the auxiliary operators during this period?
r
C 0
Paga 8.
FAUST:
The auxiliary operators help from in.the control room and Bill was directing them for the most part as to what we needed and what we wanted done at the time.
I don't think I gave any orders to anybody to do anything as far as' the Auxiliary Operators were concerned. We were wrapped up just watching the plant.
LONG:
Was anybody in the u.: trol room acting as the leader or making the basic decisions?
FAUST:
Bill was the overall decision maker. We were trying to discuss our problems as fast as we could - to decide which way looked right to go.
And Bill was making the...
LONG:
This is Bill...?
FAUST:
This is Bill Zeve.
He asked the control room about the problems we were having. He ran down into the turbine building where we were also having problems with vacuum at this time.
Unit I, of course, lost steam supply from us.
They were trying to get their boilers on; they were having trouble with the boilers.
They had them both on at one time; then I heard the word pass that they lost a boiler. Then they lost both boilers, I believe. Later on, they reestablished one to where they could keep their own vacuum over there; but we were still supply-ing our own vacuum at the time.
But we were getting to the point where we weren' t going to be supplying our own vacuum because we shut our B generator off.
Whe.n I isolated the "B" generator, pressure in the "B" generator stayed fairly constant, but level came up.
Level was in-
~
creasing in the "B" generator and we figured it was the leak.
"A"
)
generator was cooling down yet; it was really getting ridiculous, I was getting down to around 200 lbs in the "A". generator and we weren' t seeing any response.
By that time we obviously theorized we had steam where we didn' t want it.
We were just trying not to aggravate things, and hold what we had until we could get some decisions to follow in the right direction.
l LONG:
You already identified some; E at were there things that didn't function properly that you remember in particular?
FAUST:
I'm missing something. We were shif ting cire water pumps because we also had a very high level in the hotwell, with an out of site high.
We,still had vacuum to it.
LONG:
Can you identify timewise
...?
FAUST:
That's what I'm trying to get back on.
One of our problems was our concern about dumping steam into the hotwell and losing it.
And we had one condensate pump on at this time. Whenever the booster pumps tripped, I was told later that they were first on the feedpu: ps, then the condensate pump went.
}fy first i=pression was we had a total losis of flow from the valves in polishers sla==ing shut.
At that time I thought that was where our problem started from - that is, we couldn't get an electrical bypass.
I went bac'c and tried to open the CO-12V bypassing around the condensate polishers and couldn' t get it opened. What I wanted to do was try to reestablish the booster pump and I don' t know if we would have gone to the feedpump, but we were thinking along the lines of the feedpump because we also had a problem i
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Page 9.
FAUST: (cont. )with a jack on the feedpump not working.
If anything, we wanted to get flow recircing back to the hotwells through it.
Tais was just a little job off to the side that we were involved in.
Anyway we were involved partially off to the side, getting reject valves open because they had been throttled earlier. Automatic valves downstream of these had been throttled.
If we had problens with it, that is, if a reject valve opened, we ended up losing pumps.
And we had to drop suction pressure to pump it of course. We didn't want that.
But now we wanted it to reject - we got to throttle - we have got to get it open.
I was 0.K.
I was involved.
I called one of the operators and told them what I wanted to get done; I told them I wanted to get the reject valve open. He was in the control room at the time, and I was sort of talking to him out of the side of my head, telling him what I wanted. He went to open up the reject valve going out to the condensate storage tanks to try to get level down in the hotwell.
We knew we wanted the steam off the A generator.
We knew we were losing seals because we were losing gland sealing steam. We started figuring that we either control the steam generators or they're going to blow their reliefs.
So we shut off two of our cire water pumps no, we shut off 4 of our circ water pumps on the cooling towers.
What this buys us is it shif ts logic over so we can control our atmospheric
)
du=ps from our Bailey stations which were controlling the turbine bypass valve. We shif t over to these so we can control of f them as far as releasing - venting off steam from the generator.
The "A" generator at this time was still going up to where it looked like it was going to
. lift reliefs. We said, "We got to get the pressure down or we're j ust going to start blowing reliefs." We went that way - we got a call saying something like, " Don' t put anythin'g out," or, "We don' t want to see that," or something like that from somebody outside - somebody who must have been having a little power swinh or something, because we were pumping it back into the condensor no matter what.
LONG:
Do you know who that came from?
FAUST:
No, all I know is that Bill said, "Stop going to the atmospheric; put it back into the hotwell.
So we finally reestablished level in the hotwell and went back to what we were doing.
Our problems were looking better then. We started worrying about flooding out the hotwell and start losing that. We had several ES actuations on building pressure during this time, and I was going from where I was over to the makeup pumps to help out over there, because-I'm thinking of why I was over there - but I was over there helping.
I was start'.ng and stopping
=akeup pumps as they were coming on from the Tuilding actuation.
What.
I'm saying is the reason why we were doing this was that building pressure was going up slow and we were anticipating that we're going to get it right about now.
We knew why it was going up was because we ended up controlling pressure in the system by blowing the electromatic relief, i
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Page 10.
FAUST: (cont. )
which goes to the RC drain tank. We knew we had ruptured the disc in there and we knew we were putting a lot of water into the buildings.
Pressure change in the building was very gradual.
Before anything happened here we had put on reactor building emergency cooling for 2 hours2.314815e-5 days <br />5.555556e-4 hours <br />3.306878e-6 weeks <br />7.61e-7 months <br /> to start cooling the building.
LONG:
Yeah.
FAUST:
I stopped the "A" - This is where I'm having a hard time - well, I know I ended stopping the "A" Makeup pump and sometime passed while it was off. We had already gotten building isolation and we were reestablishing things we needed from that bypassing the building pressure -cause we actually have. the capacity to bypass it where you can operate components as you need them.
When you no longer see you need something you can take it of f and put it back on the reestablish control. Pressurizer level was still high and pressure was what we were trying to control. We were trying to establish a level in the pressuri:er. We had heaters on at the time. We lost them except for breakers that had been tripping down probably due to all the heat in the control building area. We tried to restart "A" makeup pump be-cause I wanted to get seals back to normal as well as because I was pegging out the seals.
LONG:
Uh. Huh.
t FAUST:
And I didn't see them come back down off and one of my concerns was damage to the ~RC pump seals, so I was try ng to get the injection flow path normal by reestablishing at least an "A" pump and going through the 32 to control it.
I went to start the "A" makeup pung and it wouldn't start for me.
It came on and tripped off again. You know it was showing me I was having problems with it so instead of retrying to start it again I just pulled the lock and I picked up the "B" makeup pump got that established and took the "C" off, I lost the "C" and normal af ter stop with the BUST lined up to it just in case we needed it.
I had been involved, Ed was behind, or Key Bryan was behind the panel and I had been involved in establishing seal injection, proper seal injection flow rates first all 4, and then I'm not quite sure why the decision came out but by this time Bill and a bunch of them were back there talking you know this was no longer a fantastically rushed situation. We were trying to maintain what we had and correct the problem to get the bubble which we now knew we had, back into the pressurizer so they had me secure the 16 "B" and 16 "D" valves and g
establish 250 GPM through 16 "A" and "C" each off respective pumps.
The B pu=p in this case, the B Makeup pump and the C makeup pump 0.K.
and we kept going that way and what we were doing was trying to press the system up to where we could get the bubble out of the loops and get it back over and we couldn' t seem to get pressure up.
It was as if the pressuri:er was solid so all we knew, all we were looking at what was looking apparent to us at that time at least that's the information I was getting back. What I was determining is we were coming in our injection lines instead of going into the core possibly or getting much into the core or otherwise it was actually foing up through into the pressurizer and'just going du= ping out our elector-matic relief and we were putting it into th'e building and I was
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FAUST: (cont. )
watching BWST level, initially it had come down from 55, and then it went down like 50, and a lot of water and we're not doing anything here, so we knew we were apparently getting some cooling by just getting water in there at least it was going in and we were getting something from it but we were also putting a lot of it back into the building and kept up that way till we started talking.
Ed Fredericks said let's try and get pressure down and get the core flood tanks to dump in.
Of course, by this time we knew we were holding all right.
Higher up authorities were back in the room talking about this and as Ed was trying to say let's go this way and get pressure down, we can have those core flood tanks dump in there and hopefully, quench the bubble, and reestablish the bubble back into the pressur-izer.
So we vent pressure off and bring the pressure down to where we could get it into the core. We had to go down to at least around 600 lbs. to where we start putting the core flood tanks into the core.
Now core flood tanks floated on the core, ah, I'm not trying to be funny about it, but ah it was a little tense in there.
Things weren't going quite the way we wanted it to go at times.
O.K. we had already had the problem with starting the makeup pu=p during this time right and we were into an ES as well, and then we asked about site emergency.
So, we actually ended up staying this way.
I was relieved about 9 hrs.
later into this thing right as I was getting ready to be relieved.
I was talking to my relief in fact I had been relieved momentarily because Tav or T hot started. coming down and we ended up with was we g
figured were getting some water in there.
It's finally going into it.
The plant starting /shif ting and we thought we were going to get the bubble back in the pressurizer cause we had gotten the level in there, and it looked like we were starting to get some heat out of the heaters in pressurizer where it might get the bubble back over, but it was rather shortlived in that all we ended up doing was reactuating the building isolation area because the te=perature came down.
Of course we got flashing and went right out the drain tank probably into the building and we saw a 27 psi spike building pressure and it came immediately back down.
O.K., we picked up everything, everything else seemed to steady back out where it was again it seemed everything went where it was and we figured at this time we got our, we overroad the system again, in other words, bypassed it, bypassed ES, and stabilized out where we were again. Building spray pumps of course picked up and we took them off. My reasoning behind that is we didn't have a high building pressure anymore and why start washing everything down in there with sodium hydroxide, so that's about it.
Up. to that point that's about where I finally got relieved.
REPPERT:
About what time was that?
FAUST:
This was, let's see, 4 o' clock when it started, this war
- out 3 o' clock i
in the af ternoon.
,j RE? PERT:
Other than the auxiliary operators did you have any' co=n.
teations from outside the control room?
1 l.
FAUST:
No.
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REPPERT:
You didn't think so.
FAUST:
We had, as far as communications flowing in and out of the control room no, we had all the people we needed in there, then more, to handle that.
I was concerned with the plant from almost the be-ginning of it.
That's where I was working.
REPPERT:
0.K., you've covered different kinds of things.
LONG:
Yes, you did.
REPPERT:
Do you have any questions now?
FAUST:
No, I don' t think so.
REPPERT:
Yeah, but each time we get something new added...
LONG:
Teah.
FAUST:
You're hearing like I said what other people are seeing, but I,'m trying to keep in ah, I'm trying to keep it in at least a sequence that it had happened to me.
I'm hoping I'm not leaving anything out.
It is fuz:y on just when I was doing the further I got away from the initial part of the accident.
LONG:
Then time spread out.
REPPERT:
Well, we'll let you get back to your job and I' appreciate very much the opportunity to talk and I think we're probably going to try to
)
talk with you fellows as a group, we may do that.
1 FAUST:
It may help because sometimes we each, we tried that the other night and it helped put things in their order some more than jus't one guy trying to fumble around and trying to remember what the other guy was doing or where he was at the time and why he was there.
LONG:
Right.
FAUST:
Sometimes he can say something that will snap it back for you a little bit better.
REPPERT:
Yeah, well we might want to.do that.
Sometime.
O.K.,
this ends our interview with Craig Faust.
Ihank you Craig.
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