ML20198B781
| ML20198B781 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Site: | Wolf Creek  |
| Issue date: | 12/21/1984 |
| From: | William Ward NRC OFFICE OF INVESTIGATIONS (OI) |
| To: | Hayes B NRC OFFICE OF INVESTIGATIONS (OI) |
| Shared Package | |
| ML20198B650 | List: |
| References | |
| FOIA-85-101 NUDOCS 8511070249 | |
| Download: ML20198B781 (7) | |
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% **..* / December 21, 1984 MEMORANDUM FOR: Ben B. Hayes , Director ,
Office of Investigations FROM: William J. Ward, Assistant to Director Office of Investigations c
SUBJECT:
01 EVALUATION OF THE KANSAS GAS & ELECTRIC (KG&E)
INVESTIGATIVE PROGRAM At the suggestion of KG&E's retained counsel, Mr. Gerald Charnoff, you, Richard Herr and I visited KG&E's Wolf Creek Generating Station near Burling-tor, Kansas on September 19, 1984 where we received a briefing regarding the Quality First Program. Based on the results of that briefing you instructed me to conduct a thorough evaluation of the KG&E Investigative Program, of which Quality First (01) was but one part. Accordingly, I visited Wolf Creek during the period of September 25 through 27 and again or. October 17, 1984 I also visited KG&E Corporate Headquarters on October 16, 1984 During these visits I reviewed records and interviewed KG&E and contractor personnel at both senior management and working levels. As a result of these efforts, I feel I gained a good understanding of the KG&E Investigative Program - such as it is.
Quite simply, there is no investigative program per se'. Investigations are ccrducted by several KG&E organizations. There does not appear to be any integration of effort, nor it there a central point where everything comes together. Before pursuing this point any further, let re describe sone of the KG&E investigative units.
The Quality First Program was established in about March 1984 to investigate and resolve confidential quality concerns resulting fror Q1 hotline telephone calls and Wolf Creek Project Personnel Exit Interviews. 01 also receives a substantial nurber of allegations fror " walk ins".
The Q1 charter is to investigate all quality concerns relating to, "...hard-ware / installations, documentation /intir.idation and/or harassment issues."
Other concerns such as cost and schedule issues, thef t of property or drugs (
are referred elsewhere. The manager of Q1 currently reports to the Director of Quality with a " dotted line" relationship to the KG&E Vice President-Nuc-lear. '
The manager of Q1 informed me that. drug related allegations are referred to the Wolf Creek Security Department for investigation. He further advised that allegations of theft of company property are similarily referred. Interviews with the Wolf Creek Chief of Security revealed that he has received only four referrals from Q1. More importantly, he advised that he has no investigative personnel assigned to his staff. He further advised that there is no formal procedure whereby results of any of his " investigative" efforts would be ,
reported back to Q1.
[N 8511070249 851015 PDR FOIA VARRICC85-101 PDR
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Ben B. Hayes 2 December 21, 1984 Further inquiry revealed that Q1 currently refers drug allegations as well as other non-quality concerns to the KG&E Construction Manager. The Construction Manager evidently places these items on a tracking system, and in turn further refers them to other KG&E or contractor managers for resolution. *The Con-struction Manager infomed me that he has one individual assigned on a part time basis to track follow-up action on these items, ho investigative person- )
nel are assigned to this unit.
The KG&E Corporate Manager of Internal Audit, who reports directly to the Chaiman of the Board, occasionally conducts investigations. When inter-viewed, the manager advised that the number of these investigations has tapered off with the advent of Ql. Nonetheless, nost past as well as current investigations are related to cost and schedule or vendor issues.
The Vice President-General Counsel plays a major role in the KGSE investiga-tive program. The legal staff conducts a wide variety of investigations of a sensitive nature such as sexual harassment, character issues and matters which may entail litigation. Interestingly, the only Q1 investigator with fomal investigative training is in fact under a personal services contract with the General Counsel. Thus, although he nomally reports through the operations chain to the Vice President-Nuclear, he also has direct access to the General Counsel for whom he occasionally conducts investigations. In this latter capacity, he is working outside of the operations management chain.
There is yet another player in the KG&E investigative program, the Executive Assistant to the Chaiman, who is currently Acting Director of Operations.
Although this individual's duties are rather vaguely defined, he appears to have some general oversight responsibilities regarding the security and emergency response programs. In this regard, he is occasionally involved in investigative work. One such example cited to me was an investigation he conducted of the fraudulent use of a KG&E telephone credit card.
Lastly, as many issues are apparently " farmed out" to various managers for l resolution, it is clear that each of these in turn is, in effect, involved in the conduct of_ investigations. I did not attempt to pursue this aspect any further other than to establish that no other fomally trained investigative i personnel are assigned to these units.
As I indicated at the outset, there is little if any coordination, let alone [
integration of these investigative activities. It is clear that KG&E does not truly have an investigative program in view of this. I think a prerequisite for a corporate investigative prograt would be either the designation or -
establishment of an organization at the corporate level to be the central j focal point of all of these uncoordinated activities. I would strongly ;
recorrnend that this organization be free of cost and schedule concerns to the i extent possible or practicable. In my view, the lack of any such organization is one of the causal factors behind the shortcomings in the Quality First Program which I will now describe.
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Q1 was originally established with a built in conflict of interest: It reported to the Wolf Creek Manager of Quality Assurance. The conflict arises w
Ben B. Hayes 3 December 21o 1984 in that the quality concerns being investigated by Q1 represent ostensible failures of the QA program. Not only is this rather self evident, but many of th Q1 personnel with whom I spoke mentioned this. Evidently, KG&E recognized this problem because, in August 1984, they moved the organization up one notch so that it reported to the Manager of Quality. The Manager of Quality in turn reports to the Vice President-Nuclear. Nonetheless, a significant number of the closed cases in the Q1 files were done under the old system which in turn raises some question as to their total objectivity. This is compounded by the fact that the Manager of Quality Assurance has been the subject of several '
allegations relating to his character, and is at the tire of this writing under investigation by KG&E as a result of them.
Even though the Q1 reporting relationship has been modified, the attached flow chart (Enclosure 1) shows there is still the potential for considerable influence by the Manager of QA over problems identifiec by the Q1 Program.
Let me illustrate this by describing procedures. Q1, for reasons which are not wholly logical to me, is divided into two basic groups, the interviewers, and the investigators. Although there has been fine tuning of this system, much of it during the period of this evaluation, this system appears to work like this. An allegation received by any of the three pathways described above is handled by one or more Q1 interviewers. These persons document the allegations, make an initial prioritization, initiate a case file, and perform an initial 50.55(e) determination (more on this later). The matter is than referred over to the Q1 investigators who are housed in a separate trailer.
The 01 investigators perfect an investigation plan and then set forth on their investigation. Leaving for the morent what passes as at investigation, let us focus on what happens if the Q1 investigator encounters relevant quality infornation beyond that which was contained in the original allegation.
Quite simply, the Q1 investigators do not investigate tnese collateral issues regardless of their importance. Rather, as indicated cr. their flow chart, they document these in what is called a Quality First 0tservation (QF0). The
, QF0 is sent_to the Manager of Quality Assurance. The flow chart indicates the series of potential actions which may flow from QA's reaction to a QF0; howev-er, the flow chart reveals, and personnel have testified to me, that there is no system or requirement for QA to feed back the results to the Q1 Progran.
To my knowledge, unless someone were'to make a specific effort to track down the results of QF0, it could literally disappear withir. the system, especially in these frantic final weeks prior to projected fuel load. (
I mentioned" tilat the Q1 interviewers make an initial determination of 50.55(e) reportability. I should add that a final determination is made upon com .
l pletion of the investigation. In each instance the investigator fil,ls out a form (Enclosure 2) entitled WCGS Request for Reportability Evaluation. The instructions on this worksheet state, inter alia,'that in order to be report-able, a deficiency has to satisfy paragraphs 4a and 4b; i.e., there must be a
- construction deficiency that, were it to have remained uncorrected, could have affected adversely the safety of operations of the nuclear plant at any time
- and the deficiency represents a ,
throughout the expected significant breakdown in anylifetime ofthe portion of theQua plant, Tity Assurance Program conduct-ed in accordance with the requirements of Appendix B. This is being strictly interpreted by the Q1 Program to mean that there must be a hardware defect i
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., B,en B. Hayes 4 December 21, 1984 coupled with the significant breakdown in the QA Program in order for it to be reportable. In other words, a significant breakdown in the Quality Assurance Program is not, in their' view, required to be reported in accordance with 10 CFR 50.55(e). It was pointed out to ne that Mr. Glen Madsen, NRC RIV, agreed with this interpretation. Upon return from Wolf Creek, I reviewed the guicance concerning 50.55(e) reporting contained in the IE Manual. A fair reading of this guidance appears to indicate that a significant breakdown in the QA Program in and of itself is a significant deficiency and thus, must be reported under 50.55(e). My file review at Wolf Creek revealed several instances where the initial determination was that there was a significant .s breakdown in a portion of the Quality Assurance Program but it was not considered reportable in the absence of a construction deficiency which apparently is perceived as having to be hardware problem. Quite frankly, I do not know for certain what the reporting requirement is, but it certainly does suggest to ne that an intent to have'significant breakdowns in QA programs brought to the attention of the NRC. Currently they are not.
KG&E's interpretation of the reportability requirement is consistent with their position regarding the reportability of wrongdoing to the NRC. Q1 personnel stated that they had been advised by retained counsel that there was no requirement to report such wrongdoing to the NRC as barassment and intimidation and records falsification. The investigators with whom I spoke appeared to be surprised by this interpretation. Accordingly, I began a detailed review of the Q1 files of both open end closed cases. I reviewed a total of 191 case fciders. Although the large volume of file material and the constraints cf time precluded my reviewing them in the detail which I would have preferred, this relatively cursory review identi#ied the following instances of wrongdoing. 17 cases contained allegatio ; involving drug use or traffiking by project personnel. Some of these cases were sufficiently specific i.e., they contained the names of individuals or groups of individu-als, that they could have been acted upon by law enforcement or investigative personnel. Still others would have been useful to the security department as raw intelligence relacing to drug abuse on site. The remainder were probably of little value to anyone. The key, however, is that notwithstanding the annotations of the Q1 files, the security department has received only four of the seventeen allegations. At the same time, only one or two of the case folders indicate any feedback from security as a result of these referrals.
Although recent case folders indicate that the referrals have been made to the construction manager, none of the files reflect any feed back as to action taken. (When interviewed, the Construction Manager indicated that these drug allegations were passed on to the affected managers; for instance, for alle-gations involving Dariel International personnel, the Daniel Construction Manager was informed).
At least 24 of the case files contained allegations or implications of harass-ment and intimidation, several of them quite serious. At the outside of the evaluation, none of these have been referred to the NRC. (Some of these harassment ard intimidation cases contain drug allegations as well as other 1 allegations of wrondoing: in other words there is overlap between the cat-egories of wrongdoing that I am describing.) The following are repre-i
Ben E. Hayes 5 Dec mber 21, 1984
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sentative of sone of these allegations: A QC inspector asserted that he has been ordered to inspect strictly in accordance with what he felt were inade-quate procedures, and was harassed when he complained; a QC inspector for Technical Metals, Inc., claimed that he was harassed and intimidated for cooperating with Q1 in April 1984 (The Q1 investigator's notes reflect his .
belief that Federal law had been violated); a QC inspector who made record falsification allegations to the NRC was subjected to various forms of harass-s ment prior to his termination to include being assigned to a desk imediately adjacent to an individual cohabitating with the inspector's estranged wife; an E allegation by a former QC inspector who clained that he was blackballed from employnent at another nuclear site and that his confidentiality had been breached. This last case is particularly interesting as KG&E files reveal that this individual earlier had been the unwitting victim of an apparent illegal search of his vehicle during which documents contained in a box of his personal possessions were removed and destroyed by licensee officials. (The official allegedly involved in both matters is the Manager of Quality Assurance)
I found at least 8 cases which involved alleged record falsification. None of these, to the best of my knowledge, have been reported to the NRC. Addition-ally, there were several cases which contain allegations that, if true, cast doubt en the independence and integrity of the Quality Assurance Program.
Indeed, many of the more technical allegations carried with them this same implication.
As I indicated above, only one of the approximately 25 personnel assigned to the 01 Program has had any formal investigative experience or training. The bulk of the individuals assigned to this organization appear to have a Quality Assurance or a Construction background. Nonetheless, I was very favorably impressed with the attitudes of most of the personnel that I encountered.
There were uniformly bright and knowledgeable regarding the activities of the site and at least at the working level, appeared to be comitted to quality.
Nonetheless, their lack of investigative experience was evident in at least two areas, the attitude with which most of them appeared to follow alle-gations, and their ability to document the results of their efforts.
With regard to the first, it appears that the average Q1 investigator pursues allegations as if the alleged deficiencies were only the product of either shoddy workmanship or laziness. By this I mean few if any appear to approach M the allegaticn from the perspective that the deficiency may be deliberate, i.e., that it may involve wrongdoing. Some of them appear to be either unwilling or unable to draw inferences from observed deficiencies. As an -
example, some, when given the hypothetical example of an alleger providing specific information regarding clearly defective pipe hangers which had been accepted, volunteered that this condition may have been a product of an improperly trained QC inspector. None of them appeared to be alert to the fact that if the hanger were rejectable, then clearly the inspection records supporting them would be false. Even when this condition was pointed out, g oniy one suggested that the record falsification may have been a product of harassment and intimidation.
Ben B. Hayes 6 December 21, 1984 It was also not clear to me just exactly how investigations were being conducted. It appeared to be highly variable. Although, most investigators indicated that they personally would look at suspected hardware, generally the responsibility for examining additional related hardware was given the affected construction organization. In short, quite a bit of traditional investigative work was given other entities for accomplishment with predict-ably variable results, let alone qLestionable objectivity.
Q1 investigative reports seldom provide the detailed documentation to support their conclusions that we expect in 01 reports of investigation. They are at best bare bones efforts that do not provide the reader an opportunity to see the evidence relied upon by the investigators to arrive at their conclusions.
They apparently are construed as adequate enough by KG&E to allow them to cor-rect deficiencies as quickly as possible. It is highly likely that KG&E does not expect these reports to be the literary or professional equivalent of 01 reports of investigation. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to establish a standard approaching that of 01's for such reports of investigation if KG&E wishes an outside party such as the NRC to rely upon them in reaching an informed judgement. I might add that there is one interesting contrast. The one trained investigator in the Q1 Program tends to produce Q1 reports of investigation of approximately the same degree of coverage as that of his relatively untrained co-workers. On the other hand, the reports that he produces for the General Counsel appear to be highly professional; i.e., they are quite well written and detailed.
In the final analysis, I do not have a great degree of confidence in the Q1 Program. I certainly could not accept it as a suitable substitute for 01 efforts - at least in the areas of wrongdoing which fall within the ambit of the OI. I say this based only in part upon the deficiencies that I have cited abcve.
I also was struck by the general sense of frustration evidenced by many of the Quality First personnel as well as other Wolf Creek personnel with whom I spoke. The consensus appeared to be that harassment and intimidation'was quite prevalent at Wolf Creek, especially within the Daniel International organization, and that there was little that they could do to correct it.
They did not appear to feel that they enjoyed any great support from their management structure, and indeed, that is not an illogical perception. .Their management structure is composed of those persons whose favorable employment (
evaluations are based primarily on their ability to have Wolf Creek meet its scheduled fuel load date. Indeed, fuel load appears to be a recurring theme that one hears all over the site. This is understandable, it is even pre-dictable, but it does not make for an independent investigative program staffed with the numbers and types of personnel needed to do the job. There has been considerable turnover in the Q1 work force which is attributable to reasons more than the desire to find more stable employment in the face of a possible loss of job at the end of construction. At least two fomer Q1 employees asserted to me their belief that the program was viewed as a hindrance to fuel load.by the Vice President-Nuclear. They and others appear 1 to be genuinely concerned about the effect of harassment and intimidation, especially by Daniel, on well-intentioned and sincere craft personnel who I
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8 December 21. 1984
,, genB. Hayes bring deficiencies to the attention of the NRC, Q1, or even their own supervisors.
i With regard to the harassnent and intimidation, it should be noted that KG&E has made a concerted effort to have employees bring such allegations to the attention of Q1 which in turn would have the ostensible mission of redressing the employees' complaints. Q1, however, does not advise the complainant of his or her protections under Department of Labor (DOL) and NRC regulations.
As a consequence, if Q1's attempts to redress the employees' concerns are unsuccessful, i.e., they are unable to develop sufficient information to substantiate the employee's assertions, or they are unable to correct the condition which led to the complaint to begin with, the 30 day period in which the employee must act to preserve his or her DOL rights is expired. This has the effect intended or otherwise cf depriving employees of their right to 00L protection.
As I have mentioned to you previously, during my evaluation I developed information relating to the character of certain senior KG8E officials. I will provide the details of this to you separately.
Based on my evaluation, it is my recommendation and firm belief that the NRC should not rely on the results of the KG&E Investigative Program. Rather, it should insist that matters falling within the jurisdiction of the NRC be promptly reported through existing reporting channels, and a decision made at such time regarding the necessity of NRC intervention. At the same time, I do not wish to close on such a totally r.egative note. I strongly believe that licensee investigative programs are a step in the right direction, and that further, KG&E does have the nucleus for a fine program. We must be very careful not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. With some modifications along the lines that I have either suggested or alluded to in this evaluation, I believe that this Agency could place increased reliance upon the licensees work products so long as it is assured of the candid and pronpt reporting of relevant information.
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Enclosures:
As stated cc: R.A. Fortuna E.C. Gilbert R.K. Herr, 01:RIV Distribution:
L'61:s/f Wolf Creek 01:c/f 01:r/f WJWard 01 WJWard/jh 11/02/84 DW: BILL /KG&E/jh
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