ML19257A735

Revised Contentions Re Licensee Emergency Plans in Light of President'S Commission Rept on Tmi.Alleges Inadequacy & Ineffectiveness of Plans for Failure to Comply W/Reg Guide 1.70 Requirements.Certificate of Svc Encl

ML19257A735
Person / Time
Site:	Three Mile Island
Issue date:	12/18/1979
From:	Bowers J ANTI-NUCLEAR GROUP REPRESENTING YORK
To:	Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel
References
NUDOCS 8001070488
Download: ML19257A735 (18)

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NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION D a oD

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BEFORE THE ATOMIC SAFETY AND LICENSING BOARD In the Matter of )

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METROPOLITAN EDISON COMPANY ) Docket No. 50-289 (Three Mile Island ) (Restart)

Nuclear Station, Unit One) )

ANGRY REVISED CONTENTIONS (1) REGARDING COMMONWEALTH CF PENNSYLVANIA AND LICENSEE EMERGENCY PLANS AND (2) IN LIGHT OF NEWLY RECEIVED INFORMATION (REPORT OF PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON THREE-MILE ISLAND)

Pursuant to this Board's determination at pp. 858,9 of the transcript of these proceedings directing the submission of contentions relating to the licensee's emergency plan on or before Decembei 18, 1979, and to receipt by ANGRY of information not available to it at the time its contentions were initially prepared, namely, the Report of the President's Commission on 1

Despite its earlier availability, the Staff failed to serve the President's Commission Report on the parties to this proceeding until November 26, 1979. The NRC Local Public Document Room established at York College, which contains the reports of the technical and legal staf fs to the President's Commission, did not become operational until December 7, 1979. In light of these facts, ANGRY submits that the revisions to its contentions based on this material and contained herein are timely filed.

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I Three-Mile Island, ANGRY hereby submits revised contentions as hereinbelow set forth.

REVISED CONTENTION #III ( A) :

The licensee's Emergency Plan (EP) fails to satisfy reasonable and applicable standards of adequacy and effectiveness in the following principal respects:

A. The adoption of a ten-mile geographic limit to the extent of the licensee's emergency planning capability (at p. 2-5) lacks substantial basis in either logic or fact.2 To the contrary, Regulatory Guide (RG) 1.70 S 13.3.1 specifically requires that one of the protective measures that is to be incorporated in coordinated emer-gency plans is evacuation of persons from the exclusion area and from any other potentially affected sector of the environs. . . (Emphasis added)

B. There is no provision in the EP for the prevention of damage to property (e.g., livestock) in the area surrounding the pLuit site as required by Appendix E to 10 CFR50, SS II(C), III, and IV(C).

C. The statement that "PEMA and the counties within the ten-mile EPZ utilize the same classification See ANGRY Contention II(C) .

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system" (p. 4-8) is in error. The York County Evacuation Plan contains no classification system whatsoever. ,

D. The perfunctory form letters found in Appendix C to licensee's EP provide no indication, let alone assurance, of the existence of 1 mutually acceptable criteria" for implementation of emergency measures as required by Emergency Planning Review Guideline No. One, Revision One (EPRG) S IV( A) (1) .

E. The adoption of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Disaster Operations Plan Annex E (DOP) designation of "the ' risk county' as responsible for the preparation and dissemination of information material on protective actions to the general public" (p. 6-8) conflicts with the requirements in EPRG S II ( A) (7) and RG 1.101 5 6.4(2) to make available on request to occupants in the LPZ information concerning how the emergency plans provide for notifi-cation to them and how they can expect to be advised what to do.

F. The licensee's "Onsite Emergency Organization"

( S 4.5.1. 3) contcine insufficient personnel and expertise in the area of Health Physics to discharge adequately the responsibilities of dose assessment and projection in the event of a 9

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rapidly developing accident sequence. The time required for the mobili=ation of offsite health physics support (2-4 hrs.-See Table 8) , which is given responsibility for "overall assessment of the impact of liquid and gaseous effluents with respect to. . . protective action guides" (p. 5-12), is inconsistent with adequate radiolo .

gical assessment capability.

G. The licensee's EP fails to provide for furnishing to the Pennsylvania Bureau of Radiation Protection (BORP) information called for in the latter's plan such as " nature of the failure, the status of safeguards, the condition of consequence niti-gating features" (p. VI-1) and " mix of radio-nuclides discharged" (p . VII-1) .

H. The claim that "all aspects of the plan will be fully implemented within 60 days prior to the restart of TMI Unit 1" (p. 2-1) is potentially in conflict with the plan's provision for a " joint exercise" radiation emergency drill which will be held only "about once every five years" (p.8-7).3 See ANGRY Contention II(E).

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I. The licensee's emergency notification procedures (pp. 6-2, 6-3, 6-4; Figure 15)4 are inadequate with respect to certain areas directly at risk in the event of a nuclear cccident, namely, York and Lancaster Counties. Although the Dauphin County Emergency Operations Center receives immediate notification of an emergency declaration, notifi-cation of York and Lcncaster Counties must follow an excessively circuitous path:

1. Licensee to Dauphin

2. Licensee to PEMA

3. PEMA to BORP

4. BORP to Licensee

5. Licensee to BORP

6. BORP to PEMA

7. PEMA to Dauphin

8. PEMA to York, Lancaster and Cumberland Counties such a notification sequence is in direct conflict with requirements that " delegations of authority that will permit emergency actions (such as evacuation) to be taken with a minimum of delay should be carefully considered" (NUREG 75/111,5 A3) 4

- See also Pa. DOP Appendix 3.

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and that "Upon declaration of a ' general emergency' immediate notification shall be made directly to the offsite authorities responsible for implementing protective measures. ..

(EPRG S II(A) (5)) (Emphasis in original).

J. RG 1.101 S 6.4 requires the licensee to specify

" criteria for implementing protective actions

. . ." The licensee's EP fails to set forth the following mandatory items of information regarding the time required for protective action imple-mentation:

1. Expected accident assessment time.

RG 1.70, S 13.3.1-2.

2. Time required to warn persons at risk. RG 1.101, S 6.4.1-2(b);

RG 1.70, S 13.3.1-3,4.

3. Time required for a general evacuation. RG 1.70, S 13.3.1-5,5; November 29, 1979 letter to "All Power Reactor Licensees" from Brian K. Grimes, Director, NRC Emergency Preparedness Task Group.

4. Time required to evacuate special facilities (e.g., hospitals).

November 29, 1979 letter, suora.

REVISED CONTENTION # III(B) :

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Disaster Operations Plan, Annex E (DUP) and the Bureau of Radiation Protection i693 256

(BORP) Plan for Nuclear Power Generating Station Incidents fail to satisfy reasonable and applicable standards of adequacy and effectiveness in the following principal respects:

A. There is no demonstrated basis in logic or fact for the " Assumption" that:

P. The ten-mile evacuation distance includes an adequate safety margin which precludes the need for evacuation of institutions, facilities or people beyond the ten-mile radius.

(DOP, p. 4)

B. The BORP's " incident classification" system (S II) is based upon RG 1.101 and is thus inconsistent with the licensee's system,

_ which is based upon NUREG 0610. Such incon-sistency conflicts with both RG 1.101, S 4.1 and EPRG S II(B) (4) .

C. The BORP classification system is otherwise deficient in that it lumps together all but the least serious accidents under one classi-fication, " Emergency Event", thus precluding guidance as to appropriate emergency response a more detailed breakdown of emergency events would permit. For example, NUREG 0610 states:

The immediate action for this class (general emergency) is sheltering (staying inside) rather than evacuation until an assessment can

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be made that (1) an evacuation is indicated and (2) an evacuation, if indicated, can be completed prior to significant release and transport of radioactive materials to the affected areas.

D. .There is no provision for stockpiling and distri-bution of chemical thyroid blocking agents as required by EPRG S IV (B) (3) (e) .

E. The Emergency Planning Review Guideline requires

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state / local plans to designate " protective action guides and/or other criteria for implementing specific protective actions. . ."5 (S IV(B) (1) ; emphasis added) and "information needs" for implementing such protective actions S Iv(B) (2)) . The BORP Plan both fails to explicitly impose upon the licensee clear responsibility for fulfilling such information needs or,where required, to undertake to satisfy

, them at its own initiative.

(1) Section VIII(A) of the BORP Plan indicates " time to onset of release" as 5The Report of the President's Commission on the Accident at TMI emphasizes the importance of such analysis and prior planning:

Planning should involve the identification of several different kinds of accidents with different possible radiation consequences. For each such scenario, there should be clearly iden-tified criteria for the appropriate responses at various distances. . . response plans should be keyed to various possible scenarios. . .(pp. 76,77).

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4 a significant factor in determining the appropriateness of recommending evacu-ation. However, nowhere is the licensee given explicit responsibility for providing such information, nor dces the Plan contain an analysis of how variation of this factor will affect the choice of appropriate protective action.6 See e.g.,

NUREG 0610, p . 13, par . 4 (c) .

(2) A second factor listed is " time required to effect relocation". NUREG 75/111, 5 J(6) requires an adequate state plan

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to include development of " bases and time frames for evacuation" resulting in " estimates of the time required to carry out evacuation procedures" that reflect consideration of such factors as " impaired mobility of parts of the population 7 (S J(7) (c)) and " potential 6

Such analysis is surely preferable to simply assuming, as the Pa. DOP plan does, that " adequate lead time will be available to implement the provisions of this plan" (p. 4).

7The importance of this factor was graphically demon-strated to this Board in the statement of Warren L. Pre l.es nik ,

Executive Vice President of Harrisburg Hospital, identified in d

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t impediments to use of egress routes, such as rush hour traffic and inclement weather" (S J(7) (f)) . The availability of this and other information specified by the President's Commission (footnote 5, supra) is an essential prerequiste to adequate emergency planning and decision making whether or not in the context of an actual emergency situation. -

REVISED CONTENTION # VI:

The TMI-l reactor was designed and constructed in accordance with General Design Criteria within which the Table 3 of the licensee's EP as being within a ten-mile radius of TMI, that "our hospital alone would have required a minimum of 48 hours5.555556e-4 days <br />0.0133 hours <br />7.936508e-5 weeks <br />1.8264e-5 months <br /> under Sideal conditions' to safely evacuate those 200 type (requiring medical support systems) patients that we had in our hospital at that time." (Tr. 14 59) .

8 The licensee challenged this contention in its original version for the reason that its alleged lack of

" specificity" precluded him from assessing its relevance to his interpretation of the scope of this proceeding, i.e., "the bases for suspension." With respect to the question of specificity, see footnoto # 9 below. The one impression that clearly emerges from a review of the various positions the licensee has taken thus far in this proceeding on the question of its scope is that of inconsistency. In its answer to the Commission's August 9 Order, the licensee urged this board to " confine this proceeding strictly to issues directly related to the TMI-2 accident and to the question of what measures need to be taken in the light of that accident to assure the continued safe operation of TMI-1."

Later,in its response to amended petitions, the licensee contended that the sole issue before this Board was "the 1693 260

particular constellation of events which caused the TMI-2 accident, and others similar thereto in their involvement of multiple and interrelated mechanical and human breakdowns, were considered too improbable to be included. The failure of the TMI-l reactor design and operator training to anticipate such multiple failures in equipment and operational functioning renders it peculiarly vulnerable to a breakdown comparable in necessity and sufficiency of the Director's recommendations to resolve the concerns identified by the Commission as the bases for suspension of operation of TMI-1." The licensee reiterated this position in oral argument before this Board (Tr. 147) and in its response to the NRC Staff's brief on the effect of rulemaking, at p. 6. In its latest pronouncement, a response to Steven Sholly 's Amendment to his Petition to Intervene , the

. licensee states that the issue before this Board is whether "the short-term actions taken by Licensee are necessary and sufficient to provide reasonable assurance that a TMI-2 type accident will not recur at TMI-1" (p. 8) . Of course, it need not be belabored that none of these positions conforms to what the Commission actually identified in its Order as the subjects to be considered at the hearing (See August 9 Order and Notice ,cf Hearing, p. 12; see also statements of Norman Aamodt at Tr. 134 and 139 for the position as to scope which in the judgment of ANGRY most closely conforms to the actual language employed by the Commission in its Order). Notwithstanding the uncertainty which may exist as to the licensee's position, ANGRY submits that its contention # 6 clearly falls within the boundary of the NRC staff's position on the scope of this hearing:

But on the other hand, we don't believe simply because the Commission may not have mentioned this item specifically in either its July 2 Order or its August 9 Order, that we could not take that up if there were. . .

a reasonable nexus between that generic event and the TMI-2 accident. (Tr. 123).

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severity to the TMI-2 accident. All safety related systems in TMI-1 must be subjected to thorough analysis and modification to assure their ability to withstand hypothetical accident scenarios that reflect all reasonably conceivable combinations of human and mechanical failure. The results of such analyses should also be incorporated into improvements in operator training. The measures specified in the NRC's August 9 Order fail to impose these essential conditions to the restart of ,

TMI-1.

BASES FOR REVISED CONTENTION # VI:

In NUREG 0578, the TMI-2 Lessons Learned Task Force stated:

The functions and general characteristics of the systems required to provide defense in depth are specified in the General Design Criteria of the Commission regulations (Appendix A to 10 CFR Part 50). The specific design and performance requirements of these systems ar> determined, generally by analysis, so that the consequences of specified events, such as anticipated operational transients and design basis accidents, are within specific acceptance criteria.

9 The licensee's endlessly repeated demand that inter-venors "specify the scenarios they desire to litigate" (Response to Sholly Amendment, p. 9) begs the very question ANGRY seeks to raise with its Contention # VI. It is precisely the failure (or unwillingness) of the licensee and staff to develop and incor-porate into design basis planning and operator training scenarios of the type identified in its contention that ANGRY seeks to challenge thereby.

At Three Mile Island, some of the safety systems were challenged to a greater extent or in a different manner than was anticipated in their design basis. Many of the events that occurred were known to be possible, but were not previously judged to be sufficiently probable to require consideration in the design basis. . . A central issue that will be considered is whether to modify or extend the current design basis events or to depart from the concept. For example, analysis of design basis accidents could be modified to include multiple equipment failures and more explicit consideration of operator actions or inaction, rather than employing the conventional single-failure criterion (p. 16, 17).

(Emphasis added)

The Task Force gave a concrete example of such design inadequacy when in the course of a discussion of initiating parameters for containment isolation it remarked, "For these events, minimum ECCS function has always been assumed. None of these analyses has assumed the failure of emergency core cooling. . ." (p. A-14). However, the requirement for design and accident analysis the Task Force eventually decided to impose on reactor operators expressly excluded the need for consideration of " passive failures or multiple system failures."

It went on to speculate as to the "need for more analyses in the long term" as a result of " reconsideration of the appropriateness of the single-failure criterion" (p. A-44, 45).

In its final report, NUREG 0585, the Task Force returned to this theme:

The accident also involved a sequence of events more severe than those included in current design basis events, and thus, it 1693 263 raised the question of whether other events should be included. . . The design basis events are not realistic descriptions of all of the numerous and varied. events that could occur at nuclear power plants. . . There remains, however, the possibility that significant event sequences have been over-looked and not included within the current design basis events. . 10 (p. 3-1).

It (auxiliary feedwater system review) revealed some relatively low system relia-bilities in particular designs because the existing single failure criterion excludes some passive failures and some operator '

errors. Better identification of these types of design inadequacies, if they exist in other systems, can be gained through systematic, integrated, quantitative evaluations of potential accident sequences and system responses. (p. 3-2).

Actions to be taken as a result of such evaluations were also outlined:

Equipment identified as the potential cause of violation of the acceptance criteria for any design basis event should be appropriately modified to eliminate or significantly reduce the probability of adverse interaction.

Alternatively, the affected safety systems or structures should be modified to cope with the interraction. (p. A-14).

10"But there are certain combinations of events and failures which fell outside our envelope, so we didn't look at those." Statement by Harold Denton, Director, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, USNRC, before Senate Sub-Committee.on Nuclear Regulation, Serial No. 96-H12, p. 413.

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v.

The President's Commission on the Three Mile Island Accident also addressed itself to the issues raised in ANGRY's Contention # VI. The Commissi,on sharply criticized NRC policy under which:

Applicants for licensees are only required to analyze " single-failure" accidents; they are not required to analyze what happens when two systems or components fail independently of each other.

The accident at TMI-2 was a multiple failure accident. (p. 52)

The Commission's recommendations included the adoption, as a

" safety emphasis", of a systems engineering examination of overall plant design and performance, including inter-action among major systems and increased attention to the possibility of multiple failures; (p. 63)

The Technical Staff Analysis Report on Quality Assurance to the Commission quoted from an April, 1976 letter from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers:

Ritualistic applications of single-failure criteria do not serve the public safety purpose.

The report went on to state:

The single failure criterion is an inferior rule of design by comparison with more extensive reliability / safety techniques available. (p. 18)

One such technique cited and endorsed by the staff report is Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) employed extensively by NASA.

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General Design Criterion 29 requires that safety systems "be designed to assure an extremely high probability of accomplishing their safety function in the event of anticipated operational occurrences." ANGRY's Contention #VI is intended to insure that for TMI-l the term " anticipated operational occurrences" encompasses in as comprehensive a manner as possible that class of multiple failure events identified by the NRC as having been responsible for the TMI-2 accident.

Dated: December 18 _, 1979 Respectfully submitted, ANTI-NpCIJAR UP REPRESENTING YORK t (.

By: M b 4 k. Y John Bowerg 245 West Philadelphia Street York, PA 17404 i693 266

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.. e UNITED STATES OF ABERICA 4- 9$h4 v\

NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION O Ng7 JO BEFORE THE ATOMIC SAFETY AND LICENSING BOARD bc c @$ 46 Yh In the Matter of . ) # WI

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METROPOLITAN EDISON COMPANY ) Docke t No. 50-289

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(Three Mile Island Nucle ar St ation, )

Unit Fo. 1) )

CERTIFIC ATE OF SERVICE I hereby certify th'at I have this 18th day of December,1970, served copies of the foregoing Revised Contentions of ANGRY on each of the following persons by deposit in the United St ates mail, post age prepaid.

Ivan W. Smith, Esq. Docketing and Service Section Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Office of the Secret ary

.U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Consnission U.S. Phclear Regulatory Commission Washington, D.C. 20555 Washington, D .C. 20555 Dr. Walter H. Jord an James A . Tourtellotte, Esq.

881 W. Outer Drive Of fice of Executive Legal Director Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37830 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Comission Washington, D .C. 20555 Di . Linda W. Little George F. Trowbridge, Esq.

5000 Hermitage Drive Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge Rs z.eigh, North Carolina 27612 1800 M Street, N. W.

Washington, D.C. 20006

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