KNOXVILLE — The Tennessee Valley Authority used a decade-old computer model to forecast river flooding affecting what could become one of the United States’ first new nuclear plants of the 21st century.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday cited the country’s largest public utility for “quality assurance” violations in its bid for a build-andoperate license for a two-reactor nuclear station at its never-completed Bellefonte site in North Alabama.
The NRC said TVA used a 1998 computer model, supported by data from a 1963 flood, to predict how fast the Tennessee River could rise and flow after heavy rains upstream or near the proposed plant in Scottsboro.
The computer model failed to reflect modifications to the upstream Chickamauga Dam, the effects of a new Chickamauga Lock or even valleywide flooding in 2003, according to the NRC.
Supporting data not only was old — developed using the comparatively ancient Fortran computer program — it couldn’t immediately be found, NRC engineering division director Patrick Hiland complained in a March 19 letter to TVA nuclear vice president Ashok Bhatnagar.
Bottom line: “TVA was unable to provide evidence to confirm that TVA conducted verifications and validations to ensure that the (forecasting) computer program functioned correctly,” Hiland wrote.
The NRC cited TVA for three level-four violations, the lowest level on NRC’s list, and probably will not assess fines, NRC spokesman Roger Hannah said.
However, the problems have come up less than two months into a multiyear process to license one of the first U.S. nuclear plants applied for in 30 years, and one that will use a next-generation Westinghouse AP1000 pressurized-water reactor design. The nuclear industry is watching.
“TVA is going to work with the NRC to resolve these issues,” TVA spokesman Terry Johnson said, adding there “is the possibility that other issues are going to be raised as they go through this application review.”
TVA, which provides electricity to about 8.7 million consumers in Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, has nine power company and reactor manufacturing partners in the Bellefonte license. The consortium is called NuStart Energy Development LLC.
They have applied for permission to build and operate a plant on the site of a two-reactor station TVA began in the 1970s, scrapped before it was finished in the 1980s and wrote off in the 1990s.
Not much of that old plant would remain for the new plant. TVA has yet to say if it will build the station, although agency officials say they likely will need the power by 2017 or 2018 when the plant could be finished.
TVA manages the entire Tennessee River system on a minute-by-minute basis through a series of dams to ensure navigation, power generation, recreation, water quality and flood control. But the computer modeling TVA submitted to the NRC for Bellefonte suggests it just dusted off materials from decades ago.
