TVA, NRC mark progress at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant

ATHENS, Tenn. — Officials with TVA's Watts Bar Nuclear Plant told regulators Tuesday that, although the utility is behind schedule and over budget with the completion of a second reactor there, progress has improved in the past four months.

"We've had challenges to our budgets and our schedules, and I don't have a report on that today, but ... we think there is a positive trend," Watts Bar Construction Manager David Stinson told the officials with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in a public meeting.

Stinson flashed up a slide showing steam rising from both cooling towers at the Watts Bar plant near Spring City, Tenn. No electricity is being generated in the still-under-construction Unit 2 reactor, but Tennessee Valley Authority testing shows the new cooling tower is working, he said.

Regulators with the NRC acknowledged that they think work is progressing more safely and quickly.

NRC's Robert Haag, a construction projects chief for the region, said NRC will continue to look at the work TVA is doing, but also will look at ways that regulators can streamline some inspection processes to bring a reactor online at Watts Bar, where a reactor already is operating in compliance with standards.

"We're going to look at the applicability of some of our inspection projects, given that the plant has 20 years experience with [building and operating] Unit 1," he said.

Haag said nuclear regulators in September had assessed TVA's performance at Watts Bar as "acceptable," though he said a violation was issued to TVA for four "historical" matters still not corrected. He said one was a question of how a circuit breaker would perform under seismic stress.

But he congratulated TVA for improving performance overall.

Stinson said the nuclear construction at the plant has undergone many improvements.

"A year ago, we'd have told you we were having trouble with our weld program, but we've made changes," he said

TVA has improved its welding workforce, he said, and, in the process, "rejected" welds fell from about half to a rate of about one in 12.

Haag said NRC, too, is plugging ahead in its work, including a review of 532 historical concerns relating to 1980s partial construction at Watts Bar, before the work was halted without the second reactor's completion.

"We have closed out 145," Haag said. "We still have a lot of items left on our plate."

TVA officials have said Unit 2 was about 80 percent complete when construction was stopped in 1988.

TVA spokesman Terry Johnson said the agency will assess the budget and schedule again in January.

Currently, the interim fuel load date for Unit 2 is December for a start-up sometime in 2013. The original fuel load date was April for a start-up in 2012.