It probably should be no surprise that just two weeks ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a "chilling effect letter" to TVA after determining that a "chilled work environment" exists within the operations staff at the Watts Bar nuclear power plant in Spring City.
An NRC review at Watts Bar - some 48 miles northeast of Chattanooga - found that some operations employees may not have felt free to raise safety concerns. Some Tennessee Valley Authority licensed operators may have been unduly influenced and directed by sources external to the control room, NRC regulators wrote.
It seems that Watts Bar workers still made more allegations about safety problems to federal regulators this year (six already in 2016) than any other nuclear plant in the country, according to a new NRC report. What's more, Watts Bar is No. 2 on the list for worker complaints to regulators from 2012 through 2015, tallying 54 complaints altogether. But that's not all. TVA's Browns Ferry plant, with three reactors, is No. 3 on the list with 52 complaints at the Athens, Ala., plant in three years.
Normally, these Watts Bar workers would raise their concerns with TVA, and TVA would investigate and fix the problems that prompted concerns among the workers who are readying the new second reactor at Watts Bar to go online in June. But that apparently wasn't happening on the TVA end, so the workers - most of whom have families living here, too, went to NRC.
Just a month ago, we noted on this page that it was disconcerting that a pump motor fire at the new Unit 2 reactor forced the public utility to declare a brief emergency alert even before the new reactor reached criticality. TVA crews were testing equipment in the new unit when the fire was noticed. Because it took 19 minutes to extinguish the small fire, TVA was required to declare a "Notice of an Unusual Event" - the lowest of the four NRC emergency classifications.
About a year before that, the federal NRC fined TVA $70,000 for poor oversight of agency contractors after those contractors falsified required fire watches at the Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant in Soddy-Daisy and then tried to cover up that falsification. And before that, contractors at Watts Bar were charged federally for falsifying inspection records of cables that hadn't even been installed yet. In fact, in recent years, all three of TVA's operational nuclear plants have been under some form of special watch from NRC, and at one point all three were on special watch for safety problems at the same time.
NRC spokesman Roger Hannah told Times Free Press Business Editor Dave Flessner this week that the NRC takes each employee safety allegation seriously, especially since utilities have their own internal employee concerns program to try to deal with problems before they reach a regulatory level.
"But more important than the number of these allegations is their seriousness, so just adding up the number may not indicate how serious a problem there may or may not be," Hannah said.
What we don't understand is why the NRC hasn't sent TVA the same sort of chilling effect letter about Sequoyah and Browns Ferry nuclear plants. In previous years, it would seem there has been additional chill at all TVA plants: During the five-year period between 2008 and 2012, Browns Ferry had 65 complaints, Sequoyah had 50 and Watts Bar had 40 whistle-blower allegations. That totals 155. So 2013, 2014 and 2015 are just more of the same.
The good news - other than the fact that the NRC finally is taking a deeper look at Watts Bar before the newest reactor hits full stride - is that TVA has decided not to pursue completing the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant near Scottsboro, Ala., some 41 miles southwest of Chattanooga. Bellefonte is the plant where we ratepayers have already spent at least $5 billion over some 43 years, yet one reactor is said to be about 90 percent complete and a second is supposedly 58 percent complete. TVA is now soliciting alternative ideas for the plant - or a buyer.
The bad news is that TVA leaders have said they plan to file an application next month to designate a site near Oak Ridge for a new type of smaller nuclear plant - in fact several. The still-in-design technology is called "small modular reactors" or SMRs. TVA would build several of them on a 1,364-acre site on the Clinch River - the site where the U.S. Department of Energy once began building a breeder reactor.
SMRs are said by backers to be safer than conventional nuclear plants because they are underground. But somehow the thought of radioactive nuclear fuel underground on the banks of the Clinch River which flows in short order to the Tennessee River upstream of Chattanooga doesn't sound particularly soothing.
TVA, for its part, must respond in writing to the NRC within 30 days of the March 24 "chilled work environment" letter.
TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said the utility takes the letter "very seriously."
"We have a robust employee concerns program and continue to actively encourage employees to raise concerns, including reporting them to the NRC," Hopson told the Times Free Press.
Since that "robust" concerns program clearly hasn't been enough, perhaps TVA might want to become better at tending the nuclear plants we have, rather than foolishly seek to build more.