It is disconcerting that a pump motor fire for TVA’s brand new reactor at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City forced the public utility to declare a brief emergency alert even before the new Unit 2 reached criticality to begin making electricity in June.
Tennessee Valley Authority crews were testing equipment Wednesday in the new unit when the fire was noticed at 3:42 a.m. in one of the three hotwell pump motors in the turbine building on the non-nuclear side of the reactor where radioactive fuel was loaded several weeks ago.
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 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s emergency classifications. The alert was ended by 5:08 a.m. after operators confirmed that all plant systems were operating as designed.
“Plant personnel extinguished the motor fire, and there was no danger to the public,” TVA spokesman Jim Hopson said. “Other Watts Bar Unit 2 systems were unaffected. Watts Bar Unit 1 was also unaffected and remained safely online throughout the event.”
Other nuclear experts – U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Joey Ledford and David Lochbaum, nuclear safety expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists – concurred.
That’s good news, and in this instance it appears the worst fallout for TVA’s beleaguered nuclear program might be a little embarrassment, a slight delay and a public reminder that nuclear power safety demands respect.
Just months ago, after 43 years of stops, starts and re-dos, TVA finally completed this second reactor at Watts Bar. Altogether, we ratepayers have spent about $12 billion to build the Watts Bar power plant.
But it’s important to recall that just a few years ago all three of the public utility’s nuclear plants were under some form of special watch from NRC.
And almost exactly a year ago, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission fined TVA $70,000 for poor oversight of agency contractors after those contractors falsified required fire watches at the Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant and then tried to cover that falsification.
NRC inspectors found that four contract foremen “deliberately failed to conduct compensatory hourly fire watches as required.” The watches were required to compensate for fire equipment that was out of service during a refueling outage at Sequoyah near Soddy-Daisy. NRC imposed a fine because NRC inspectors, not TVA, discovered the violation.
If you feel uncomfortable about this, you should. And if you think a $70,000 fine will get TVA’s attention, think again. The median income of TVA’s Chattanooga region employees is more than $70,000. It sounds like a lot of money to most of us, but to TVA it’s a cheap out – after all, this is the federal utility that in 2015 managed to spend at least $113 million on bonuses while losing $762 million in its pension fund investments, leaving the utility with a record high $6 billion shortfall in its employee retirement system.
Sadly, TVA oversight and TVA contractors have more than once left our nuclear safety – and our nuclear confidence – to hang in the wind.
In late 2011 and early 2012, two TVA contractors were prosecuted and sentenced in federal court after pleading guilty to falsifying and overseeing falsified work records at – yes – Watts Bar’s Unit 2 reactor as it was under construction.
Those contractors were responsible for making quality control inspections on electrical cables in the reactor’s containment area. But in some cases, the cables they certified as meeting safety standards weren’t even installed, according to comments at the time from then-U.S. Attorney Bill Killian.
Yes, you read that right. The cables didn’t even exist, except on paper. They were not installed. But in TVA work papers, they’d been put in place and deemed safe.
So if last week’s fire at Watts Bar will, at worst, cause a week’s delay for the new reactor’s full start-up, then we’re good.
It could be much worse.
And after all, what’s a few days’ additional wait for a reactor that’s been in some phase of construction for 43 years?