The Sequoyah Nuclear Plant near Soddy-Daisy sits next to the Tennessee River.
Federal regulators have slapped TVA with a $70,000 fine for not maintaining required fire watches at the Sequoyah Nuclear Power Plant three years ago and for not adequately supervising contractors who tried to cover up the failure.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced the civil penalty Wednesday — the first in 14 years at an operating TVA nuclear plant.
The NRC penalty was classified as the lowest safety severity. But the fine was imposed because contract workers who were supposed to be watching for a potential fire in October and November of 2012 did not do their jobs and then falsified records to try to hide the violations.
Victor McCree, regional administrator for the NRC in Atlanta, said he was imposing the fine “to emphasize the importance of prompt identification of violations, the importance of TVA’s oversight of its fire protection plan implementation, and in recognition of the willful aspects of the violations.”
“The potential consequences of missed fire watches concern us,” McCree said in a statement. “Although there are other fire protection features, fire watches are an important part of the plant’s overall fire protection strategy, especially in areas where other equipment may be temporarily unavailable.”
TVA said it will not contest the penalty. John Carlin, the Sequoyah site vice president, said TVA has upgraded equipment and procedures to limit the need for long-term fire watches and improved its oversight procedures to avoid a repeat of the problem during refueling outages.
TVA dismissed six contract workers and managers who failed to maintain the fire watches or tried to cover up the problem at Sequoyah in 2012.
“This was not consistent with TVA and Sequoyah standards, and we’ve taken aggressive steps to correct this problem,” Carlin said. “We take this very seriously, and those involved were removed and they may no longer work at TVA nuclear facilities.”
Investigations by the TVA Inspector General and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that laborers and foremen for Day & Zimmerman, one of the construction and engineering contractors hired by TVA for outage repairs at Sequoyah, “deliberately failed to conduct compensatory hourly fire watches as required.”
Workers said at the time that they were maintaining fire watches and falsified documents to indicate the fire watches were being conducted. But security logs and cameras indicated that no such fire inspections or reviews actually were done.
The safety infraction was one of 13 notices of violation the NRC has imposed against TVA operating nuclear plants in the past decade, but the first since 2001 with a monetary penalty, according to notices filed on the NRC web page.
TVA was fined $70,000 in 2013 for quality assurance problems in verifying equipment used to build the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor, which it is still building and hopes to complete later this year.
The hourly fire watches at Sequoyah and other nuclear plants are required to compensate for fire equipment that is out of service during repairs or refueling outages.
The NRC is imposing a monetary fine because NRC inspectors, not TVA, discovered the violations, and because the workers involved tried to deceive regulators about their actions. But NRC spokesman Roger Hannah said that once TVA was made aware of the fire watch failure, the utility took corrective actions.
“While the contractors falsified records, there is no evidence that TVA did,” he said.
McCree said the lack of a fire watch did not create any immediate problems since there was no fire during the lapses in fire protection procedures, and he said TVA has since corrected the problem. But the NRC plans another inspection and review of the plant, probably during an outage at Sequoyah this spring.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340.