Under regulatory pressure to change the way employee concerns are handled, TVA says it is trying to thaw the often chilled atmosphere for employees to raise safety concerns at its Watts Bar nuclear plant.
TVA’s top nuclear officials said Tuesday they have revamped management procedures, coached bosses on how to better treat workers and conducted surveys and employee meetings to better encourage and respond to safety issues raised by workers.
“We recognize that the Watts Bar environment, and specifically in operations, had degraded to a point where some operators felt reluctant to raise issues – we get that and we own that,” Mike Balduzzzi, senior vice president at TVA, told nuclear regulators Tuesday. “We firmly believe it is necessary for our employees to feel free to raise nuclear safety issues without fear of retaliation and, in fact, they should expect to be complimented for doing so.”
Despite such reassurances, however, a nuclear watchdog group questioned why TVA keeps having problems with employee concerns at its nuclear plants. During a hearing before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s regional staff in Atlanta, the director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Nuclear Safety Project said the corrections program outlined by TVA “is troubling in that it shows how blind TVA continues to be” in its culture and response to worker concerns about potential safety problems at nuclear plants.
“It’s disappointing for a company that has gone through a number of safety-conscious work environment problems repeatedly over a number of years can’t recognize signs of those problems until someone else calls their attention to it,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer who once worked at the NRC and now studies the industry for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Since they are having trouble figuring out that they have those problems, there’s not much confidence that they will be able to solve problems that are invisible to them.”