The Tennessee Valley Authority is implementing a new and more focused way for employees in the nuclear power program to voice their safety concerns which TVA officials hope will remove the federal utility from the regulatory watch list for having a "chilled" work environment by the end of the year.
TVA Nuclear Chief Timothy Rausch said the new employee concerns program is designed to be more proactive in identifying and addressing safety concerns by TVA workers than the previous program, which Rausch said employee surveys, internal audits and outside regulators had criticized for "inconsistent performance."
"The previous program, at times, has been reactive and waited for issues to come to us versus our desired environment where we are proactively identifying issues at early signs of decline and then striving to fully address them," Rausch said in an interview with the Times Free Press Thursday.
But the new employee concerns program and the staffing changes TVA is making to implement the change is generating its own employee concerns from critics who claim the federal utility is still stifling workers from raising questions about potential safety problems.
An attorney who represents most of the workers in the previous program whose jobs were eliminated by the change said TVA is ending a program that has helped workers to voice questions and potential problems at TVA's nuclear plants.
"While TVA's words pay lip-service to the 'vital role' played by the Employee Concern Program (ECP), if TVA really understood the necessity and significance of the ECP program in its own strong safety culture, it would not have taken this outrageous action," said Billie Pirner Garde, a Washington D.C. attorney currently representing four staff members for the former ECP program whose jobs was eliminated by the change.
In a letter to NRC's executive director for operations, Margaret Doane, Garde said the previous Employee Concerns Program with staffers at each of the three nuclear plants, plus the Chattanooga Office Complex downtown, provided "the only honest insight into the dysfunctional organization." Garde said the former TVA ECP program "has been at the forefront of identifying" problems and responding to employee concerns.
"To be blunt, if a TVA employee identifies a serious safety concern today, who are they going to call - ghost busters?" she asked the NRC in a letter outlining his concerns about the new initiative. "TVA's current senior management, in particular in the nuclear regulatory affairs and licensing department, is simply incapable of accepting truthful feedback about its work environment. Its focus, for years, has been to remove those individuals who try to tell management that it is their behaviors and conduct that is at the core of the problem."
The change in the ECP ended five jobs in the ECP program at TVA, although the workers could apply for other jobs.
"None of the Employee Concern Program representatives have been fired," Rausch said."But the revised program requires a different set of skills, abilities and experience for our Employee Concerns reps to ensure they can engage with workers and identify important issues earlier."
In an internal memo outlining the change in the Employee Concern Program last month, TVA said the new approach is a "more focused model for addressing employee concerns" and is similar to what other successful utilities are doing in their nuclear programs. The memo said employee feedback indicated that the former ECP program "is not an effective alternative avenue for raising concerns."
In a May 30 presentation obtained by the Knoxville News Sentinel, Greg Boerschig, TVA's vice president of nuclear oversight, said "the goal for success is not found in ECP enabling employees to use them as the preferred source of resolving concerns" outside of the normal chain of command.
"Success is defined by employees understanding that their leadership is the one solving their issues and that their management is the primary path for getting their issues resolved," Boerschig said. "ECP is truly a secondary path."
A May 14 TVA memo to employees said "ECP staff members will remain independent from management in its reporting structure, and will continue to respect and preserve employee anonymity as requested." A second internal TVA memo sent to nuclear staff last week said that employee surveys, focus groups and discussions have indicated "change is necessary in order to build the desired confidence that ECP is a viable alternative avenue for raising nuclear safety concerns."
But Garde claims that 90 percent of the employees who responded by surveys about the ECP program said they had confidence in the program as it existed prior to the changes.
Rausch said TVA employees have a number of ways to communicate any concerns they have about plant operations, including telling their supervisors, voicing concerns through TVA's corrective action program, making complaints to TVA's independent Inspector General or talking with the outside regulators at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
"We periodically reinforce to all of our employees the importance of raising safety concerns and their ability and rights to notify or communicate with them (the Inspector General, Employee Concerns Program staffers and NRC)," he said.
TVA's human resources department handles most employee complaints across TVA for concerns about sexual harassment, discrimination or unfair treatment in the workplace. But the ECP staff focused on complaints regarding quality control and nuclear and radiological safety issues at TVA's Sequoyah, Watts Bar and Browns Ferry nuclear power plants and the corporate nuclear staff that supports the three operating plants.
NRC spokesman Joey Ledford said the regulatory agency "continues to inspect and evaluate the safety conscious work environment at TVA's three nuclear sites" after the NRC found in 2016 that TVA had a "chilling" environment for worker concerns at its Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City, Tennessee.
NRC cited TVA for the ongoing problem and confirmed the chilled work environment at TVA again in 2017 and TVA remains under heightened scrutiny because of complaints about the work culture. In 2018, TVA's Inspector General also found that TVA was not adequately addressing nuclear safety concerns voiced by its workers. An NRC inspection in January of this year found improvements but not enough for the agency to remove its increased oversight.
The first reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant was within weeks of being started up in 1985 when employee concerns voiced about welds and wiring in the plant forced a review that ultimately led to a delay in the startup of the Unit 1 reactor for more than a decade while welding, wiring and other problems were addressed and the plant was revamped.
Ledford said the NRC did not require TVA to make any specific changes to its employee concern program and has been informed of the new program by TVA.
"The NRC expects that all NRC-regulated sites have an environment where employees feel free to raise any safety concerns, but each licensee decides how best to ensure that it exists," Ledford said.
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com