The Popperville Town Hall: Counterfeit and Fraudulent Parts All Over The Nuclear Industry

Originally published on Jan 15, 2013...

TVA cited for not testing nuclear parts

published Friday, March 29th, 2013

　
Federal regulators have cited TVA with three more apparent violations at Watts Bar Nuclear Plant — this time over thousands of parts the utility purchased that are not documented as nuclear-grade quality.

Tennessee Valley Authority officials and engineers then failed to maintain a quality assurance program to test and certify those parts as nuclear grade, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and TVA.

Now TVA must hire a contractor and pay for 30 or 40 experts to backtrack at least 6,200 shipments and purchases of different parts -- some already installed and some dating back to 1995.

What's more, the undocumented parts may not be installed or stored only at Watts Bar, but also at the Sequoyah and Browns Ferry nuclear plants. What began as a Watts Bar issue has been "escalated" to include all of TVA's seven reactors at three nuclear plants.

It was not clear Thursday, and TVA had no estimate, of how much it might cost to check all the parts, ensure their quality and replace any as necessary.

In 1995, the NRC recognized that nuclear operators were having increasing problems finding nuclear-grade parts as the industry's growth lulled in the United States after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. So regulators enacted rules requiring that parts obtained from non-nuclear-certified vendors must receive special and strict industry testing to be performed and documented by the operators.

But TVA apparently missed the memo.

TVA officials who met Thursday with NRC regulators in Atlanta acknowledged that their engineers didn't notice the new rules and didn't make the change.

TVA spokeswoman Gail Rymer said the nuclear plants are safe and the public is not at risk.

The parts review -- now about 11 percent complete -- has not identified any defective items, according to Joe Calle, TVA's manager for what the agency is calling the "recovery project."

Calle told NRC officials that TVA officials have confidence in the parts based on the utility's historical relationships with the commercial vendors and the specifications of their purchase orders. The quality of the parts is not the problem, he said. Rather, the trouble was in TVA's record-keeping for quality control.

"Latent organizational and programmatic shortfalls within engineering, supply chain and procurement engineering did not account for monitoring or assessing [the] ... commercial grade dedication program weaknesses and industry changes," Calle told NRC experts.

One example he gave was the database TVA used to catalog parts. He said it had drop-down windows for information entry, rather than areas that allowed for more information.

So TVA's procurement engineers "did not always provide sufficient documentation for the critical characteristics" to ensure quality parts. "Neither the software template nor the procedure contains direction for capturing critical thinking and justification," states a TVA slide provided to explain why many parts do not have adequate quality control documentation.

"We created our own perfect storm," Calle told NRC officials.

That quality control testing and documentation would vary from part to part, he said, but in many cases it should involve measuring sizes and testing hardness.

NRC officials Thursday seemed not so sure when Calle said at least one undocumented part has failed, but not because it was not a nuclear-grade part.

"You can't really tell why it failed, because you haven't really investigated it completely, right? You haven't completed all the reviews," countered Richard Croteau, the region's director for construction projects.

"No, we have a long way to go," Calle replied.

NRC inspectors first noticed the problem in a Watts Bar inspection in September 2011. When it was not resolved within a year, regulators in February 2012 handed TVA what is called a "noncited violation" notice.

Then in additional inspections in December 2012, January and February 2013, NRC inspectors decided still more attention was needed, and now the regulators have "escalated" their oversight.

"Based on the results of this ... three apparent violations were identified and are being considered for escalated enforcement action," states a new NRC letter to TVA dated Tuesday.

During Thursday's meeting, Calle and Don Jernigan, TVA's senior vice president for nuclear support, said that of the 6,200 unique parts orders (an order may contain multiple identical items) TVA now has reviewed 728, about 11 percent.

Of those 728, at least one part from each order package is installed already in at least one TVA nuclear plant.

Those reviews, to date, found:

• 374 parts packages were found acceptable as they had been recorded.

• 354 packages were "determined to require critical characteristics reverification, which includes actual testing of items in some cases," according to TVA.

Jernigan told the NRC that TVA will have developed a prioritizing approach for rechecking already installed undocumented parts by April 30, and the utility will complete its "comprehensive evaluation" of all undocumented commercial-grade parts that have been installed between 1995 and 2011 and correct any identified deficiencies by Dec. 31, 2014.

The Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor already is $2 billion over budget, and its completion date has been extended from 2012 to 2015.

Spokeswoman Rymer said the new problems will not drive up the cost or slow construction.

"We anticipate issues with a complex project like completing Watts Bar 2," she said. "The [parts certification] work is being integrated into ongoing activities at the site, and the project remains on schedule for completion by December 2015 and within a total cost of $4 [billion] to $4.5 billion.

January 25, 2013: NRCNRC INFORMATION NOTICE 2012-22: COUNTERFEIT, FRAUDULENT, SUSPECT ITEM (CFSI) TRAINING OFFERINGS NRC

So I began YouTubing this two days ago...My first Jan 13 about noon time.

....Jan 12: added new videos at the bottom and now I can have vedeos long than 15 minutes.

TVA nuclear parts scrutinized

The discovery that not all of the parts -- everything from bolts and fan belts to cables and electrical breakers -- had been tested adequately to assure they would meet nuclear plant safety and quality standards was first made by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during a September 2011 Watts Bar inspection.
But just over a week ago, TVA filed an event report with the NRC stating that more than 500 packages of parts -- some already installed -- must be evaluated.
"Watts Bar Nuclear Unit 2 has determined that certain equipment components have been installed that may not meet the requirements of the commercial grade dedication process. This condition has the potential to create a substantial safety hazard had it remained uncorrected. Evaluations are being performed," TVA said in the event report.
TVA officials said no hazards have been found so far, but they acknowledge that their new parts reviews must be spread to all of the utility's six operating reactors.
That could involve "thousands more" parts packages, according to TVA spokesman Ray Golden.
"We've determined the cause of why this happened to us. And it's essentially a failure on our part to incorporate an industry update," Golden said Monday.
Work to evaluate the parts, which includes TVA and contract lab testing, has been ongoing at Watts Bar for more than a year, according to Ric Wiggall, head of nuclear engineering for Watts Bar Unit 2 construction.
"All the materials testing done to date has given us acceptable results," Wiggall said. "We've tested about 30 percent of the [Watts Bar] packages."
He said the additional work will not delay completion of the new reactor or drive up expenses.
The reactor is expected to be complete by December 2015 and cost about $4.5 billion. The reactor originally was expected to be complete in October 2012 at a cost of just under $2.5 billion.
WHAT HAPPENED?
When work began on Watts Bar's Unit 2 in 2007, it marked the construction start of the only new reactor added to America's nuclear fleet in the past 25 years.
But the safety of reactors begins before the building, and the components for reactors have to be nuclear worthy, according to NRC spokesman Joey Ledford.
"Worthy" components have "gone through an 18-step process for quality assurance before they are certified as nuclear grade," he said.
But finding certified parts has gotten tougher.
"I think what happened is that over the years, it has gotten more difficult for some of the [nuclear plant operators] to get components, so they've gone out on the market to get them themselves," Ledford said. "What we don't know yet is how complete [TVA's] work had been [to assure the purchases were nuclear worthy], Ledford said.
Joe Williams, TVA's general manager for nuclear power engineering, said the problem for TVA was one of rules interpretation.
"We performed an investigation and concluded that the TVA experts who were in charge of the process some years back misinterpreted their procedure as fully meeting the requirements when it did not," Williams said.
He said he knows of no other utilities' nuclear plants in the country with such concerns.
At the time the NRC initially noticed the problem in 2011, inspectors gave TVA what they called a "nonstated violation" -- essentially a warning and a suggestion that TVA recheck its parts purchases.
Wiggall said the NRC came back this past December to look at TVA's progress on the matter and raised more questions that caused utility officials "to re-evaluate."
"That was when we decided we would conservatively report it [in the Jan. 3 event report]," Wiggall said. "We do not at this point believe there will be any problems. ... What we expect is that when we complete the work and there are no problems, we'll retract it."
Williams said key difference in what TVA had done versus what it now is doing "is an additional level of rigor in verification tests."
Wiggall and Golden said much of the problem is just missing paperwork, and that's what TVA's new tougher testing will provide.
"There are some parts that when you buy them they don't come with the paperwork that would come with them from a nuclear component supplier. So it's incumbent upon TVA in that case to fill that paperwork, do any testing and provide ourselves the assurance that that part would perform its intended function," Wiggall said.
"And that's common in the industry," Wiggall said.
Ledford said it is too soon to say if the NRC will take further action.
"Obviously this is going to take a lot of work on the part of TVA and the NRC to sort out," Ledford said. Our concern is that many of these noncommercial-grade components could be installed in safety-related systems."
Contact staff writer Pam Sohn at psohn@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6346.

Of course, the other possibility is insiders and whistleblowers are leaking to me?

Counterfeit and Fraudulent Parts Throughout Nuclear Industry
Mike’s commentary 1

18 months and they haven't found the time to check their operating plants: "TVA officials said no hazards have been found so far, but they acknowledge that their new parts reviews must be spread to all of the utility's six operating reactors."

If you can't prove it with documentation and its pedigree...it is inop.

Counterfeit and Fraudulent Parts Throughout Nuclear Industry

Mike’s commentary 2

"Watts Bar Nuclear Unit 2 has determined that certain equipment components have been installed that may not meet the requirements of the commercial grade dedication process."I think what happened is that over the years, it has gotten more difficult for some of the [nuclear plant operators] to get components, so they've gone out on the market to get them themselves,"Ledford said.

Counterfeit and Fraudulent Parts Throughout Nuclear Industry

Pentas Control INC CEO convicted of lying to NRC At Peach Bottom.

"He said he knows of no other utilities' nuclear plants in the country with such concerns."

Counterfeit and Fraudulent Parts Throughout Nuclear Industry

TVA 1