Pilgrim: White Safety Relief Valve Problems

August 26, 2015
EN 15-024 

OFFICE OF ENFORCEMENT NOTIFICATION OF SIGNIFICANT ENFORCEMENT ACTION

Subject: ISSUANCE OF FINAL SIGNIFICANCE DETERMINATION AND NOTICE OF VIOLATION

This is to inform the Commission that a Notice of Violation (NOV) associated with a White Significance Determination Process finding will be issued on or about September 1, 2015, to Entergy Nuclear Operations, Inc. (licensee) as a result of an inspection at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station (Pilgrim).

The White finding involved the licensee’s failure to establish measures to promptly identify and correct a significant condition adverse to quality, or take corrective actions to preclude repetition, relating to a component that is essential to perform the Automatic Depressurization System (ADS) safety-related functions. Specifically, the licensee failed to identify that the ADS ‘A’ safety/relief valve (SRV) did not open upon manual actuation on February 9, 2013. The licensee therefore did not take action to preclude repetition, which resulted in the failure of the ADS ‘C’ SRV to operate upon manual actuation on January 27, 2015. Also, because the licensee was not aware of the ‘A’ SRV’s inoperability from February 9, 2013, until January 27, 2015, a period greater than the allowed Technical Specification (TS) outage time, the required actions of the TS were not followed.

A NOV is included based on the licensee’s failure to establish measures to assure that
conditions adverse to quality are promptly identified and corrected, and failure to assure that the cause of the condition is determined and corrective action taken to preclude repetition in accordance with 10 CFR 50, Appendix B, Criterion XVI, “Corrective Action”.