Millstone-Dominion Still Has Junk Engineering Organizations

The greatest sin here was Millstone was situationally unaware of the responses in their switchyard and grid system. They didn’t know how or gain an accurate picture of these interacting systems. They were hyper focused on dumping of the SLOD safety protection system instead of understanding the interaction and function of these giant systems.

What really what caused this is a broken and unenforced 50:59 NRC process. Its turned into a voluntary system. Basically the game goes across all utilities, the NRC says all rules associated with the 50:59 are optional depending on the needs of CEO bonuses. You can ignore the rules at your own peril...our inspectors would never question you on these intentional NRC rule and plant licencing violation . If you guess right and nothing happens to the site associated with a design change to the facility...you are free and clear. If you create a nasty public relation(say, a dual plant trip) event, then we will retroactively harmlessly violate you for not requesting a 50:59.   

If Millstone would have submitted a 50:59 or the NRC would have enforced a 50:59 in 2001 when this boondoggle began leading to a preventable dual plant LOOP,  these NRC Jan 2016 questions would have been asked and answered before the project even began in 2001.  

The idea at this point, Millstone engineering is still highly dysfunctional, in that the NRC had to prod the utility to understand the grid response in with a dual plant trip.

It is totally disgraceful and unprofessional on the nuclear safety and Dominion’s grid responsibility, the agency had to prod them with these questions.

Jan 13, 2015 

SLOD

REQUEST FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION REGARDING LICENSE AMENDMENT REQUEST FOR REMOVAL OF SEVERE LINE OUTAGE DETECTION FROM THE OFFSITE POWER SYSTEM MILLSTONE POWER STATION UNITS 2 AND 3 DOCKET NOS. 50-336 & 50-423 (TAC NOS. MF6430 AND MF6431)

By letter dated June 30, 2015 (Agencywide Documents Access and Management System Accession No. ML15183A022), Dominion Nuclear Connecticut, Inc. (the licensee) requested a license amendment request (LAR) for Millstone Power Station Units 2 and 3 (MPS2 and MPS3).

The proposed amendments would revise the MPS2 and MPS3 Final Safety Analysis Reports(FSARs) to: 1) delete the information pertaining to the severe line outage detection (SLOD) special protection system, 2) update the description of the tower structures associated with the four offsite transmission lines feeding Millstone Power Station (MPS), and 3) describe how the current offsite power source configuration and design satisfies the requirements of General

Design Criteria (GDC) 17, "Electric Power Systems" and GDC-5, "Sharing of Structures…

This below link is my blog write up of the dual plant trip...the NRC answers my question fromn this post in their 2016 questions to Dominion.   

Millstone: Response to Special Inspection