In about two weeks, a team of more than a dozen experts will arrive at Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Plant to begin a unusually deep inspection. Officials with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say the process will last well into next year—at the very least.
The inspection process was triggered by the discovery last October of a broken valve in the nuclear facility’s cooling system. What’s more, the valve had probably been broken for a year and a half.
On Tuesday, NRC Branch Chief Eugene Guthrie laid out a three phase plan for getting to the bottom of the root problem, which he says goes far beyond a single piece of broken equipment.
“We’ve had concerns, historical issues with equipment and reliability at the station. The failure of the valve on unit 1 is just an example.”
Guthrie says the first phase will begin in mid-September, with 14 inspectors on site for two weeks, followed by three months of periodic visits to check in on every stage of the maintenance cycle. At some point after that, TVA will present its own assessment of what problems there are at Brown’s Ferry and a plan to fix them. Once that happens, the third inspection will begin, with no set end date planned.
The NRC has some money budgeted to pay for the inspections, but much of the cost will be covered by the utility. For instance, TVA will be billed for every hour an inspector is on site.
At the end of the meeting, nuclear watchdog Thomas Saporito with Saprodani Associates questioned whether TVA bears the full blame.
“You would have had six quarterly inspections where you have experts go down there and assess the plant. In addition to that you have resident NRC inspectors on the site all the time. Why did the NRC fail to find this violation for 18 consecutive months?”
Another critic questioned whether it’s wise to spend money and time on fixing the plant given its age. Glenn Carroll of Nuclear Watch South suggested the NRC consider shutting down Brown’s Ferry altogether.
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