Less than one year before its scheduled closure, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts remains in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s lowest safety ranking allowed for an atomic energy plant to continue operations.
The NRC made the determination in its latest quarterly performance evaluation for the single-reactor facility in Plymouth, made public on Aug. 30. It covered agency oversight from July 1, 2017, to June 30 of this year.
“The NRC determined the performance at PNPS remains in Column 4, or the Multiple/Repetitive Degraded Cornerstone Column, of the NRC’s Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) Action Matrix,” NRC Region 1 Administrator David Lew wrote in an Aug. 28 letter to Brian Sullivan, site vice president for Entergy Nuclear Operations. “The NRC also determined that Entergy continued to operate PNPS safely and securely, and that additional regulatory action beyond Column 4 was not warranted.”
A series of safety failures and unplanned shutdowns landed Pilgrim in Column 4 in September 2015, a month before Entergy said it would close the facility due to ongoing market challenges facing the nuclear power sector.
Following an extended NRC special inspection, Entergy began a recovery plan so it can improve its safety rating. Its commitments were laid out in an August 2017 confirmatory action letter to Sullivan from then-Region 1 Administrator Daniel Dorman, covering recovery action plans for nuclear safety culture, corrective action program, human performance, operations standards and site leadership, procedure quality, safety relief valve white finding, and engineering programs and equipment performance.
The NRC is conducting five confirmatory action letter reviews to assess improvements at Pilgrim. Lew said last month Entergy made progress in meeting its obligations under the recovery plan, but that “a significant amount of work related to the performance recovery of PNPS remain for Entergy to be completed.”
Areas of improvement, the NRC told RadWaste Monitor, have included the operability determination process at Pilgrim – the approach for confirm that a plant’s structures, systems, and components are functioning as intended. Entergy made a number of revisions to plant procedures to specify roles and responsibilities for the shift manager in the operability determination process, the shift manager and senior reactor training on the process, and establishing operability determine challenge boards to evaluate operability findings, and other improvements.
“Based on the results of these and other activities, as well as the documentation of the additional corrective actions Entergy completed to address the lack of rigor in shift manager operability determination reviews, the CAL team concluded that the corrective actions the company had completed to address and preclude repetition of the SRV ‘White’ finding were effective,” the NRC said in a prepared statement.
Areas of continued focus for upcoming confirmatory action letter inspections will encompass engineering programs, the performance of equipment at Pilgrim, operations standards and leadership, and nuclear safety culture. The NRC will have to determine Entergy has met its commitments in the confirmatory action letter prior to placing Pilgrim under standard levels of oversight.
“As the NRC noted in its letter, the station has shown improvement in a number of areas, including site leadership, improving standards and expectations, and conservative decision making,” Entergy spokesman Patrick O’Brien said by email last week.
Management hopes to return Pilgrim to standard regulatory oversight, Column 1, though that would not occur before early next year, O’Brien said. The NRC must still conduct the final two of five confirmatory action letter inspections, scheduled for this month and December.
Pilgrim is due to cease power production on May 31, 2019. Entergy on Aug. 1 announced plans to sell the plant to New Jersey energy technology company Holtec for decommissioning. The companies aim to file a license transfer application with the NRC later this year and to close the deal toward the end of 2019.
