The Nuclear Regulatory Commission slapped a $900,000 fine on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar nuclear plant in Tennessee, issuing five violations related to a “substantial safety culture issue” at the plant during the fall of 2015 and early 2016.
Tennessee Valley Authority uses Watts Bar Unit 1 to produce tritium for U.S. nuclear weapons. Watts Bar Unit 2, in a refueling outage at deadline Friday, will start producing weapons tritium after it restarts, a spokesperson for the authority said Thursday.
The violations are related to a Nov. 11, 2015 reactor heat-up, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) report. The plant’s Outage Control Center (OCC) wanted the main control room to continue with the plant’s heat-up without the normal letdown portion of the chemical and volume control system in operation, causing an uncontrolled pressurizer water level increase, the report said.
Neither the OCC personnel nor the main control room operators had the knowledge or training to know whether this would violate safety procedure, the report said.
Nonetheless, the shift manager told the operators to go forward “without validating the capability of excess letdown to control pressurizer water level and without having or using approved or modified written procedures for responding to off-normal events,” the NRC found.
The operators were later required to address the uncontrolled increase, but didn’t act in accordance with written procedures, the NRC said in its report.
The NRC said its investigations indicated a “chilled work environment” in the Operations Department due to a perception that operators were not free to raise safety concerns without a fear of retaliation.
“When faced with an emerging issue, [main control room] operators did not ensure that shift operations were conducted in a safe and conservative manner; did not stop when unsure and proceed in a deliberate and controlled manner; did not validate available information; allowed production to override safety; and proceeded in the face of uncertainty,” the NRC wrote in the report.
Although the violations didn’t result in consequences on Nov. 11, the NRC said, under different circumstances, they could have, and issued some of the fines largely in response to the willful nature of TVA’s violations.
The NNSA wants the Tennessee Valley Authority to produce about 2,800 grams of tritium annually by government fiscal year 2027, which starts Oct. 1, 2026. For fiscal year 2021, Watts Bar Unit 1 was supposed to irradiate 1,792 tritium producing burnable absorber rods, while Watts Bar Unit 2 was supposed to irradiate 960 rods.
