THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 10, 1995 TAG: 9503100319
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD AND SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: SURRY LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
In its darkest days, back in the late 1980s, the Surry nuclear-power plant was shaken by problems.
First came a December 1986 accident in which four workers were killed by a burst hot-water pipe. Then in 1988, the plant was hit with a series of troubling incidents, including a spill of thousands of gallons of radioactive water.
Federal regulators took notice. In five out of seven rating categories, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the Virginia Power plant the lowest passing grade.
At a public meeting Thursday, however, the power plant's report card from the NRC was about as good as it gets: a top rating in all but one category and gushing compliments from commission officials.
It was so big a turnaround that Virginia Power board members, executives and employees talked about fighting a new demon: complacency. They sported buttons with the word boldly crossed out.
``We've come too far, we've worked too hard and we've got too much left to do to fall back on any laurels,'' said Toby Sowers, the station's engineering superintendent.
Surry's improved performance - the best scores it's achieved since the NRC started its Systematic Assessments of License Performance in the early 1980s - not only dampens public concern about the plant's safety. It's also good business news for Virginia Power.
The utility, part of Richmond-based Dominion Resources Inc., is more dependent on nuclear power than the average utility. It gets 31 percent of its output from Surry and its North Anna nuclear plant, located northwest of Richmond. The U.S. power industry as a whole gets 21 percent of its capacity from nuclear.
``We as a company just cannot perform well unless our nuclear program performs well,'' Virginia Power President James T. Rhodes said at Thursday's meeting.
The efficiency of its two nuclear plants - North Anna has top scores in all NRC ratings categories - helps Virginia Power keep its rates slightly lower than the average for utilities in the Southeast, Rhodes has said. The utility counts so heavily on Surry that it plans in 1997 to ask the NRC to extend the plant's operating license by another 15 to 20 years, to at least 2028.
Rhodes credited Surry's improved grades largely to Virginia Power's move several years back to start separating nuclear operations from those of its other power-generating plants. He also cited increased investment by the utility in such things as nuclear engineering and maintenance.
NRC Regional Administrator Stewart Ebneter said the Surry station's performance improvement wasn't easy to achieve because of its age. Its two units began operating in 1972 and 1973, making Surry among the older of the nation's 70 commercial nuclear plants.
In an occasionally stern, but mostly friendly lecture, Ebneter commended Virginia Power for its response to plant problems in the late 1980s and for managing to maintain improvements even while the company's senior management has changed frequently.
``Surry has come a long way and it looks good,'' he said.
The biggest improvement at the plant recently was in the performance of its engineering staff, NRC officials said. They also applauded Virginia Power for cutting the amount of nuclear-contaminated floor space outside the reactors' containment areas from 40,000 square feet in the late 1980s to zero today.
Some of the biggest concerns voiced by the NRC centered on six ``trips,'' or forced shutdowns, during the latest 18-month reporting period, which ended Jan. 21.
While the NRC applauded Surry's staff for resolving these incidents quickly and safely, federal officials underscored the need to replace old equipment and better train personnel.
In one case, an employee tightened pipe fittings too hard, causing a cooling problem, said Morris Branch, the NRC's resident inspector at Surry. That employee, Branch said, was not following established procedure.
Morris also recalled an incident in which staff misdiagnosed the cause of leaking coolant water, and another that caused alarms to sound because electronic devices monitoring the radioactive core had failed. While the alarms turned out to be false, they showed that the monitoring system was flawed.
J. Philip Stohr, chairman of the special committee that inspected Surry, said some of these shortcomings could have been prevented with a more aggressive maintenance and repair program.
Stohr said that the six trips were not an unusually high number, and were actually lower than what the plant registered in the 1980s.
``All these events were handled fairly easily,'' said plant manager David A. Christian, noting that their root causes were discovered within ``minutes'' and that the facility was back in operation in all cases within 24 hours.
However, the problems were enough to keep the power station's score in the maintenance category at ``good'': one notch below the top ranking of ``superior.''
The NRC's Ebneter told Surry's maintenance superintendent, Richard Blount: ``We'll look for 100 percent improvement next time.''
``We'll give it to you,'' Blount replied. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
The Surry nuclear power plant received top marks from the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission in all categories but one - the best
scores it's achieved since the NRC started the reviews in the early
1980s.
by CNB