Report criticizes Vt. Yankee management
|
|
The Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Vermont on Thursday Sept. 25, 2008. Vyto Starinskas / Rutland Herald |
Toolbox
By Daniel Barlow
Vermont Press Bureau - Published: July 21, 2010
MONTPELIER – An ask-no-questions corporate environment at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant was blamed Tuesday for a host of inaccurate and misleading information supplied to state regulators and officials.
The Vermont Legislature’s Public Oversight Panel concluded in a 21-page report that officials with Entergy Nuclear Vermont cannot operate the plant reliably for another 20 years without changing the corporate culture.
“Entergy cannot operate VY reliably for an additional 20 years unless it successfully reestablishes a corporate culture where its individual employees and the organization as a whole have a questioning attitude, and where adequate resources are consistently spent on non-safety issues,” the report concludes.
The report also criticized the company for not putting necessary funds toward non-safety systems in the nuclear power plant, which led to the tritium leak in its underground piping system, a scandal that rocked the public perception of the company.
“If the events of the last few years are any guide, Entergy has a tendency to focus on expenditure on safety systems and systems of obvious reliability importance while withholding resources from systems that it deems of secondary reliability importance,” the report states.
This is the second report on the reliability of Vermont Yankee released by the Oversight Panel, a group of nuclear power experts appointed by the Legislature and Gov. James Douglas. The group was reconvened by lawmakers earlier this year when allegations arose that Entergy officials misled them and state regulators about the existence of the plant’s underground piping system.
The panel’s inquiry into that question was put on hold, according to the report, when the Vermont Attorney General’s Office launched a criminal investigation into those misstatements. That investigation is ongoing.
Larry Smith, a spokesperson for Entergy, said the new report reaffirms the conclusion of the panel’s original report: That Vermont Yankee can continue operating reliably after 2012 if several key changes are made.
“Entergy Vermont Yankee stands by our commitment to pursue the 82 recommendations contained in the original 2009 report and will continue to work with state regulators to ensure this gets done,” Smith said in a written statement.
Smith added that the plant has been scrutinized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and consistently scored high safety marks. He said non-safety systems at the plant are important and Entergy officials are now using the root cause analysis that came out of the tritium leak investigation to focus on non-safety equipment.
“Safety is our first priority, both nuclear safety and radiological safety,” Smith said. “There is no such thing as being overly focused on safety.”
The report concluded that there was no deliberate attempt by Entergy to mislead during the Oversight Panel’s first assessment of the plant in late 2008. But the report also states that Entergy had numerous opportunities to correct the record – and did not do so in fear that there would be a push to reopen the plant’s assessment.
Eleven Entergy staffers were disciplined as a result of the misleading information and because all those employees were not from a single unit at Vermont Yankee – many were employed in different sectors across the company – the report concludes that there is a systemic problem with the corporation.
The three members of the Oversight Panel wrote that had Entergy revealed that they submitted incorrect information earlier in the process, that the Comprehensive Reliability Assessment would have been reopened much earlier than this year.
“Had this been done in August 2009, before the leaks were discovered, Vermont Yankee’s reputation would hardly have suffered,” the report reads. “Most, if not all of the Entergy employees who have been removed from Vermont Yankee would still be employed there.”
Supporters of Vermont Yankee had a different take on the conclusion of the report. Guy Page, a spokesperson for the Vermont Energy Partnership, a group that includes Entergy, said the report states support for continued operation of the plant and praised it for 531 days of continued operation without shutting down.
“There are certainly some issues that Vermont Yankee needs to address, but the underlining conclusion of the report is that the plant can operate safely and reliably after 2012,” Page said.
Arnie Gundersen, one of the three Oversight Panel members, said he didn’t think Entergy could address the “culture issue” in the company in time to make the case for relicensing after March 2012.
“It took them eight years to dig their hole,” Gundersen said, referring to when Entergy purchased Vermont Yankee from a consortium of Vermont utilities in 2002. “It will be very difficult for them to emerge from that.”
Gundersen agreed that the panel found no deliberate attempt to mislead them during their research in the second half of 2008, but he added that the company was guilty of “gross ethical lapses” for letting those misstatements stand the following year.
Daniel.Barlow@timesargus.com
41