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Watts Bar nuclear plants – a history of safety flaws

Guity’s reports showed that hundreds of cables had been installed incorrectly at Watts Bar. They demonstrate that the TVA cared very little about regulations…

Safety Concerns Cloud US Nuclear Renaissance, Spiegel Online, By Ullrich Fichtner,  21 July 11, Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan “…….. A nuclear engineer who was born in Iran in 1942, Guity is a disappointed American today. “Time bombs,” he says, sounding very bitter. “We are sitting on a bunch of ticking time bombs.”…….

Loss of Faith    It takes a lot of puzzle pieces to assemble Guity’s life into a coherent picture, and to understand how a man, with a mixture of professional honor and integrity, took on the biggest energy company in the United States and fell by the wayside in the process.

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, he gradually discovered that so many shortcuts were taken, and some of the work was so shoddy, during the construction of the nuclear plants along the Tennessee River that it made a mockery of any notion of nuclear safety.

Guity was a nuclear engineer at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a large, long-established government-owned company that operates the Browns Ferry, Sequoyah, Bellefonte and Watts Bar nuclear power plants. When the plants were built, there was talk of thousands of clear violations of plans and building regulations, with the most serious infractions occurring at Watts Bar.

Not Up to Standard

The plant’s two units were built at the same time in the 1970s and 80s. Only Unit 1 was placed into operation, after a dramatic delay, while Unit 2 remained unfinished until construction was resumed a few years ago. If Guity had his way, the entire plant, including both units and everything else associated with it, would disappear from the map as soon as possible.

Inside the plant, rows of thick power cables were bent at such sharp angles that they could be expected to fail at any time. Weld seams were not up to standards along lengthy segments. Concrete walls were too thin. Guity saw all of this with his own eyes, in his capacity as quality manager for the reactor project. The reason Guity still has trouble sleeping at night is his belief that all of these old mistakes and violations can never be completely corrected.

One of the reasons Guity is so upset is that there is no public debate in the United States over Watts Bar, or nuclear energy in general. It is a non-issue throughout the country, even though, according to Guity, there are plenty of reasons that it should be discussed. The United States has 104 nuclear reactors in operation, more than any other country in the world. Many plants are alarmingly dated — some are 40 years old or even older. Some 65,000 tons of nuclear waste have accumulated over the decades. As unbelievable as it sounds, the country doesn’t even have a long-term plan for the storage and disposal of the nuclear waste being generated every day.

If the second unit at Watts Bar, America’s last reactor still under construction, really does go online next year, almost 40 years after building work began, parts of the unit will still date from the time when so many criteria were being violated. In fact, no one, not even the TVA, knows exactly the nature and scope of these violations.

……Starting in about 1979, when work was in full swing at Watts Bar, he could no longer ignore the construction defects and began keeping a record of what he saw. His career began to stall about that time…..Guity’s reports showed that hundreds of cables had been installed incorrectly at Watts Bar. They demonstrate that the TVA cared very little about regulations.

July 21, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA