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Review and
Related
Methodology
By Jack Davis, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission.
Jack Davis
Jack Davis is Director of the Japan
Lessons Learned Division in the NRC’s
Office of Nuclear
Reactor Regulation.
Mr. Davis oversees
the staff focused on
enhancing the U.S.
commercial nuclear
fleet’s ability to
safely deal with
beyond-design-basis
extreme natural
phenomena.
Mr. Davis’s more
than 24 years of
nuclear experience
include senior NRC
leadership positions
in nuclear reactors,
nuclear fuel cycle,
high-level waste,
nuclear security
and corporate infrastructure. He also
served in Department of Defense nuclear
weapons-related positions and spent
several years at Westinghouse as a
process engineer.
Mr. Davis holds a bachelor’s in Nuclear
Engineering from Penn State University.
An interview by Newal Agnihotri, Editor
of Nuclear Plant Journal, at the NRC’s
Regulatory Information Conference in
Bethesda, Maryland on March 9, 2016.
1.
What is the progress of flooding
evaluation?
All but four sites have completed
their flooding re-evaluations. The
reevaluations for these four remaining
sites depend on information from the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and we
expect that information later in 2016.
After that, all plants will have reevaluated
their flood hazard.
Any site that has a new, recalculated
hazard level that exceeds their licensed
hazard level is required to put interim
actions in place. We’ve reviewed those
interim actions, we’ve inspected them,
and we’ve said that they look reasonable.
In the meantime, we’ve asked the plants
to make sure that
their
mitigating
strategies are still
viable considering
the new hazard,
and to upgrade the
mitigating strategies
if needed. All of
those
mitigating
strategies affected
by the reevaluated
flooding
hazards
must be looked at by
the end of 2016.
2.
What is the
progress of seismic
capability evaluation?
All
plants
have provided their
seismic reevaluation
to the NRC. They’re in the process,
just as with the flooding hazard, of
looking at their mitigating strategies and
determining if they still have a viable
approach considering the new seismic
hazard information. They will upgrade
the mitigating strategies, if needed. In the
meantime, they’ve also done an expedited
review, if you will, similar to an interim
action. This ensures that they have any
short-term fixes in place to have the time
to do the more detailed calculations that
they need to do.
3.
What are theUSNRCreactor pressure
vessel post Fukushima instrumentation
requirements?
If a plant needs instrumentation for
their mitigation strategy, then it needs to
be powered. In addition to being able to
deal with the mitigation strategy, they also
need to be able to have instrumentation
that tells them that they have eminent or
actual core damage. So they would be
looking at power for those instruments
as well. We focused our requirements on
the power source for these instruments.
Secondly, all plants have a portable
capability to take readings in the field,
and that was included as part of the
strategy. Finally, the spent fuel pool
instrumentation order required them to
have two channels for reading the spent
fuel pool level. The two channels must
be able to detect if the water level is well
above the fuel, getting close to uncovering
the fuel or actually below the top of the
fuel. Those are the three different levels
that they need to definitely show on the
instruments.
There were no other requirements
that we put out for instrumentation. The
mitigation strategies work well with the
approach that we’re taking now, which
ensures we have power for the necessary
instrumentation.
More than 80%of the plants currently
meet the requirements of the Spent Fuel
Pool Instrumentation order right now, and
the remainder will be done in 2016. This
progress is on schedule.
4.
What is the status of implementation
of SAFER (Strategic Alliance for FLEX
Emergency Response)?
We have the industry’s two national
response centers that the agency has
reviewed and approved. One is inPhoenix,
and the other is in Memphis. They each
contain five sets of emergency equipment
that each plant needs to meet the phase 3
requirement of the mitigation strategies
order. These sets can be deployed to any
one of the reactors in the country within
24 hours. The requirement is 24 hours,
but in most cases, they can do it much
faster than that.
A lot of the equipment at these
response centers is redundant to the
portable phase 2 equipment that the
plants are already required to have onsite.
In some cases, there are a few extra pieces
that they would need for indefinite coping
time.
Nuclear Plant Journal, May-June 2016 NuclearPlantJournal.com
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