FPL workers shut down wrong pump at Turkey Point, then covered it up, NRC finds
Technicians at Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point nuclear power plant did maintenance on the wrong pump, causing it to briefly shut down, then falsified records to cover up the mistake.
The July 2019 goof-up on the pump, which injects water into a nuclear reactor’s cooling system, was described in an inspection report from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission released last week. It was a relatively minor error and did not affect the operation of the plant.
But FPL, after an internal investigation, fired four employees a month later — a supervisor and department head who had been working at Turkey Point since 1988, and two technicians who had been at the company for over 10 years. According to a Feb. 4 NRC letter describing the agency’s inspection, the incident led FPL to investigate “a trend of unacceptable behavior events including this event and its associated investigative report.”
“Corrective actions, in the form of site communications, were implemented to address the importance of a strong nuclear safety culture and requirement for complete and accurate work and truthfulness,” the report said.
The incident preceded three unplanned reactor shutdowns that happened in August 2020. A special investigation completed by the NRC in December concluded that FPL took “acceptable” measures to stabilize the reactor during those incidents and found a half dozen minor problems considered of “very low safety significance.”
Peter Robbins, director of nuclear communications at FPL, said the safety of the plant was never compromised by the pump error and the company is reviewing the NRC’s latest investigation.
“As part of the formal regulatory process, FPL will be working with NRC staff to ensure that the agency’s final decision is based on the best available information. Because nothing we do is more important than the safe operation of our plant, we take all feedback seriously and have already taken steps to address the NRC’s concerns as part of the regulatory process,” Robbins said in an emailed statement.
According to the Feb. 4 NRC letter, FPL has 30 days to respond before enforcement decisions are made.
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the charging pump trip itself didn’t appear to be of high significance in terms of reactor safety. But the fact that longtime Turkey Point technicians and supervisors were engaged in misconduct was more of a concern.
“It’s not unusual to see reports of technicians misrepresenting work orders but what is significant in this case is that supervisors were involved in covering up for their staff, basically telling the company there was nothing wrong,” Lyman said.
In its description of the incident, the NRC said that two technicians were assigned to perform maintenance on the charging pump at Unit 4, one of the plant’s two nuclear reactors. Instead, after passing through a radiation checkpoint, they went through the door for Unit 3, the other reactor, and began working on an oil low pressure switch.
The technicians heard a change in the pump sound and “observed that the pump hesitated, and then the piston slowed and stopped.“ That’s when they realized they were working on the wrong pump, according to the report.
They filled out the work order report as if they had worked on the assigned pump in Unit 4. The technicians called their supervisor to tell him about the mistake, but failed to notify the plant’s control room about the fact the pump had shut down, the report said. Later that day they met with the supervisor and the department head, who decided to keep the issue “in house’’ and not report it to the control room, which violated FPL’s own operational protocols, the NRC said.
The investigation concluded that the supervisor and the department head at Turkey Point “apparently engaged in deliberate misconduct by concealing the human performance error, thereby failing to follow a site procedure that required immediate notification to the control room.”
This story was originally published February 9, 2021 at 11:38 AM.
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