Pickering A passes safety review

Agency inspects restarted Unit 4
Spare parts need better handling

Toronto Star - July 6, 2004
by John Spears

The Pickering A nuclear generating station has received a generally passing grade in a safety review by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the review says improvements are needed in some areas, including the way plant staff obtain and track spare parts.

In a submission prepared for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Association, the station's owner, Ontario Power Generation Inc,. says it is already at work fixing some of the issues identified in the review.

The review was carried out in February to look at operating practices at Pickering A's Unit 4, which returned to service last September following a six-year shutdown.

The Ontario government is expected to decide very soon whether to return a second Pickering A unit to service, and then will consider whether the final two units should also be restarted.

The restart project has been plagued with delays and cost overruns; conceived as an $800 million project, the board first approved spending of $1.1 billion to return all four units to service. But it's now estimated it could cost up to $4 billion to return all four units to service.

The review team said Pickering A has good emergency preparedness practices, a good safety culture, strong training programs and is receptive to external reviews.

But it zeroes in on the availability of spare and replacement parts as an obstacle to refurbishing the reactors.

Lack of parts "sometimes interferes with the ability to accomplish work," the review notes. The same problem was highlighted in a report last December by a provincially appointed review panel probing the reasons for Pickering A's cost overruns and delays.

The plant has made progress on clearing the backlog of parts that are ordered but not delivered, the review says, but that has just increased the backlog of parts being cleared through quality control checks. Nuclear plants must meet quality control standards set by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Agency.

"Without a more effective strategic spare-parts program, it will be difficult to maintain appropriate plant material condition," the review notes.

While a new warehouse has been built 20 kilometres from Pickering, the review says that two warehouses on the Pickering site don't meet international standards.

The warehouses are old, dusty and poorly organized, and they lack appropriate lighting, temperature and humidity controls, the review says. That could result in "a degraded state of the spare parts and that could lead to a failure of the equipment on which they have been installed and as a consequence impair safe and reliable operation of the plant," the review says.

The review also says Pickering A managers need to do a better job of telling their staff about operating goals and about new practices.

In a response to the review, station manager John Coleby says Pickering management invited a team of experts from the World Association of Nuclear Operators to help OPG fix some of the problems highlighted by the review.

The spare parts issue is difficult, he acknowledges in notes to a presentation scheduled for Thursday at the nuclear safety commission.

"Procurement of spare parts is an issue facing all of OPG's plants as equipment becomes obsolete and suppliers go out of business," Coleby says.

Pickering A is the province's oldest operating nuclear station, dating from the early 1970s. The plant has a set up a "strategic materials availability initiative" to work on the problem, and has hired more design engineers as well, Coleby says.

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