The Formal Negotiations: On Decommissioning Vermont Yankee

Attorney General Sorrell 

After some preliminary reports that "negotiations between Governor Shumlin's administration and Entergy would be held," we finally have a report that one such meeting was held.

"Issues" were discussed--

Dave Gram of Associated Press reports that Governor Shumlin, Attorney General Sorrell, Department of Public Service Commissioner Recchia (and perhaps others) are meeting with Entergy. The group plans to prepare a "global agreement" on decommissioning issues. They have met at least once, and  they plan to meet again in early December.  

This is a round of "formal negotiations." According to Sorrell, it includes discussion of the following "issues":

• how much work will need to be done on the site, 
• what's in the underground piping, 
• how long it's likely to take for the nuclear fuel rods to cool enough that they can be moved

Since these "issues" are actually not "issues" but facts, I think  the Shumlin people are actually just getting a briefing from Entergy. This doesn't sound like a "negotiation."  If it is any kind of negotiation,  I wish the plant the best of luck.  I think that Entergy may want a global agreement.

But sound bites may be planned.

I also think that Governor Shumlin will prefer having sound bites to having an agreement. 

Governor Shumlin

I suspect Shumlin plans to hold a press conference after the meetings. In this conference, he will claim that Entergy-Louisiana would not give Shumlin what he wants for the people-of-Vermont. (We don't live in Louisiana, you know?)

Okay, okay, I am judging Shumlin by his past words and his past actions.  He may have changed.  I believe that people can change.  I will have to wait and see if Governor Shumlin has changed.  For the sake of my friends at the plant, I hope Shumlin has changed!

However, if Shumlin begins insulting "Entergy-Louisiana" in the near future, please remember that you read it here first.

About the Piping

"They lied!"

This is the biggest issue about the piping. Did Vermont Yankee deliberately mislead regulators about the existence of underground-or-buried pipes containing tritium and other radionuclides? That is THE question, from the days of the potluck to Donald Kreis post in Vermont Digger a few days ago. All other issues pale in comparison. The tritium leak was found within six weeks, and is being remediated as I write this. It's not about the tritium. It's about the question: Did Entergy lie about the pipes?

Two people responded to one of my recent posts about the subject:

• Donald Kreis, Vermont Law School professor, who advises the legislature on methods to shut down Vermont Yankee
• David O'Brien, Vermont Public Service Board Commissioner

In return, I have responded to their comments, and the conversation continued on Vermont Digger. The conversation was removed from Digger for a while, but has recently been restored.

Considering that the conversation was spread between various blog posts, I need to do a bit of a summary.

The Piping Diagrams in Review

In the post Piping Diagrams, I reviewed the legal investigative report Report of Investigation Entergy Vermont Yankee written by the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. Since the Report is 140 pages long, I devoted myself to the first forty pages. I also referenced an article by Donald Kreis which referred to events that were described in the first forty pages of the Report.

Facts

I posted some facts:

• On September 9 and September 11, 2008, Entergy met with the NSA, a group doing the CRA assessment (Comprehensive Vertical Audit and Reliability Assessment).
• The NSA group were knowledgeable engineers and they were mainly assessing reliability.
• Entergy presented piping diagrams for the plant, and gave copies to the NSA members
• Entergy presented tables of piping which consisted of a table of pipes and whether the pipes carried radionuclides. They gave these tables to the NSA also.
• Entergy and the NSA members agreed that the service water system posed the most reliability issues, and decided to investigate the service water system more thoroughly than other piping.
• Entergy gave PowerPoint presentations at the meetings.
• The NRC had copies of the diagrams that Entergy gave to the NSA members.

As far as I can tell, nobody has taken issue with the facts above.

I am going to post one more fact here, one that is worth remembering when we read the rebuttals.

• All accusations against Entergy quote verbal statements and PowerPoint presentations, not diagrams or tables. Nobody has accused Entergy of altering any diagrams or tables before giving these items to the NSA.

Until somebody points out an alteration on a diagram or chart, we can conclude that the diagrams handed to the NSA were correct. PowerPoint slides and verbal statements may not have been correct, but the diagrams were accurate.

My opinions

I also posted some opinions:

• The NSA and PSB were given piping diagrams, and if they did not examine them carefully, they have as much egg on their face as Entergy does. (I never said I wanted to be popular. Sigh. The number of people who will avoid me at meetings is growing and growing and....)
• Don Kreis article concentrated on the misleading aspects of the Entergy PowerPoint presentations. He included references to the Space Shuttle and Afghanistan, but only mentioned the piping diagrams in passing. I pointed out that PowerPoint is always a short-form communication device, and a difficult one. However, the diagrams were available to check and answer questions.

Donald Kreis and Chairman O'Brien took issue with these opinions.

Kreis and O'Brien Object

In comments on my post, both Don Kreis and Commissioner O'Brien disagreed with my opinions. Disagreed rather strongly, as a matter of fact.

I will summarize their arguments below. I also cut and pasted their comments to my earlier post, An Amazing Conversation.

Objections to my opinions were:

• Kreis said that the presentation was focused on the PowerPoint. Maybe it should have focused on diagrams, but it didn't.

• O'Brien said that indeed, they had piping diagrams, but they were not told that some of the piping carried radionuclides.

• O'Brien further stated that the legislation had us on a very tight schedule where we had less than 4 months to complete a massive inspection

• O'Brien noted further that after discovering that Entergy's affidavit could not be relied upon, contractors (had to) go over the drawings and other information to identify the pipes that do carry radionuclides and it took about 5 weeks and cost about 150K.

• O'Brien and Kreis agreed that regulators have to trust utility information. O'Brien put it very succinctly: we have to trust a utility to provide us with accurate information. Our entire system of regulation is based upon that basic premise. If that was not true, the DPS and every other PUC in the country would have to be at least twice as large. Once a utility shows it cannot be trusted to give accurate information, then we have to go over everything with a fine toothed comb.

Trust But Verify?

Entergy gave both piping diagrams and pipe lists (including radionuclide information in table form) to its regulators. It also made verbal statements that might have been misleading.

Obviously, it would have been better if Entergy had given this information in a more understandable fashion: a piping diagram labeled with radionuclide-carrying pipes. But that is not how P and I D diagrams are usually formatted. The fact is: Entergy gave the regulators complete information, in diagrams and tables.

So the question: Did they lie? becomes a different set of questions:

1. Did Entergy have an obligation to present the information in a clearer form?
2. Did the oversight panels and regulators have an obligation to verify the information they received, by looking past the PowerPoint and reviewing the basic data?

As a former EPRI project manager who reviewed many many sets of research results, I believe question two is very relevant. Research reports had "results" at the front, and data sets the size of phone books in the back of the book. I had to look at both areas. Surprisingly often, the two areas disagreed. This shouldn't happen, but it happens all the time. The data didn't quite support the conclusions. That's why they hire project managers, I guess.

Still, the questions above are both important questions, and worth an entirely separate post.

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Late-breaking news. The NRC just released its report on groundwater monitoring at Vermont Yankee.

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Graphics. I like this sculpture of Lady Justice by J. L Urban. The statue is part of a court building in the Czech Republic. Lady Justice holds a book instead of scales, and is not blindfolded. I consider her to be Lady Justice for the Regulatory Process. (The usual Wikimedia license.)

An Amazing Conversation

My post on the Piping Diagrams elicited two very interesting replies, one from Commissioner O'Brien, and one from Don Kreis of Vermont Law School.

I am cutting and pasting their comments below.

However, something even more amazing has happened. In a world (Vermont) where people shout and throw manure, Professor Kreis and I are having a very civilized conversation about Vermont Yankee. We are discussing who said what to whom. We are having this discussion in a very positive manner. This is a conversation I want to publish on my blog! Alas, it is getting awfully long...so I will link to it, instead.

Read and join the conversation at Vermont Digger or add a comment on this blog. Thank you to Don Kreis and the people at Vermont Digger for this opportunity.

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IMPORTANT UPDATE: The link to the conversation at Vermont Digger no longer works, and the conversation has been removed from the site. An earlier post by Donald Kreis remains on the site.

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The comments from my earlier post, below.

Don Kreis said...

Meredith:

Thanks for the invitation to leap into the dialogue. If I am understanding our respective comments correctly, we are a couple of Tufte fans who aren't in fundamental disagreement here. Diagrams and technical reports would have been a good focus at the September 11, 2008 meeting, which instead was organized around a .ppt presentation that was unhelpful for precisely the same reason that the Boeing .ppt show was unhelpful during that final flight of the Shuttle Columbia.

Obviously, the 9/11/08 PowerPoint didn't have the devastating consequences the Boeing/NASA one did. I never suggested otherwise. Your real beef, I think, is with Tufte -- he could have chosen other, less high-stakes examples of bad PowerPoint slides. The world is awash in them.

MAY 9, 2010 8:08 PM

David O'Brien, Commissioner said...

Meredith, with all due respect I have to disagree with your characterization of the Department having egg on our face with respect to the now famous underground pipes. When others are looking at this issue they are missing a critical piece that is not in the VY investigation or recorded even in our emails. It is the repeated claims by VY persons at the many meetings we had together with the consulatants and the oversight panel where VY was questioned on their claim that they did not have any underground buried pipes. It was this repeated asseration by VY that we trusted that they were giving us an accurate answer.

There are so many people saying why not just look at the drawings. Well, first, they probably have no idea how many drawings there are for this plant and the drawings alone do not identify pipes carrying radionuclides. After discovering that the company's own affidavit by a Mr. Rademacher could not be relied upon, Bruce Hinckley, our consultant that assisted us with the NSA audit, had to have contractors go over the drawings and other information to identify the pipes that do carry radionulclides and it took about 5 weeks and cost about a 150K. People forget that the legislation had us on a very tight schedule where we had less than 4 months to complete a massive inspection. We had to get the scope of the inspection agreed upon with the POP so we could get started before the clock ran out. We did not have reason to believe that VY was not providing accurate information with regard to the pipes and therefore had no reason to second guess them by spending more time and money to verify their statement upfront.

In summary:

1. First, the question isn’t just about whether there were underground pipes at VY. Of course, there are underground pipes at VY. We all knew there were underground pipes at VY, but what we were told is that there were no underground piping systems carrying radionuclides. So we could have been aware of numerous drawings showing underground pipes and that would not have alarmed us or clued us in that there are underground pipes carrying radionuclides.

2. Second, as a long time regulator, we have to trust a utility to provide us with accurate information. Our entire system of regulation is based upon that basic premise. If that was not true, the DPS and every other PUC in the country would have to be at least twice as large. Once a utility shows it cannot be trusted to give accurate information, then we have to go over everything with a fine toothed comb. We said we would verify the piping affidavits that Entergy gave us because we no longer trusted them to give us correct information. Hence the extra 5 weeks and 150K worth of verification.

MAY 10, 2010 8:35 AM

Meredith Angwin said...

First, I would like to thank Donald Kreis and Commissioner O'Brien for their thoughtful responses to my blog.

Donald, just a note that it is not possible for me be annoyed at Tufte. I have admired him since I first saw his first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. And he can use whatever examples he chooses.

My issue was different. The Report of the Investigation clearly states that Entergy gave P and ID diagrams and tables of piping to the NSA team in meetings on September 9 and 11, 2008. As I understand it, the NSA team received this piping information in both hard copy and electronic form. (This is not in the report, it is something I heard through the grapevine. Maybe NSA actually only received paper copies, I don't know for sure.)

You concentrate on the Powerpoint presentation, and ignore the backup data which Entergy gave to the NSA participants. In my post, I cited the pages for my sources of data exchange. Perhaps you can read pages 19 through 23 of the text (25 through 30 of the pdf) and tell me why you think the Powerpoint was the only significant information-exchange method?

Commissioner O'Brien, I want to thank you for your response, which was full of new information (or at least, new to me). I didn't understand the legislative requirement to complete the massive inspection in four months. I had no idea of the constraints under which the Department was operating. From an outsiders point of view, the whole thing has basically gone on forever, with dockets, VSNAP meetings, NSA panels, POP panels, etc. When you are working inside the project, though, life looks different. The Department was clearly put in a position of Never Time to Do It Right, Always Time to Do It Over. Six weeks and 150K to do it over! Thank you for explaining the situation.

Thank you both for your comments.

The Piping Diagrams

Late last month, the legal investigative report on Vermont Yankee was released by the Public Service Board. Report of Investigation Entergy Vermont Yankee was written by the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. To prepare the report, the firm spent 2,300 hours interviewing 29 people and reviewing 65,000 documents.

The Missing Piping Diagrams

In an early February post, I wrote: A huge portion of this story is missing. In all this testimony, nobody asks for the piping drawings. People send emails or ask questions: "Do you have such piping?" They get answers: "Nope." Nobody ever asks to see a diagram.

I also pointed out that if the regulators and panels didn't request the information, or if they didn't examine the information they had requested, there is plenty of egg-on-the-face to go around.

I Found the Diagrams

On page 25 of the pdf (page 19 of the text) of the Report of Investigation, I found the following information, which I have paraphrased for clarity:

In a meeting with the NSA team on September 9, 2008, Entergy provided the team with the Piping and Instrumentation (P & ID) diagrams of the Main Transformer, HPCl, Condensate & Feedwater, Residual Heat Removal, Cooling Tower, Service Water, and Condensate Storage with underground piping.

On page 27 and 28 of the pdf (page 21 and 22 of the text) there is a description of a further meeting on September 11, 2008, in which VY gave NSA tables of piping that was included in VYs Buried Piping and Tanks Inspection and Monitoring Systems, (BPTIP) reviews. The tables included the AOG piping (which was later the cause of the problem) and other systems associated with the tritium review program. Contamination levels were described for each length of pipe.

One of the VY people (Naeck) said (page 22, paraphrased) that the NSA people were smart engineers. He felt NSA knew of the existence of piping that carried radionucleides.

Who knew?

NSA knew, as above.

Who else knew? The NRC knew. At the NRC meeting on April 19 in Brattleboro, NRC staff members stated that they had records of piping at Vermont Yankee. They stated that they did not come forward during the NSA or POP review process because the NRC does not participate in hearings between a plant and its state regulators. However, I am reasonably sure that if a state regulator asked them for piping diagrams, they would have agreed to share them. They might have had to get permission from the power plant. I don't know. Of course, nobody asked the NRC because the NSA already had the diagrams.

In short, everyone knew.

PowerPoint or Piping Diagrams?

Recently, Donald Kreis of the Vermont Law School has written about this September 11 meeting which included the tables of piping. However, he describes the meeting as being based on a misleading PowerPoint presentation. Kreis ignores the piping tables which were given to the NSA at that meeting.

Like Professor Kreis, I am a fan of Edward Tufte. Like Tufte, I have mixed feelings about the use of PowerPoint. PowerPoint certainly played a role in the shuttle disaster Kreis mentions, but the corporate culture of NASA played a bigger role.

I do appreciate Kreis use of effective rhetoric. He puts VY, shuttle disasters, and Afghanistan losses together in one article, tarring VY with completely unrelated disasters. This was a true tour-de-force, and worthy of a lawyer who knows how to persuade people. I can't write a comment on his article, though, because comments are closed. Perhaps Kreis will comment on my post instead? I think it would be worthwhile to have a dialog.

After the VY-NSA Meeting

Let's leave Kreis and PowerPoint now, and go back to the Report of the Investigation. The early pages show VY and the NSA amicably deciding that the Service Water System (SWS) is a more vulnerable system that the CST (Condensate Storage System) or other systems. They mutually conclude that piping in trenches is likely to be far less of a problem than the SWS, and they decide to investigate the SWS.

As a former corrosion engineer in nuclear plants, I agree with this decision to switch the focus from the CST to SWS. The SWS uses untreated water for cooling the condenser, and always poses problems of corrosion and biofouling. As one engineer at VY says early in the report Breite, quoted on page 25 of the pdf, 19 of the report: (I was) not surprised (we were looking at SWS) because everyone looks at SWS. SWS across the industry consistently raised reliability concerns.

Much later, things got difficult. The players changed and the questions changed. The agreements about what systems to investigate did not hold, but that is another post for another day.

Right now, we can leave the situation as amicable as it was in late September 2008. Piping diagrams were available. NSA and Entergy had agreed to investigate SWS. Groups were in agreement. (We're now on page 40 0f the pdf and 34 of the report.)

Later, things changed.

Beyond Egg

In recent articles, DPS and Arnie Gundersen claim that they were not given sufficient information. Since they had access to P & ID diagrams and pipe lists, what information did they feel they were lacking? (Perhaps they are just trying to rub the egg off their faces. Or perhaps information was lacking, though the articles don't say what information they were denied. )

I recommend Rod Adam's excellent post on this subject. Adams gives important insight into people's motivations.

I also plan to get beyond page 40 of this 140 page report. Later. In another post.

Graphic of part of a P&ID diagram in accordance with Creative Commons license.

Summing It Up

Excellent information in two recent summaries, posted in the last three days.

Vermont Yankee for Beginners

Dr. Robert Hargraves, a friend of mine, gave a twenty minute talk on Vermont Yankee last week, speaking to the Rotary Club in Hanover, New Hampshire. Bob covered a quick history of Vermont Yankee, put the tritium issue in perspective, pointed out funding sources of the VY opponents, and demolished the simplistic arguments for replacing VY with renewables. All in less than twenty minutes! Here's a link to his slides with a voice-over.

Bob's presentation

Piping for Experts

My most recent post includes a video clip of the Entergy briefing that explained how they found and fixed the leak of tritiated water. In that briefing, Mr. Savoff of Entergy used a video animation to show the pipes, their position, the drain, the wells, the geology showing that the test wells are separated from potable groundwater by a layer of bedrock. The link below will bring you to the animation he used, which is somewhat self-explanatory.

However, there is no audio portion to this animation. For the full explanation, you would have to watch the press briefing clip on my previous post. But that briefing runs for an hour, while you can move through the animation video below in a much shorter time. (You don't really have to be an expert to watch this animation, but without a voice-over, it is definitely more an advanced-course event than Bob's video.)

Vermont Yankee Underground Pipe System

Television set graphic Wikimedia, GNU Lesser License

Tritium Summary

I have done several posts on tritium in the past few days. Some are quite long. So here's an executive summary

In Tritium Is Three, I pointed out the three important questions about the tritium leak at Vermont Yankee
1) Is the tritium a danger to public health?
2) Does the existence of a tritium leak prove that the plant is badly managed?
3) Did Entergy lie about its underground piping?

The next two posts, Tritium and Health and Tritium, Oil and Kale answer the first question about health. Tritium is not dangerous at the levels found in the test wells. These posts compare the radiation levels to bananas and kale, and compare the spill levels to recent oil spills.

The next post, Tritium and Plant Management, answers the second question. The existence of a tritiium leak proves nothing about plant management. Tritium leaks have been found at many plants, and Vermont Yankee has taken all appropriate steps (test well, inspections, informing regulators and NRC) to handle the leak.

The next two posts answer the third question: Did Entergy lie about its underground piping? These are long posts containing many quotes.

In Miscommunication? I point out that the different groups have different definitions of underground and buried, the terms were used interchangeably in many cases, and there was plenty of room for honest misunderstandings.

In the final post, Piping and Misinformation, I ask a simple question: in all this testimony, why did nobody refer to a piping diagram? The regulators may have had such diagrams, but not looked at them. Or the regulators didn't request such diagrams. In either case, the regulators, as well as Entergy, has serious egg on its face. Referral to such diagrams could have put a complete end to any misunderstanding or miscommunication.

Piping and Misinformation

Did people at Entergy lie under oath and deliberately mislead regulators? (The third of the three tritium questions.)

A long post on an important subject.

In my previous post, I made a case for honest communication errors as the source of the "misinformation" that Entergy provided the regulators. I pointed out the lax use of the terms underground and buried in testimony, and described how it could have affected the questions and answers. Not everyone will agree with my conclusion. The anti-Vermont Yankee explanation would still be an unqualified "They lied!!" Anti-s would say that the plant had a motivation for lying: They claim that if Entergy admitted to underground pipes carrying radioactive material, regulators would expect clean-up to be more expensive, and they would require Entergy to put more money in the decommissioning fund.

I have stated my opinion that the plant representatives didn't lie, but rather that there were serious miscommunications about terminology. I am sure I can't convince everyone, but I have convinced myself. But there is still more.

Something is missing. Something big is missing. Nobody is covered with roses in this story, true enough. But, to be blunt about it, there's a whole lot of missing information and I think some of it is missing testimony.

As I noted in my previous post, The Times Argus put together a timeline. This timeline covered questions asked and answers received. Most of the timeline is taken from Arnie Gundersen's testimony on January 27 before the House Committee on Natural Resources and Energy. Gundersen's testimony is public record and Gundersen was kind enough to send an electronic copy to Howard Shaffer, who forwarded it to me.

Some examples of missing information.

In May, as described before, Jay Thayer answered a question about underground piping by saying he would get back to the regulators. He did not get back to the regulators. He didn't follow up. (He should have followed up.)

Neither did the regulators. They never asked him again, as far as I know. (They should have followed up.)

Another example, On July 24, 2009, Gundersen wrote an email to Public Service Board Commissioner O'Brien. In the email, Gundersen asks:

“Could you please ask ENVY to confirm in writing the following SPECIFIC question: "Is there underground piping that carries radioactivity at VY?" If, for some reason, the POP misunderstood NSA and ENVY and there is, in fact, underground piping that carries radioactivity, I would like ENVY to list those underground pipes it is aware of that may contain radioactivity.”

(emphasis in the original)

After a certain amount of to-and-fro (this question isn't for the Public Service Board, it should be answered directly by the plant, etc.) Entergy answered, according to Gundersen's testimony.

On August 13, 2009, Entergy Legislative Liaison Dave McElwee emailed Gundersen:

“As for your outstanding question on underground piping goes,....we have none. Since this is not an item active in the review of CRA recommendations, we consider this issue closed.”

Okay. In May, Jay Thayer said he didn't think the plant had that sort of piping, and he would get back to the regulators. Later, in August, Gundersen asked about underground piping and Entergy answered "We haven't got any." Apparently that was the end of that exchange, also. (A month later Gundersen did ask about the storm drains at the plant.)

I find these exchanges mystifying. When you ask a question, the person answering it may understand the question, mis-understand the question, answer the question truthfully, or lie. All these are possibilities in all human exchanges. If Entergy didn't understand the questions, or if Entergy was lying, the various committees of the legislature had an obligation to find out the truth.

And what happened? They didn't bother, as far as I can tell.

A huge portion of this story is missing. In all this testimony, nobody asks for the piping drawings. People send emails or ask questions: "Do you have such piping?" They get answers: "Nope." Nobody ever asks to see a diagram.

Yet there was an ISA (Independent Safety Assessment), with engineers on the staff. If the people doing that assessment had asked Entergy for a piping diagram and been refused, such a refusal would have been reported in every newspaper in Vermont. ( Maybe every newspaper in the country.) All large industrial facilities have piping diagrams. Any facility regulated by the NRC has a piping diagram. Oversight panels must have been able to ask for and receive these diagrams.

That is the testimony that has not yet been reported. The testimony where they examine the piping diagrams.

The oversight committees seem to be playing games. The question is always: "Do you have such pipes, cross your heart and hope to die?" The question is never: "Thank you, sir. You say you don't have such piping. Can you show us the piping diagrams to confirm this statement?" The question is never: "On examining your piping diagrams, sir, I must disagree with your answer here. I see this, this, and this. The pipes I have indicated are pipes that must be examined."

To me, the exchanges that have been reported to date are like something out of Alice in Wonderland, not an engineering inquiry. Engineering inquiries don't stop at "no we don't" answers when such answers can be verified. Engineering is about verification and drawings and blueprints and pipe diagrams and piping and instrumentation diagrams and...All that stuff.

My feeling is that people in the various state oversight committees and panels, did have access to these diagrams. I simply cannot believe that they did not request and receive complete piping diagrams. The regulators have major egg on their faces for not referring to the diagrams.

Don't get me wrong. Entergy has major egg on its face for its answers. There is no question about that. I think the problem was miscommunication (in which case Entergy should have tried harder to clarify the question). Others may think the issue was outright lying under oath.

Either way, the piping diagrams showed these pipes.

It is self-serving of the regulators to cry "they didn't tell us the truth" when the truth was visible in piping diagrams that had been submitted to their offices. If the regulators and panels didn't request piping diagrams for the whole plant, then we need a more competent group of regulators and panelists, in my opinion. Indeed, if the regulators and panels didn't request the information, or if they didn't examine the information they had requested, there is plenty of egg-on-the-face to go around.