Limerick Nuclear Gen Station Audit Available

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The NRC audit of PECO Energy's Limerick Nuclear plant is now online at:

http://www.nrc.gov/NRC/Y2K/Audit/Y2K50352.html

It's a bit light in details compared to some of the others. The only immediate comment I have is that there appears to be a lot of reliance on scheduling dependencies for replacing systems / components needing to be replaced.

-- Anonymous, January 08, 1999

Answers

I live close enough to Limerick to see the cooling cloud. Reading through the report, my overall sense is that they haven't actually done much beyond 'assessment'. The following quote I found rather interesting:

PECO Energy Distribution (PED) briefed the audit team on its Embedded Technology (ET)Project, which is the Y2K readiness project for PECO' s transmission and distribution systems. PED stated that the ET project began on June 1, 1998, with support from PECON's Y2K team members. PECON's support includes training, planning, and assisting in performing some of the Y2K readiness activities. PED's ET team consists of one coordinator, one engineer, an analyst, two senior field technicians, and one vendor field technician. The team surveyed 570 substations and identified 3000 embedded components. These components consist of 150 different types of equipment. An initial assessment of these 150 types of embedded components identified 75 different types needing further Y2K susceptibility testing.

Amazing amount of work for six people over 6 months! If they actually visited these substations, they saw 3 per day/ 7 days a week. 3000 embedded components broken down to 150 "types" of which half need further workup. This reads like a paper exercise and not an actual 'lets go look at the equipment' event. If the numbers are right, they have to look (and test) about 1500 embedded components. Hmm, that works out to 4 or 5 per day EVERY day until rollover. This presumes that they are 100% accurate on excluding the other 1500 components. It also presumes they found all of the embedded systems. PECO seems to rely a lot on vendor assurances in other parts of the report. Can't say it helps my peace of mind!

-- Anonymous, January 08, 1999


And this seems like it is just testing. What happens when they find out that 20% of these "components" need upgrade/replacement? What is the deffinition of "component"? By their time schedule I would think embedded system, so they haven't looked at failures of individual chips. Either way "those" people are pretty good!!!

-- Anonymous, January 09, 1999

I have heard reports, and maybe someone can verify this, that Even though two systems are the exact same model and make, that doesn't necessarily mean they have the same components.

For example. If you go to Compaq's website and look at the PC compliance information, you'll see that a particular computer must have a BIOS date of greaterer than 11/96 to be compliant. That implies that some of that model were shipped with compliant BIOS's and some were not.

If PECO has 3000 embedded systems that represent 150 different components, that doesn't mean they only have to test 150 components. Just because two components look the same, it doesn't mean that they are the same. Is this correct?

MB

-- Anonymous, January 11, 1999


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