Publication: The Day
Waterford - Dominion has fired a government affairs coordinator at Millstone Power Station who took an annual training test for her supervisor without his knowledge.
According to a report issued Monday by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the female coordinator completed computer-based "Plant Access Training" on April 17 by logging in under her supervisor's identity to complete the training for him.
Every employee who is authorized to enter Millstone's "protected area" where the reactors are located is required to requalify every year for access to that area by completing computer-based training, said Richard Zuercher, a spokesman for Dominion. The training is mandatory for every employee in the protected area.
In a separate incident, the Virginia-based parent company of Dominion Nuclear Connecticut, which owns Millstone, has also banned from any company site a contract worker who last year twice lied about a past arrest on federal self-disclosure forms. The forms are required of employees working at the nuclear power complex during reactor refueling.
On Monday, Dominion acknowledged the actions taken against the workers following the NRC's public release of the report on its investigation for both incidents. Neither Dominion nor the NRC would identify the employee or contract worker.
The NRC cited the company for "isolated" and "minor" violations that did not jeopardize plant safety but were found to be "deliberate" and "willful" actions by the employee and the contract worker, said David C. Lew, director of the NRC's Division of Reactor Projects.
Lew delivered the report by letter to David A. Heacock, Dominion's president and chief nuclear officer.
Daniel Weekley is managing director of Northeast government affairs at Millstone. Zuercher would not say whether Weekley was the supervisor referred to in the report. He noted that Dominion terminated the coordinator by revoking her site access.
The coordinator "is no longer with the company," said Zuercher. "That is a violation of federal regulations. We don't put up with that."
The contract worker gained access to Millstone during the Feb. 19, 2008, shutdown for refueling of the Unit 2 reactor by falsifying a criminal history self-disclosure form and did the same thing on a personnel history questionnaire for the Unit 3 reactor outage on Sept. 30, 2008, Lew said.
"The contractor was not a Dominion employee," Zuercher said. "He was denied access to the site and he will never be allowed on site again."
In both cases, Dominion discovered the acts and reported them to the NRC, but the NRC's investigations did not occur until March 5 for the contract worker and May 5 for government affairs coordinator.
Lew issued so-called "non-cited violations" related to the incidents, which do not include fines or increased oversight, but could result in potential targeted inspections in future assessments of how the plant operates, according to Neil Sheehan, an NRC spokesman.
Non-cited violations are considered "low level (breaches) in terms of the safety significance of the plant," said Sheehan. "This is certainly going to be a topic of discussion" in the future, he said.
The violations are also being treated as minor, Lew wrote, because the actions were isolated, without involvement by managers, and the individuals' site access has been revoked. In addition, the company has placed the issues under review as part of its "corrective action" program.
Citing federal privacy policies, Sheehan also said he could not disclose the identities of the former employees.
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