During a late night chat with one of the mechanics at the plant I was working at, he told me that he was the one who found that "problem." According to him, ALL of the carbon steel was gone and the only thing left was the clad!!!! He was a contract employee working an outage and was NOT an employee at Davis-Besse.
It looks like to me that they had been having problems for a while but were sweeping it under the rug to get the outages done and the plant back on line. Plus you don't have that much going on with metal being corroded and not seeing it in other ways.
Flash ahead a few years and the plant I was at was having primary leakage. I was involved as a supervisor trying to figure out what was going on. We had someone else on the management team that was from Davis-Besse and I always wondered why he didn't recognize IMMEDIATELY what we were seeing based on him being involved at Davis-Besse. I always assumed they cleaned house there and I assumed he was one of the casualties.
Interesting. There’s always seems to more to the story.
Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that is in the back of my mind when they start talking about extending plant life. On paper it might look great, but unless you have all of the information you can’t make a good decision.
I’m not familiar with NRC because I was Navy, but if you’re extending a license you need to do thorough eyes on inspections and interviews with the plant workers as well as paper audits.
The good thing about the Navy is if you’re caught covering something up, the hammer drops. There have been whole boat crews that have gone down.