ESBWR - design cert inspection identified 6 apparent violations at GE-Hitachi

On December 15-19, 2008, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) conducted an inspection at the General Electric-Hitachi (GEH) Nuclear Energy facility in Wilmington, North Carolina. The inspection was part of NRC's design certification review of GEH Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR). The inspection team in part focused on the development and use of GEH software codes to perform safety analyses for the ESBWR design certification. NRC today released the inspection report and notice of several apparent violations.

05200010/2008-201-01 Open NOV
10 CFR Part 21: Failure to perform Part 21 evaluation when other GEH organization indicated that a software problem had impacted their use of the code

05200010/2008-201-02 Open NOV
Design Control: Failure to document the justification or rationale for the use a particular version of a non-Level 2 code during an alternate calculation to verify original calculations and developer's assumptions.

05200010/2008-201-03 Open NOV
Corrective Action: Failure to get ECP problem reports responses in a timely manner.

05200010/2008-201-04 Open NOV
Corrective Action: Failure to have adequate corrective action program for Level 1 software code errors.

05200010/2008-201-05 Open NOV
Audits: Failure to have the GEH NQA audit plans for 2006 and 2007.

05200010/2008-201-06 Open NOV
Audits: Failure to adequately document the basis of the audit findings to support the audit conclusions.