Westinghouse Owners Group’s Program to Extend the Technical Specification Completion Time for the Containment Isolation Valves Available to Purchase

The Westinghouse Owners Group (WOG) has undertaken a number of programs focused on improving U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Technical Specification requirements. This particular program focused on the Completion Times (CTs) for the containment penetration isolation valves (CIVs). This paper presents and discusses the approach and analysis to extend these CTs from 4 hours to 7 days. This extension is necessary to provide sufficient time for plant personnel to address CIV inoperability and to perform preventive maintenance activities on the CIVs during power operation. Containment penetration types that were included in these analyses were for systems connected to the containment atmosphere, the reactor coolant system, and the steam generators. The approach used in this program applied both deterministic and probabilistic evaluations. A plant-specific implementation of the generic analysis is provided for the Wolf Creek Generating Station (WCGS). The results show that a CT extension to 7 days can be justified for a majority of the CIVs for the WCGS. For those CIVs where the full 7-day extension could not be justified, it was found that many could be extended to at least 12 hours. There were only a small number of CIVs where an extension could not be justified.