This study introduces a condition diagnosis technique for a turbine governor system. The governor system is an important control system to handle turbine speed in a nuclear power plant. The turbine governor system includes turbine valves and stop valves which have their own functions in the system. Because a turbine governor system is operated by high oil pressure, it is very difficult to maintain under stable operating conditions. Turbine valves supply oil pressure to the governor system for proper operation. Using the pressure variation of turbine and governor valves, operating conditions of the turbine governor control system are detected and identified. To achieve automatic detection of valve status, time-based and frequency-based analysis is employed. In this study, a new approach, wavelet decomposition, was used to extract specific features from the pressure signals of the governor and stop valves. The extracted features, which represent the operating conditions of the turbine governor system, include important information to control and diagnose the valves. After extracting the specific features, decision rules were used to classify the valve conditions. The rules were generated by a decision tree algorithm (a typical simple method for data-based rule generation). The results given by the wavelet-based analysis were compared to detection results using time- and frequency-based approaches. Compared with the several related studies, the wavelet transform-based analysis, the proposed in this study has the advantage of easier application without auxiliary features.