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Regional News
| Article published Saturday, February 15, 2003
Regulator flip-flopped on Davis-Besse
shutdown
By TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF
WRITER
ROCKVILLE, Md. - Records show that a senior
Nuclear Regulatory Commission official who let Davis-Besse operate
six weeks longer than his staff’s recommendation was so leery about
the nuclear plant’s condition that he agreed it should be shut down
early himself.
However, he backed off after hearing
FirstEnergy Corp.’s financial pleas.
A partial transcript of
an interview released yesterday could give credence to a scathing
report issued Jan. 3 by the NRC’s Office of Inspector General, in
which the agency is accused of putting northern Ohio at risk in the
fall of 2001 by refusing to execute a shutdown order that had been
OK’d by agency attorneys, according to a leading nuclear
watchdogs.
David Lochbaum, who used the federal Freedom of
Information Act to obtain that interview transcript and others that
formed the basis of the inspector general’s report, said he finds it
highly suspicious that the NRC’s Sam Collins apparently reversed
himself days after agreeing Davis-Besse had been
dangerous.
As the NRC’s nuclear reactor regulation director,
Mr. Collins is the only government official authorized by the Atomic
Energy Act to issue operating licenses and shutdown
orders.
NRC staffers wanted the plant shut down no later than
Dec. 31, 2001 because they feared its reactor-head nozzles were
cracked and leaking. As it turned out, so much acid had gotten out
of the reactor that the head nearly ruptured - a scenario that
experts now say could have led to a Chernobyl-like meltdown if
safety systems and the containment structure had, in turn,
failed.
According to a transcript of his second interview
with the inspector general’s office, Mr. Collins said he had
intended to issue the shutdown order when he forwarded it up the
chain-of-command on Nov. 16, 2001, to William Travers, NRC executive
director of operations. Five days later, the order was passed along
to the full NRC board. Both of those reviews were informational
only, because Mr. Collins - by law - had the final say.
"And
on the 16th of November [2001], you forwarded to the EDO [Mr.
Travers] saying this was your intent to issue these orders and the
21st [of November, 2001] it was forwarded up to the Commission as
part of their required chain of events?" an interviewer
asked.
"Correct," Mr. Collins replied.
"Are you saying
now that as of the 21st [of November 2001], you weren’t comfortable
signing the orders?"
"As of the 21st, I was comfortable in
signing the orders if it would be necessary for us to use that order
to ensure that the plant was in a safe condition," Mr. Collins
said.
NRC staffers received a memo on Nov. 21, 2001,
summarizing a meeting that day between Mr. Collins and Robert
Saunders, president of FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., the
utility’s nuclear subsidiary.
The inspector general’s office
has claimed that meeting was pivotal to the decision Mr. Collins
ultimately made - meeting the utility halfway and letting it keep
operating Davis-Besse until Feb. 16, 2002, a date which skeptics
have viewed as arbitrary. The company’s originally scheduled
refueling outage was to begin March 31, 2002, three months later
than the shutdown date proposed by the NRC
staff.
Investigators have said they were stunned to learn no
record exists of the meeting in which Mr. Collins announced his
decision: After months of interviews, they said they weren’t even
able to ascertain how many - let alone which - NRC officials
attended it.
In striking that deal, Mr. Collins compromised
public safety at the expense of corporate profits, according to the
inspector general. Some NRC officials now concede that compensatory
measures employed until Feb. 16 - including a slightly reduced
operating temperature - provided little safety margin.
Mr.
Lochbaum reiterated his belief yesterday that the NRC’s decision was
driven largely by its fear of a legal battle.
Shutdown orders
are rare. The NRC hasn’t formally gone through the process since
1987. The few issued in the agency’s history were for plants in
which problems were discovered after utilities had voluntarily shut
them for refueling or other reasons, records
show.
"FirstEnergy was prepared to fight. The NRC, rather
than fight, chose to compromise," Mr. Lochbaum said.
NRC
staffers described their frustration in getting information from
FirstEnergy in the fall of 2001 by saying it was "like pulling
teeth," according to the transcript.
FirstEnergy has
disagreed. The company admits it erred by putting production ahead
of safety during the 1990s, but said it would have shut down
Davis-Besse itself if it had correctly interpreted the telltale
signs, such as containment air filters clogged with rust particles
every other day for almost three years.
Mr. Collins has
declined requests for interviews since the inspector general’s
report, even after the state’s largest activist group - Ohio Citizen
Action - used the report to call for his ouster.
Outgoing NRC
Chairman Richard Meserve, who is leaving in March to become
president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, has backed Mr.
Collins. In a memo sent Jan. 8 to NRC Inspector General Hubert T.
Bell, Dr. Meserve called the internal investigation "unjustified,
unfair, and misleading."
But the inspector general’s report
has created a buzz on Capitol Hill, most recently during a Senate
subcommittee hearing chaired by Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio. Other
officials, including U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo) and U.S.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D., Cleveland) are calling for congressional
inquiries, saying the report alleges a fundamental breach of the
NRC’s mandate to hold safety above all cost
considerations.
George Mulley, the report’s author, said the
tone could have been harsher. "We bent over backwards to be fair,"
according to Mr. Mulley, the inspector general’s senior level
assistant for investigative operations.
According to the
transcript, Mr. Collins also hinted at external pressure from
unnamed politicians being placed upon Mr. Meserve and himself. He
did not elaborate.
"There was also feedback at one point from
the Chairman at a very high level just indicating his external
interest in this and I indicated to him I’m aware of that," Mr.
Collins was quoted as saying.
An interviewer asked him to
describe what he meant by external.
"My impression, we were
talking about elected officials," Mr. Collins said.
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