A veteran government risk analyst involved in the controversial
decision to delay lid inspections at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in 2001
has broken with his colleagues to charge that the decision was badly
flawed.
In a sternly worded memo to senior executives of the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, 16-year agency employee Steven Long warns that public safety
will be jeopardized if they repeat their mistake of basing judgments on
"truly incomplete and unreliable" information.
Long contends the NRC did not have enough information to justify
letting Davis-Besse postpone the safety inspection.
Instead, Long said the agency should have relied on the strong
circumstantial evidence it had collected from other reactors that already
had shut down at the NRC's request to check their lids. All six of
Davis-Besse's sister plants had found cracks and leaks in the steel
nozzles that are passageways for the reactors' control rods.
On that basis, Long wrote, Davis-Besse should have been ordered closed
to do the lid inspection. Neither Long nor other NRC officials returned
calls yesterday seeking comment.
Long's memo is the first breach in what agency executives have
portrayed as a unanimous agreement. Last month, Long's boss wrote to the
NRC commissioners in praise of the decision postponing Davis-Besse's
inspection, saying it was "not only correct, but . . . a good and
appropriate model for future actions."
Long said he was "especially troubled" by that viewpoint.
The discovery of cracks at several other plants and the risk that a
damaged nozzle could be blown out of the lid prompted the NRC in August
2001 to ask Davis-Besse and 68 similar reactors to shut down by year's end
for inspections. Others agreed to the costly work, but Davis-Besse owner
FirstEnergy Corp. resisted, arguing it should be allowed to run until
April 1, 2002.
The NRC had prepared and authorized an order requiring Davis-Besse to
comply - a measure that hadn't been used in 14 years. Instead, based on
the supposedly unanimous staff agreement, NRC reactor-regulation director
Sam Collins relented and accepted a compromise.
That compromise allowed the Toledo-area plant to run 47 days past the
Dec. 31, 2001, inspection deadline.
When Davis-Besse did shut down and found cracks, workers repairing them
stumbled upon a pineapple-sized rust hole caused by corrosive coolant that
had been leaking unnoticed since at least 1996. The lid could have burst
in as few as one or two years, the NRC determined.
Putting off the inspection delayed the rust hole's discovery by six
weeks and sparked both internal and external criticism of how the NRC
reached its decision. Agency chairman Richard Meserve and other top agency
officials have insisted that the NRC staff reached unanimous agreement in
a hastily called meeting that letting Davis-Besse run the additional six
weeks posed no significant safety concern.
But Long, in his six-page memo, made public yesterday, told Meserve
that it would be wrong to suggest there was complete agreement.
In a meeting on Nov. 28, 2001, the day the Davis-Besse shutdown order
was to be issued, 12 to 16 agency technical personnel - most of them
managers - gathered to hash out their positions. Associate licensing
director Brian Sheron asked for a show of hands on whether the Davis-Besse
shutdown order should be issued.
Long was one of three staffers who supported ordering FirstEnergy to do
the inspection before year's end. Sheron then asked if anyone thought
there would be an accident related to nozzle cracking if Davis-Besse
operated the additional six weeks.
No one said they thought such an accident was likely in that short
time. However, Long said he "did not then and do not now agree" that that
meant there was no significant safety concern at Davis-Besse. The very
information that analysts needed to make an accurate judgment of the risk
at Davis-Besse would not be available until the plant shut down for its
lid inspection, Long argued.
"I am concerned that eventually we will fail to adequately protect the
public if we continue to use . . . risk information without regard to its
reliability" in a specific case, he wrote.
Long also faulted the way the decision was reached, saying he did not
even realize that the polling of staff members Sheron conducted in the
impromptu meeting would be the final word. No records were kept of the
meeting.
"I assumed that the 'show of hands' was only a quick way to see what
bottom-line conclusion had been reached by each of us," Long wrote.
There were far more managers than technical reviewers at the meeting,
said Long. If the vote was intended to be a "representative democracy," he
said, it would have been the other way around, since there are more
staffers than managers in the NRC, and since the staffers had done the
Davis-Besse risk analysis.
Long's conclusions are all the more troubling because the NRC seems
reluctant to acknowledge them, said Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information
and Resource Service, a watchdog group.
"Frankly, it's complicated by the unwillingness of the commission to
revisit the issue," he said.
The NRC's Inspector General in a January report strongly criticized the
Davis-Besse decision, saying a seven-month inquiry showed the agency had
enough evidence to justify shutting down the plant but let it run largely
because it didn't want to hurt FirstEnergy financially.
Meserve, the agency's chairman, rejected the findings as "unjustified,
unfair and misleading." An NRC task force responsible for identifying
lessons the agency should learn from the Davis-Besse debacle recommended
taking a hard look at the adequacy of the NRC's methods for evaluating the
risk that reactor lids might be deteriorating.
"I hope that the agency can move past defensive reactions to criticism
and learn from this experience," Long concluded.
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