Davis-Besse nuclear power plant:
What's the problem?

It’s been more than a year since a pineapple-sized hole was discovered in the top of the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant, owned by FirstEnergy.

On March 6, 2002 employees at the plant discovered the cavity in the reactor head. Boric acid had been leaking inside the plant, leaving only 3/8 of an inch of cracked, bulging stainless steel to protect millions of people from a potential nuclear catastrophe. The near-miss is the closest brush with a nuclear accident since Three Mile Island in 1979, and experts have estimated a rupture would have taken place within a year or two.

FirstEnergy has admitted that since 1990, they have repeatedly ignored basic maintenance duties. At one point, Davis-Besse managers had allowed so much corrosion to build up on the reactor lid that workers needed crowbars to remove it.

The plant managers repeatedly rejected the plant engineers’ ideas to improve monitoring equipment that would allow workers to better inspect the reactor lid.

The government ignored its own regulations by not ordering an immediate shutdown of Davis-Besse when they suspected the plant was leaking.

These events led to the worst corrosion of a nuclear reactor in U.S. history.

What we’ve learned since
the Davis-Besse near-miss

• Two employees, both in leadership positions, charged they were fired last fall for raising safety concerns about Davis-Besse.

• FirstEnergy allowed workers carrying radioactive particles to leave the plant and travel to other areas of Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded that two of the workers “potentially received a relatively large amount of internal contamination.” (Beacon Journal, 2/21/03)

• The NRC released a report finding that they allowed FirstEnergy to keep operating Davis-Besse even after they had strong indications that something was seriously wrong. This decision was "driven in large part by a desire to lessen the financial impact on [FirstEnergy] that would result from an early shutdown.” (Toledo Blade, 1/4/03)

• FirstEnergy released a report showing that the reactor’s emergency cooling system has not worked in the 26 years the plant has been operating. A retired NRC senior safety analyst said the report “contains the admission that Davis-Besse would most probably have melted if there had been a loss-of-coolant accident.” (Plain Dealer, 2/11/03)

• Photographic evidence has shown that both FirstEnergy and the NRC knew about the corrosion on the reactor as early as 1998 and did nothing about it.