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Local Companies | Article
published October 5, 2002
Activists
question NRC’s motivation
Agency
defends Davis-Besse action
OAK HARBOR, Ohio - Activists claim an
internal Nuclear Regulatory Commission memo about FirstEnergy
Corp.’s Davis-Besse nuclear plant has made them even more skeptical
about how committed the government agency has been in upholding its
safety mandate.
But an NRC spokesman said the public should
read nothing into it - that a company’s financial considerations
never have come into play when deciding what actions need to be
taken to best protect the public.
(For more Davis-Besse
coverage, go to www.toledoblade.com/davisbesse)
The
latest uproar involves a Nov. 21 memo that summarizes a meeting that
day between Robert Saunders, president of FirstEnergy Nuclear
Operating Co., and Samuel J. Collins, the NRC’s director of nuclear
reactor regulation.
The meeting was held as senior NRC
officials were mulling over a staff recommendation to shut down
Davis-Besse by last Dec. 31, rather than letting it continue
operating until its scheduled refueling outage in late March.
Documents show several NRC staffers had a hunch that Davis-Besse had
a problem with reactor-head nozzles, based on problems found at a
similarly designed plant in South Carolina.
Mr. Collins is
the senior-level NRC official ultimately responsible for accepting
or nixing the staff recommendation. He let FirstEnergy keep
operating Davis-Besse until Feb. 16.
The memorandum says Mr.
Saunders made his concerns known about the financial difficulties
FirstEnergy would have encountered if the NRC had forced it to shut
down Davis-Besse by Dec. 31. Mr. Saunders pointed out that a
mid-February shutdown was more viable, both financially and in terms
of scheduling contractors, according to the memo.
The memo
was uncovered by two activist groups, the Nuclear Information and
Resource Service and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Paul
Gunter, a spokesman for the Nuclear Information and Resource
Service, said Mr. Collins must have been persuaded to some degree by
Mr. Saunders’ financial plea.
"The concern here is the
willy-nilly nature in which the NRC dissolved the order," Mr. Gunter
said, explaining that the NRC’s technical justification for letting
Davis-Besse operate until Feb. 16 was never put in
writing.
"Sam is now obligated to put in writing why he
abandoned this order," Mr. Gunter said.
In a joint statement
yesterday, the two activist groups called on Congress to "hold the
NRC accountable for its problems as much as the NRC is now holding
FirstEnergy accountable for its problems."
The NRC’s decision
to let Davis-Besse continue operating until Feb. 16 has become the
subject of a separate inquiry by the NRC’s Office of Inspector
General.
Jan Strasma, an NRC spokesman, said the only thing
that might have factored into the decision was scheduling. "Finances
did not enter into the decision," he said. "Because the nozzle
inspection is a fairly complex technique, you need the right workers
and right equipment to do the work."
As it turned out,
Davis-Besse had a huge problem: Not only were some reactor-head
nozzles cracked, but boric acid from the reactor had leaked out of
two of them. In one spot, the acid had nearly chewed its way through
the whole reactor head - one of the most important safeguards the
public has from radiation.
"Had we known that, we would have
shut down the plant immediately," Mr. Strasma said.
The
corrosion has been described by the NRC as the worst ever found atop
a U.S. nuclear plant, sending shock waves throughout the nuclear
industry here and abroad. Several plants are now making plans to
replace their reactor heads.
(For more Davis-Besse
coverage, go to www.toledoblade.com/davisbesse)
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