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Regional News
| Article published Thursday, November 21, 2002
Some not impressed by NRC’s mea culpa
Agency’s watch over Davis-Besse
reviewed
By TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF
WRITER
OAK HARBOR, Ohio - Residents last night voiced
mixed feelings at a public meeting here about the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission’s self-assessment of its performance as a government
watchdog at FirstEnergy Corp.’s Davis-Besse nuclear
plant.
Ottawa County resident Howard Whitcomb, a Toledo
lawyer who once worked for the NRC as a resident inspector at a
South Carolina nuclear plant, said a probe by the agency’s "Lessons
Learned Task Force" should have gone back to allegations raised at
Davis-Besse since at least 1985, when the plant experienced a
temporary loss of feedwater.
A number of changes were
promised then in both the regulatory atmosphere and plant
management, as they are now, he said.
"What has once again
been shown is that when the process fails, reactor safety is
compromised," said Mr. Whitcomb, who left the NRC in the mid-1980s
to work at Davis-Besse in an administrative capacity for Toledo
Edison, a FirstEnergy subsidiary that used to have primary
responsibility for the plant.
He ultimately resigned over a
dispute with company management after the 1985 incident.
The
meeting was held to gauge public response to the 96-page report
issued last month by the special NRC task force, a group of federal
regulators from outside the Midwest that was formed to take a hard
look at the agency’s effectiveness in monitoring Davis-Besse, which
has been idled since Feb. 16.
A rust problem revealed on top
of Davis-Besse’s reactor head in early March is the worst of its
kind in U.S. nuclear history, creating an unacceptable safety risk
for thousands of northwest Ohio residents, officials have
said.
The panel’s conclusion: The NRC should share some of
the blame for what happened, because of its lax
oversight.
The NRC and the nuclear industry knew for at least
a decade that leaking boric acid from nuclear reactors can cause
corrosion of reactor heads, the panel concluded.
While nobody
apparently anticipated a problem to the extent of Davis-Besse’s, the
government agency erred by not double-checking the nuclear
industry’s assertion that a reactor head’s boric acid leakage is
normally inconsequential.
The NRC’s Midwest regional office
in Lisle, Ill., which oversees Davis-Besse, allowed itself to become
too distracted by activities at other plants, the report
said.
Boric acid from Davis-Besse’s reactor leaked through
cracked nozzles for years without being fixed, officials have
said.
The acid burned a footprint-shaped cavity through one
section of the six-inch-thick steel reactor head, leaving only a
paper-thin liner to hold back the reactor’s intense
pressure.
Had a hole burst through the reactor head - a
scenario which laboratory tests confirmed to be in the making - the
reactor’s 600-degree radioactive water would have been instantly
converted to radioactive steam. The public would have been left
hoping the containment building that encapsulates the reactor would
have done its job and held back that steam, officials have
said.
"The bottom line for us is this was a preventable event
and was not prevented," Dr. Edwin Hackett, one of the NRC’s panel
presenters, told the crowd of 100 people.
Paul Gunter of
Nuclear Information and Resource, a Washington activist group known
for its skeptical views of nuclear power, said in a statement that
the NRC’s self-assessment has done little to instill public
confidence in the regulator.
A man who identified himself
only as a local resident shook his head in dismay as he began
addressing the NRC panel. "I’ve been coming to a lot of these
meetings. It’s amazing the amount of words and letters that are
spoken and nothing’s really said," he said. "I don’t understand how
this is going to help anything if all the rules aren’t enforced in
the first place."
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