OAK HARBOR - People, not hardware, will largely determine when the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant can restart, a top Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said Wednesday.

``We will have to have the confidence of the people at the plant to allow restart,'' said Jack Grobe, who heads a panel investigating the progress being made to repair the damaged nuclear power plant owned by Akron utility FirstEnergy Corp.

Re-establishing confidence could take a while -- the company's own survey from earlier this year shows that employees mistrust plant management. And any restart will have to follow the conclusion of NRC investigations into Davis-Besse, including whether officials lied to the NRC about the plant's condition.

FirstEnergy hopes to have Davis-Besse restarted early in 2003, but that may be an overly optimistic wish, officials indicated after a meeting between the utility and the NRC at Oak Harbor High School. Company managers outlined the steps they are taking to safely repair and maintain Davis-Besse, as well as repair relations with the plant's 800 or so employees.

Sam Collins, the Washington-based director of the NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, defended his decision to allow Davis-Besse to continue to operate past a Dec. 31, 2001, deadline despite regulatory and industry concerns involving cracks in special nozzles that lead into nuclear reactors.

During the public comment period following the formal afternoon meeting, Collins said it was NRC staff consensus that Davis-Besse could be operated safely until a scheduled fuel outage in February 2002. Two NRC staff members disagreed with the decision to keepDavis-Besse running past Dec. 31, but did not base that on safety concerns, Collins said.

It was during a safety inspection conducted during the refueling outage that the two cavities were found on top of the old Davis-Besse vessel head. Just a thin inner lining of stainless steel held back radioactive, high-temperature coolant.

The Akron utility reported Wednesday it plans to install state-of-the-art coolant-leak detection equipment to monitor the reactor at the damagedDavis-Besse plant similar to systems now used at nuclear plants in Europe.

But FirstEnergy isn't sure that it will be able to install the equipment before its hoped-for restart at Davis-Besse early in 2003. Instead, it is more likely that the monitoring system will be put in place during a scheduled, normal mid-cycle shutdown of the plant. The monitoring equipment is not required under federal regulations. Davis-Besse would be the first plant in the United States to have the equipment, spokesman Todd Schneider said.

Coolant leaks from cracked nozzles on top of the reactor that allowed boric acid to eat two cavities on top of the reactor's former vessel head have kept the plant in Oak Harbor shut down since March. Total repair costs, including having to buy replacement power, could top $300 million.

The plant also is trying to figure out if any nozzles at the bottom of the reactor vessel have developed leaks. The company found small boric acid deposits and rust streaks on the lower side of the vessel that may have been caused by water flowing from the top, or by coolant leaking out from a bottom nozzle. Tests have not been able to determine how the rust and boron deposits developed.

``We're 90 percent confident we don't have a leak,'' said Lew Myers, chief operating officer for FirstEnergy's nuclear operating company.

FirstEnergy says it plans to bring the reactor up to operating temperature and pressure for three to seven days, probably in early January, to test for any leaks at the bottom nozzles, which are used to let instruments into the reactor. (Nozzles on top allow rods to move in and out of the reactor to control the nuclear reaction.) The test will be done with nuclear fuel in the reactor, FirstEnergy managers said.

In other matters discussed with the NRC, Davis-Besse managers said the work being done to repair, maintain and upgrade the plant, involving up to 1,300 contractors, has stressed organization.

The plant's quality assurance team has had to stop contractors temporarily from working on some projects when it found problems that needed correcting, the head of the team told NRC officials.

Also, Myers said the organization is meeting regularly with employees and taking other steps to improve relations between managers and employees and create a safety-conscious work environment.

The company's self-study of its role in the damage said it had put the pursuit of profit and production over safety at Davis-Besse.

Oak Harbor resident James Douglas asked the NRC officials how Davis-Besse management could justify how the plant was damaged.

``I could almost vomit,'' he said.

The NRC has final say on if and when Davis-Besse will be allowed to restart using anever-used replacement vessel head bought from a mothballed Michigan nuclear plant.

The federal agency has scheduled another meeting on Wednesday to discuss its own performance in the series of missteps dating to the 1990s that led up to the unprecedented damage at Davis-Besse.