12/06/02

Rockville, Md.- Some of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's top safety advisers were sharply critical yesterday of FirstEnergy Corp. and the agency itself for repeatedly failing to spot the years-long decline of safety consciousness at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant.

Members of the NRC's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards questioned whether the agency's current approach to monitoring the nation's 103 nuclear plants is adequate to catch the subtle erosion of values among workers and bosses alike that inevitably leads to accidents.

"It's a major failure of the system, in my view, and we should all contemplate this," George Apostolakis, the panel's chairman, said in an interview.

He stressed that he was not speaking for the advisory group, which will submit its formal recommendations to the NRC's governing board this spring.

Apostolakis and fellow NRC adviser Stephen Rosen said they would like to see the agency develop a way of measuring a nuclear plant's "safety culture" - the attitudes that indicate how seriously they take maintaining and operating the reactor.

The regulatory system the NRC has followed since the late 1990s does not directly evaluate a plant's safety culture, primarily because there is not widespread agreement on how best to measure it and because the nuclear industry has resisted what it sees as the government's attempt to interfere in management issues.

This year's incident at Davis-Besse, in which workers discovered a long-festering rust hole on the reactor's lid that threatened a major nuclear accident, has heightened the debate about regulating safety culture.

The NRC's 11-member reactor safety advisory committee, which serves as a powerful independent voice on policy-making matters, spent more than two hours quizzing NRC staff members about how the unprecedented rust hole could have been allowed to grow unnoticed for at least four years.

Panel member Graham Leitch noted Davis-Besse's reactor operators weren't the ones deciding whether the plant was in condition to keep running. Instead, they went along with engineering and maintenance workers who judged it was OK to run with deteriorating equipment.

"All of that is now observably changed," said Jack Grobe, who heads the NRC's Davis-Besse oversight panel. "The longer-term barriers that must be broken down are organizational . . . to make sure that [the operators] are being supported."

Arthur Howell, who chaired the agency's task force charged with articulating the lessons to be learned from Davis-Besse, said the industry and the NRC recognized the potential for a Davis-Besse-type development 10 years ago. But they underestimated the speed and conditions in which corrosion could occur.

The agency's staff failed to follow through on inspections for corrosion, to learn from other countries' experience with lid cracks and leaks and to recognize the warning signs appearing at Davis-Besse, he said.

"We didn't see any focused effort on the part of the NRC to identify the leak source" at Davis-Besse, Howell said.

The French government, which operates more than 70 reactors, recognized the potential for lid cracking and corrosion as early as 1991. But unlike its American counterpart, the French embarked on a program of instrument-aided lid inspections and eventual replacement of all of its reactor lids.

"Did it never occur to anybody that the French were . . . years ahead of us?" advisory panel member Peter Ford asked about the lid replacement program.

Howell answered that there was not widespread awareness in the NRC of the French program and that some staffers considered it an overreaction.

Since Davis-Besse, several U.S. reactor operators have ordered new lids, and the NRC is likely to require more stringent and more frequent inspections.

Howell's task force recommended 51 changes in NRC procedures and policies to ensure that another incident like Davis-Besse's does not occur. Those recommendations are now in the hands of NRC Executive Director William Travers, who will send them to the agency's governing board for action.

To reach these Plain Dealer reporters:

jmangels@plaind.com, 216-999-4842

jfunk@plaind.com, 216-999-4138