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Article published Saturday, December 7, 2002
Youths’ presentation impresses Kaptur
Students give representative a power point lesson on
Davis-Besse
By TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF
WRITER
Since March, U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur has been
conveying strong thoughts about the apparent maintenance and
oversight breakdown that allowed Davis-Besse to become a dangerous
nuclear plant.
Yesterday the Toledo Democrat got an earful
from an unlikely group - a team of bright children between the ages
of 10 and 13 who have put a lot of work into studying what went
wrong.
Circuit Breakers, a team of Sylvania and Maumee-area
youths that won a national robotics award earlier this year in
Orlando, Fla., met with Miss Kaptur for more than 45 minutes in her
downtown Toledo district office yesterday to give their perspective
of the problems at the FirstEnergy plant in Ottawa
County.
Seven of the nine team members attended, each
dapperly dressed and eager to give their thoughts in a calm,
professional manner.
Their conclusion: incomplete inspections
by FirstEnergy and inadequate oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission made Davis-Besse "a health and safety risk to our
community."
Three gave Miss Kaptur an overview - a power
point presentation, no less. They touched upon themes such as the
plant’s history, worker anxiety about reporting problems, and a
controversial decision made in the fall of 2001 by a senior NRC
official to overrule a staff recommendation for a Dec. 31
shutdown.
The official, Sam Collins, NRC director of nuclear
reactor regulation, allowed Davis-Besse to continue operating until
Feb. 16.
"Don’t be nervous. Pretend you’re talking to your
grandmother," Miss Kaptur told Ian Shaw, 12; Mia Steen, 12, and
Kevin David, 11.
Presenters talked about how they’ve learned
that France uses moisture-sensitive tape on its nuclear reactor
heads to detect the kind of problems found at Davis-Besse. They used
a hand-made diorama to show similarities between Davis-Besse and
Three Mile Island, both designed by the former Babcock & Wilcox
Co.
"They put profits ahead of safety," young David said in
reference to FirstEnergy management, something which the company has
admitted to the NRC at public meetings.
"If the NRC had done
their job, this wouldn’t have happened," the Shaw youth
said.
The children said they gleaned much of the team’s
information from articles that have appeared in The Blade, but said
they also spent a lot of time gathering information and graphics
from the Internet. Among those they interviewed was David Lochbaum,
a nationally recognized nuclear safety engineer for the Union of
Concerned Scientists in Washington.
Miss Kaptur said she was
impressed not only by the sophistication and quality of the team’s
presentation, but also by the members’ poise.
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