Word: betancourt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Galatis knew what he meant. Once a leading nuclear utility, Northeast had earned a reputation as a rogue--cutting corners and, according to critics, harassing and firing employees who raised safety concerns. But if Galatis wanted to take on the issue, Betancourt told him, "I'll back...
...adding other concerns he had found, such as the fact that some of the pool's cooling pipes weren't designed to withstand an earthquake, as they were required to do. Northeast sat on the memo for three months, until Galatis filed an internal notice-of- violation form, and Betancourt, a leader in the spent-fuel field for years, wrote a memo backing...
...When I started in the industry, 20 years ago," Betancourt says, "spent fuel was considered the ass end of the fuel cycle. No one wanted to touch it. Everyone wanted to be on the sexy side, inside the reactor vessel, where the action and danger were. No one noticed fuel pools until we started running out of room in them...
...Slowly, we woke up to this problem," says Betancourt. The NRC relaxed standards and granted license amendments that allowed plants to "rerack" their rods in ever more tightly packed pools. Sandwiched between the rods is a neutron-absorbing material called Boraflex that helps keep them from "going critical." After fuel pools across the country were filled in this way, the industry discovered that radiation causes Boraflex to shrink and crack. The NRC is studying the problem, but at times its officials haven't bothered to analyze a pool's cooling capacity before granting a reracking amendment. "It didn't receive...
...July 10, Betancourt met with Ken Jenison, an inspector from the NRC's Region 1 office, and gave testimony in support of Galatis' safety allegations. Less than a week later, Betancourt was called to the office of a good-natured human-resources officer named Janice Roncaioli. She complained that he wasn't a "team player," Betancourt says, and ran through the company's termination policies. Roncaioli called Betancourt's account of the meeting "slanted" but would not comment further, citing employee-confidentiality rules...