Word: fueled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...truly changed their lives. Now there is an agent, a tour, deals in the works. Before the nationals, the big money in skating bypassed this modest team. Even before the tragedies of the early '90s, life had not been easy. Jess Galindo had been a busy trucker, carting rocket fuel from Gilroy, California, to Carson City, Nevada. When both his younger children pleaded for skating lessons, he provided them--and settled for a mobile home. Rudy and his mother Margaret, who used to push the living-room furniture aside so he could "skate" at home, still live there...
Then, in late 1992, David Lochbaum and Don Prevatte, consultants working at Pennsylvania Power & Light's Susquehanna plant, began to analyze deficiencies in spent-fuel cooling systems. They realized that a problem had been sneaking up on the industry: half a dozen serious accidents at different plants had caused some water to drain from the pools. In the worst of them, at Northeast's Haddam Neck plant in 1984, a seal failure caused 200,000 gal. to drain in just 20 min. from a water channel next to the fuel pool. If the gate between the channel and the pool...
...insists that the chance of such an accident is infinitesimal. But the agency's risk-assessment methods have been called overly optimistic by activists, engineers and at least one NRC commissioner. The agency's analysis for a fuel-pool drainage accident assumes that at most one-third of a core is in the pool, even though plants across the country routinely move full cores into pools crowded with older cores. If the NRC based its calculations on that scenario, says Lochbaum, "it would exceed the radiation-dose limits set by Congress and scare people to death...
...GALATIS DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT Lochbaum's struggle to get fuel-pool problems taken seriously. He did know he would face resistance from Northeast, where the bonus system is set up to reward employees who don't raise safety issues that incur costs and those who compromise productivity see their bonuses reduced. (Northeast says it has a second set of bonuses to reward those who raise safety issues. Galatis never...
...since at least 1987 but had never done anything about them. Now, to clear the way for the fall 1995 off-load, NRC officials were apparently offering Northeast what Galatis calls "quiet coaching." One sign of this was a draft version of an NRC inspection report about the spent-fuel pool that had been E-mailed from the NRC to Kacich's licensing department. "What was that doing in Northeast's files?" asks Inspector General Norton...