Word: northeasterly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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GEORGE GALATIS WENT TO WORK AT NORTHeast Utilities in June 1982 with a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and experience with a top manufacturer of nuclear components. At Northeast, he started in the division that oversees the utility's 15 fossil-fuel plants, then moved to the nuclear group, specializing in performance and reliability. Eric DeBarba, Northeast's vice president of technical services, describes him as a solid engineer. "Nobody here ever questioned his honesty or motives," DeBarba says...
Galatis raised the issue with members of Northeast's division of nuclear licensing. "They tried to convince me they had it analyzed," he says. He asked them to produce the documents, and they could not. Galatis sensed trouble when, in later talks, "they began denying that the first discussions had taken place." In June 1992 he spelled out the problem in a memo, calling the fuel pool a license violation and an "unreviewed safety question"--NRC lingo for a major regulatory headache-and adding other concerns he had found, such as the fact that some of the pool's cooling...
...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 had been open, the pool could have drained, exposing the rods and causing...
...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...
...Management tells you to come forward with problems," says Millstone engineer Al Cizek, "but actions speak louder than words." A Northeast official has been quoted in an NRC report saying the company didn't have to resolve a safety problem because he could "blow it by" the regulators. An NRC study says the number of safety and harassment allegations filed by workers at Northeast is three times the industry average. A disturbing internal Millstone report, presented to ceo Fox in 1991 and obtained by TIME, warns of a "cultural problem" typified by chronic failure to follow procedures, hardware problems that...