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...challenger for that distinction in Jackson, the NRC head who has spent the past year conducting a painful public examination of her agency. At a forum in August near the Millstone site, she recited the chief complaints against the NRC--among them, that the agency let safety problems go uncorrected, gave Northeast the names of confidential whistle blowers and "failed to act in a timely and responsible way on serious and meritorious allegations...There is truth in all those charges," she confessed...
Candor alone won't restore confidence in the NRC, which since its inception in 1974 has been accused of being too cozy with the industry it regulates. During a House oversight subcommittee hearing last fall, Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts compared the agency to "Sergeant Schultz in the old Hogan's Heroes TV show, wandering through the barracks ignoring obvious violations and saying, 'I see nothing, I hear nothing.'" Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware has asked the Government Accounting Office for a sweeping assessment of NRC effectiveness. The report, due in May, is expected to be scathing. Among its findings...
...industry says this routine non-compliance--plant hardware and procedures that don't conform to NRC-approved licensing documents--hasn't cut safety margins. For years the documents were regarded as historical material, not as living guidebooks, says Joe Colvin, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry lobbyist. "It was a fuzzy area," he says, that neither the regulator nor the licensees paid much attention to. The post-Millstone emphasis on "rigid" compliance, another N.E.I. official has complained, "is almost as bad as NRC's reaction to Three Mile Island." Inside the agency, a rift developed between Jackson...
Taylor and Russell, the top NRC officials who made that argument--and let Millstone happen--are gone. The regional administrator for New England has been demoted, and all of the Millstone resident inspectors have been reassigned. Yet some of Jackson's critics remain unimpressed. Chief among them is Galatis, a tenacious and deeply religious man who spent three years trying to get Northeast and the NRC to abide by NRC rules. To force the issue he had to go public, filing a petition that asked the NRC to suspend Millstone's license...
Northeast eventually made the fuel-pool cooling-system changes Galatis demanded, but the NRC rejected his plea for it to suspend the company's license, insisting that "the relative safety significance" of the fuel-pool issue "is low," a conclusion disputed by a host of industry-watchdog engineers. The "pervasive noncompliance" that Galatis uncovered, the agency admitted, did pose a potential threat to public safety. The NRC informed Galatis in December that its long-term shutdown of Millstone "constitutes a partial grant of the petitioner's requests." The agency is delaying a decision on enforcement actions until the U.S. Attorney...