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Strong words--yet Kenyon was, if anything, soft-pedaling the situation. Before he joined Northeast, the utility had become known as a nuclear scofflaw, an industry rogue that for years cut operating costs by ignoring NRC regulations, allowing chronic hardware problems to go unrepaired and harassing employees who raised safety concerns--employees such as George Galatis, the engineer whose crusade to clean up the company landed him on the cover of TIME one year ago this month ("Blowing the Whistle on Nuclear Safety," March 4, 1996). Galatis' most alarming discovery was that the NRC knew about Northeast's dangerous game...
TIME's special report focused national attention on the NRC's failure to enforce its safety rules at Northeast's Millstone Station in Waterford, Connecticut. Then something extraordinary happened. Where past agency chiefs had routinely ignored such criticism, NRC chairman Shirley Ann Jackson, who had taken the job just 10 months before this scandal broke, called the TIME story "a wake-up call" and "a learning moment." Revving up its inspection program at Millstone, her agency found such pervasive noncompliance that it ordered all three plants there to shut down for sweeping repairs. A year later, Northeast is facing...
...their fight to win back public trust, both Kenyon and Jackson have shaken up their moribund organizations. Many of the senior Northeast and NRC officials identified in the original TIME story have either retired or been forced to resign. This spring, as the Justice Department concludes an investigation into alleged criminal misconduct by Northeast--illegal operation of Millstone 1, violation of environmental laws--indictments are possible and more departures likely. The NRC has become a more aggressive regulator, displaying new teeth in January when it added eight plants to its "watch list" of problem reactors, a move the industry protested...
...Galatis saw it, the fuel pool needed a beefed-up cooling system to make full-core offloads safe. The company brought in consultants to discredit him, but they ended up agreeing with Galatis. Incredibly, NRC inspectors and senior staff members had long known about the plant's refueling practice but "didn't realize" it was a violation, according to an NRC inspector-general report. James Taylor, the agency's executive director for operations, and William Russell, director of nuclear-reactor regulation, had been aware of Millstone's declining safety standards for at least five years but took no action...
...utilities around the country. He hired a former Northeast whistle blower named Paul Blanch to work on a revamped employee-concerns program, created a dedicated "recovery team" for each plant and asked the demoralized and skeptical Millstone rank and file to help him weed out problem managers. (Both an NRC Special Project Office and an "independent corrective-action-verification team" of industry consultants will oversee the work; plant restart will require a commission vote.) This reorganization, Kenyon declares, "constitutes the largest management turnaround in the history of the nuclear industry...