Word: nrc
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...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 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...
...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...
...NRC 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. But the NRC...
Lochbaum and Prevatte reported Susquehanna to the NRC and suggested improvements to its cooling system. The NRC, Lochbaum says, didn't read the full report. He and Prevatte called Congress members, pushed for a public hearing and presented their concerns to NRC staff. Conceding that Lochbaum and Prevatte "had some valid points," the agency launched a task force and in 1993 issued an informational notice to the 35 U.S. reactors that share Susquehanna's design, alerting them to the problem but requiring no action. One of the plants was Millstone...
...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...