Word: plante
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Millstone scandal began when Galatis blew the whistle on Northeast's 20-year habit of breaking safety rules during routine refueling operations at Millstone 1--moving all of the radioactive fuel rods into the plant's spent-fuel storage pool even though the pool, crowded with thousands of old fuel rods, was licensed to handle the full core only on an emergency basis. To save precious off-line minutes, Northeast would start moving the fuel so quickly after shutdown that the heat melted a worker's protective boots...
...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...
...about $12 a share--half its 1995 level--company chairman Bernard Fox has decided to retire. Kenyon, who was forced to negotiate a $314 million line of credit for the company last fall, admits Northeast could go bankrupt early next year if it doesn't get at least one plant running by then. "I don't know exactly where the cliff is," he says, "but it's out there. If we don't get these units up and running, the ball game's over...
...transform Northeast's "culture, values, processes and standards--and get the plants safely back online," Kenyon says, he has brought in new managers from leading 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...
...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...