Nuke Plant Risk Miscalculated?

Report: NRC Ohio Plant Operate Amid Suspected Reactor Leaks

(AP)  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission miscalculated the risk to the public of letting an Ohio nuclear power plant continue to run in 2001 with suspected reactor leaks, congressional auditors said Tuesday.

The General Accounting Office said in a report that government inspectors should have recognized warning signs years earlier that an unsafe amount of corrosive boric acid was accumulating on the reactor head at the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo.

"NRC should have but did not identify or prevent the corrosion at Davis-Besse because its oversight did not generate accurate information on plant conditions," the GAO said. A copy of the GAO report was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

Davis-Besse was among 14 plants that were supposed to have been inspected in the fall of 2001 because of cracking in nozzles on the reactor head. The NRC, however, allowed the plant to postpone the inspection until a scheduled maintenance shutdown months later.

Had the commission shut down the plant sooner, officials would have found a corroded hole that nearly penetrated the reactor, the GAO said. The auditors said that three years later, they still aren't convinced that the NRC has addressed the problem adequately.

"We do not yet have adequate assurances from NRC that many of the factors that contributed to the incident at Davis-Besse will be fully addressed," said the GAO report.

Davis-Besse, located along Lake Erie about 30 miles east of Toledo, started producing electricity again in March after it was shut down for more than two years. It was closed for routine maintenance in February 2002. A month later, inspectors found corrosion on the reactor vessel, where leaking boric acid had eaten almost through a 6-inch-thick steel cap.

The GAO said that three engineering consultants it retained concluded that the reasons cited by the NRC for delaying the shutdown in 2001 "lacked credibility." It said the decision was so poorly documented that they couldn't judge if it was reasonable.

The commission was faulted by the auditors for not making plant owners cultivate a "safety culture" among reactor workers and managers. The NRC should have better guidelines on when to shut down reactors for safety concerns, the auditors said.

NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said Tuesday the agency has such guidelines. "There are many areas of oversight, regulations, the technical specifications that a plant has to follow while it shuts down in order to be in compliance with its license," he said.

Burnell said the idea of assessing a plant's safety culture "is too subjective to have any real effect on safety performance."

The commission's executive director, William Travers, said the GAO auditors did not take into account how much the agency depends on reactor operators to tell the truth about plant conditions.

The NRC contends Davis Besse owner FirstEnergy Corp. gave the agency inaccurate and incomplete information about the reactor lid's status. A federal grand jury is probing whether the utility did so intentionally.

Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee with oversight of the NRC, plans to hold a hearing Thursday on the report's findings on Thursday.

Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Republican Rep. Steve LaTourette, both of Ohio, requested the report along with Voinovich. Kucinich said the latest report must make the commission, the nuclear industry and Congress realize that changes are necessary.

"This report must serve as a wake-up call," said Kucinich. He opposed allowing the plant to start back up two months ago and last year he asked the commission to lift its license.