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Sunday, February 12, 2006

Near-miss prompts safety wake-up call

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 02/12/06

BY KIRK MOORE

STAFF WRITER

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s focus on a culture of safety at U.S. nuclear plants was inspired by an unnerving close call just 30 miles outside a city of 300,000, when a nuclear reactor vessel came within a fraction of an inch of bursting.

This didn’t happen in 1979, when a Three Mile Island reactor suffered a partial meltdown.

It happened in 2002, when the cap of the reactor at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Oak Harbor, Ohio, was nearly rusted through before it was discovered during an inspection.

Government inspectors later concluded that the near disaster was exacerbated by a corporate culture that put profits ahead of safety inspections. Even though the cap showed signs of possible weakness, managers opted not to shut down the reactor early to inspect it.

The incident served as a cautionary tale for all nuclear plant operators, and a wake-up call for regulators to be more vigilant about safety.

The safety culture at Davis-Besse was found to have a built-in disincentive: An engineer who found a problem would then have to fix it, according to a federal report.

The cap’s rusted-out cavity — nearly big enough to stuff a football inside — could have caused a catastrophic loss-of-coolant accident, one of the most serious disasters possible for a nuclear plant. It likely would have led to a core meltdown and radioactive releases in the Oak Harbor area, located east of Toledo.

The chance of a meltdown came precariously close, according to the NRC. The odds were 1 in 167, or about the same as winning a boxed Pick Three lottery bet.

Source of corrosion

The corrosion was traced to cooling water nozzles that enter the vessel head; water leaking from tiny cracks left residue, including borate solution used to help control the nuclear reaction.

Boric acid had eaten through more than 6 inches of carbon steel — down to a 3/8-inch stainless steel lining that was the only barrier between the cavity and reactor pressures up to 2,500 pounds per square inch, according to NRC documents.

There were no gauges or alarms to warn plant operators that the steel was dangerously thin. But it had been known in the nuclear industry for years that pressurized water reactors of similar design could be prone to vessel head damage. Oyster Creek is a boiling water reactor, a different design that is not prone to cap corrosion.

Davis-Besse owners FirstEnergy Corp. and its operators didn’t understand how bad such corrosion could be. Some plant workers believed that the heat of normal operating temperatures inside the vessel meant that only dry acid crystals would accumulate harmlessly — not the highly corrosive acid solution, according to a July 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Previous inspection reports and traces of rust-colored escaped borate solution offered warning signs in 2000, but plant management reckoned it was safe to continue running the plant up to its scheduled February 2002 refueling outage.

When the reactor was shut down and inspectors checked the vessel head, they found between 20 and 30 square inches of metal had been eaten away.

NRC bans 4 officials

Last year, the NRC fined FirstEnergy $5.4 million. This year, the NRC also banned four senior Davis-Besse plant officials from involvement in any licensed nuclear activity for five years — essentially throwing them out of the industry. The company this year agreed to pay $28 million for restitution, penalties and public service projects to defer U.S. Justice Department prosecution.

The NRC blamed the plant’s manager of design engineering, its compliance supervisor, the technical services director and senior engineer for providing incomplete and inaccurate information to the NRC. Those punishments followed an earlier five-year suspension levied against a plant engineer for providing inaccurate information about efforts to remove the boric acid deposits.

The Davis-Besse incident was a warning flag for what can happen when managers try to maximize profitability and minimize downtime. The DOE report points out that, “Budget and schedule pressures must not override safety considerations to prevent unsound program decisions.”

“At Davis-Besse, corporate incentive programs were aligned toward short-term production,” the DOE report stated. “In combination with other incentives, such as rewards for meeting or exceeding outage goals, emergent work and repairs that did not affect generation were often deferred.”

That report considered lessons to be learned from catastrophic failure — the loss of space shuttle Columbia in 2003 — and the potential disaster at Davis-Besse. Among its findings, the report warned of the risks in cost-cutting and staff reductions.

Previous operating budget cuts at Davis-Besse had reduced the plant’s engineering staff by 40 percent, and the report noted that, “System engineers were consolidated — giving them more systems to monitor than they could effectively handle. All plant problems were not reported because typically the one reporting the problem was tasked with its resolution.”

Another lesson was the need to listen to employee concerns and “differing professional opinions” on safety issues, the DOE found.

A threefold increase

In a July 2003 report, a panel of experts organized through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a report, “The Future of Nuclear Energy,” which looked at economic pressures and other challenges to the civilian nuclear industry.

In the report, the MIT group projected a threefold increase in nuclear electricity generation worldwide by 2050 — a worthy goal, in the panel’s view, for reducing greenhouse gas emissions while supplying power for social and economic advances in the developing nations.

“This was not an anti-nuclear organization. They were reaching for a future for nuclear power,” said Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a nuclear power watchdog group.

The 2002 discovery of corrosion at Davis-Besse “raises questions about whether nuclear reactor safety goals are compatible with the transition to competitive energy markets,” the MIT experts wrote.

Although critics argued that competitive pressures would compel plant owners to avoid safety inspection-related shutdowns, plant owners argued they had an economic interest in safety, as well as constant NRC oversight.

In an understatement, the MIT group noted that “nuclear plant accident costs are not financially attractive for plant owners.”

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GEORGETOWN WORKERS PROTEST FOR UNION RIGHTS!

Night-Shift Janitors and Students to Protest at Cleaning Company’s Headquarters in Virginia

On the morning of Friday, Febuary 24, night shift workers from Georgetown’s contracted cleaning service company will demonstrate in front of their employers office building in Virginia. P&R Enterprises has failed to recognize Georgetown worker rights to form a union through card-check neutrality with District 82 of SEIU local 32 BJ. Card-check is the most democratic manner to form a union; it avoids the harsh intimidation involved in the union election process.

Workers want to bring attention to their ongoing camaign and ensure that P&R Enterprises takes notice of their determination. With this end in mind, a large contingent of workers and students will march and chant outside of the office building. P&R Enterprises is already unionized in other buildings in Washington DC. Georgetown workers, like all rank and file union members, only want to exercise their rights as workers and sit at the bargaining table with their employer.

Thursday morning, twenty members of Congress who lead our nation on labor issues sent President DeGoia a letter urging him to “ask P&R Enterprises and all contractors at Georgetown University to respect the choice [to form a union] and recognize the employees’ union through a card-check process.”

The P&R janitors who clean many buildings on campus want to unionize through a card-check process (also known as majority-sign up), which is the most fair and democratic process to organize unions. The card-check process is being promoted in Congress by over 200 Congress members sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act. Among these supporters are the twenty congressmen and women supporting the efforts of the janitors to organize at Georgetown, including Eleanor Holmes-Norton (who represents the District of Columbia in the House), former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, George Miller (senior Democrat on the Education and Workforce Committee), and all three chairs of the Labor and Working Families Caucus. A similar letter is currently in the works in the Senate building. In these letter, the members of Congress hope to show DeGioia that Georgetown’s commitment to social justice necessitates that we allow campus workers organize by the card-check process.
Georgetown University is blocking the janitors’ ability to form a union. In the February 3rd issue of the Hoya (“Wage Protest Meets DPS Resistance” 2/3/06 issue of the Hoya, see http://www.thehoya.com/news/020306/news2.cfm) university spokesperson Erik Smulson clearly stated that the university is refusing to allow janitors to organize through a card-check process. This demonstrates the university’s misunderstanding of the concept of a card-check process: it is a simple and democratic process to avoid the bureaucratic National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process, which usually takes at least 6-8 weeks, in which time employers regularly intimidate and fire pro-union workers (see http://araw.org/resources/facts/cardvsnlrb.cfm). In the same Hoya article, Smulson stated that campus workers should be forced through this NLRB election process. Today, members of Congress are emphasizing to DeGioia that the NLRB election process “simply fails to protect the rights of millions of Americans to make decisions about workplace representation without intimidation or fear of reprisal.”
The Georgetown Living Wage Coalition demands the implementation of the card-check process. When more than 50% of workers in a unit sign cards authorizing representation by a particular union, the contractor and university agree to recognize this union, rather than forcing workers through the complicated and undemocratic National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process. An overwhelming majority of P&R janitors at Georgetown have signed union cards. This has been the case for almost an entire year. It is time for Georgetown to take action and stop blocking workers’ right to unionize.
Supporting Congressional members also expressed concern in Georgetown’s possible violation of an internationally recognized human right, “the right to organize, to collectively bargain…is the same right by which we measure the democratic nature of other countries.”
WHAT: Members of congress have signed a letter addressed to President John DeGoia supporting the Living Wage Coalitions’ demand that the P&R Enterprises workers at Georgetown be allowed to form a union through the card-check process.
WHO: Signatories include; Stephen F. Lynch, Linda Sanchez, Michael H. Michaud, George Miller, Major Owens, Raul M. Grijalva, John Conyers, Jose Serrano, Robert A. Brady, Donald Payne, Robert Wexler, Lane Evans, Jan Schakowsky, Dennis Kucinich, Hilda Solis, Sherrod Brown, Joe Baca, Robert Andrews, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Stephanie Herseth
WHY: After almost four years of struggling with Georgetown administrators over the issue of the living wage, and working closely with campus wage-earning employees, the Living Wage Coalition had no choice but to take the drastic action of a hunger strike in spring 2005. After nine days on strike Georgetown University agreed to the “Just Employment Policy”. Now, almost a year later, those promises have not been met: Georgetown workers are not receiving the wage and benefits promised to them, and the university has done nothing to ensure workers’ right to organize a union through the card check process (as the contracted janitors have been trying to form a union for almost a year now).