The NRC’s Magnificent Seven
/ Grayson Webb
Several weeks ago, the Crew at Fairewinds Energy Education told you about The NRC’s Magnificent Seven – electrical engineers employed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) who are putting their careers on the line to protect all of us. The courageous employees found a critical flaw in atomic power plants, which the NRC chose to ignore. These people took the only action open to them, as private citizens they legally filed a 2.206 petition seeking action from the NRC to either enforce existing regulations for atomic power plants or shut them down.
Invited guest David Lochbaum from the Union of Concerned Scientists and Maggie and Arnie Gundersen discuss the brave seven who submitted the "put up or shut down" petition in this most recent Fairewinds podcast.
In the words David Lochbaum, taken from his All Things Nuclear blog post on the subject:
“If employees of the NRC do not trust the NRC to have acted to protect members of the public and have to petition their employer to protect the public, why should any member of the public trust the NRC to have its back (other than to have its back covered with a target)?”
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Transcript
English
MG: Hi, you’re listening to Fairewinds Energy Education’s podcast hosted by the Fairewinds crew. I’m Maggie Gundersen, and I’m here to welcome you to the show. Today I’m joined by Arnie Gundersen, Chief Engineer for Fairewinds, and our special guest, Dave Lockbaum, Director of UCS, Union of Concerned Scientists Nuclear Safety project. Dave and Arnie, it’s great to have you here today.
DL: Thank you, Maggie. (AG: Hey, Dave)
MG: So Dave, today we want to talk to you about NRC7, the story you did in the beginning of March petitioning the NRC over safety. We understand that there are some significant problems that 7 nuclear engineers at the NRC brought to the NRC, and was there since 2012 – since the problems were discovered at Byron Station. And nothing has been done to rectify those problems country wide. Could you talk a little bit about that issue, beginning with Byron?
DL: Definitely. In January of 2012, Byron had an electrical short out in a switchyard. That’s the connection between the power plant and its offsite power grid. That electrical short should have caused the normal power supply to be disconnected and a more reliable power supply – the onsite emergency diesel generators – to be connected to emergency equipment at the plant. But due to a design problem, that didn’t happen. Instead, the degraded power supply continued to be fed to normal and emergency equipment at the plant. The problem with that was that the lower voltage or the degraded power could have caused motors for primary safety systems and their backups to be disabled. As a result of that, the NRC determined – asked every other plant owner, if they had this similar kind of design vulnerability. And the answer they got from every plant in the country except for Seabrook in New Hampshire was that we have that same problem. Even the new plants being constructed in South Carolina and Georgia have that same design problem. So the NRC took an event at one plant, did some homework and found out that it was a generic problem affecting basically every plant in the country. The industry developed a fix for it, and what was missing was action by the NRC to compel owners to go out and fix this widespread problem.
MG: What would have happened if this had happened at other plants? What would have been the risk to the public?
DL: Well, the risk that was calculated by the NRC for that kind of problem at Byron, if it were to occur again, was that the chance of reactor meltdown goes up by over 100. Normally, the chance of a meltdown at an average plant is 1 in a million years. This was a hundred times more likely to lead to that if it were to occur. It doesn’t mean that if you have this open phase condition at your plant that you’re moments away from meltdown, but it does mean if you have this condition, that outcome is much more likely to occur.
MG: (3:39) So Dave, in the article that I read that you wrote, you said that the reactor risk at Byron and at any plant that would have this issue for the open phase condition is one meltdown every 10,000 years. Correct?
DL: That’s correct. Yes.
MG: So what I’d like to know from you and from Arnie – and part of the reason I wanted to have this discussion – is what is the risk for a nuclear meltdown overall? You said one in a million years?
DL: It’s in that ballpark. Individual plants vary, but that’s typically the range you see; whereas this event at Byron was at least a hundred times greater chance under that bad outcome.
MG: Okay. Here’s what I can’t understand. We’ve had five serious meltdowns in 35 years worldwide, beginning with Three Mile Island March 28, 1979. So how does that factor in to their calculations? Obviously, it’s certainly not one in a million years.
DL: It’s very creative math that’s practiced in order to yield that one in a million. Math is a good tool in the right hands and it’s a bad tool in the wrong hands. For example, math would tell you if you had a room filled with ten women and ten men, that the average person in the room has one testicle and one ovary; but reality would say you didn’t nail anybody in that room. So math in the wrong hands can lead to bad outcomes. The one-in-a-million years is a very optimistic number calculated by the nuclear industry. And as you noted, the reality as we cross the world, we have one reactor meltdown about every 5, 6,000 years. So there’s a disconnect between reality and the math that the NRC and the industry are using.
MG: Well, the way I see the math – and let’s simplify it a little bit for everyone around the country and worldwide who’s listening to us – in the last 35 years, we’ve had 5 meltdowns. To me that’s one every 7 years.
DL: Good point. When I said one-in-a-million years, it’s reactor years. So in this country we have approximately 100 reactors operating. So in a year, we accumulate 100 reactor years of experience. So I left out the reactor years in that term. The math is still wrong, but it’s not quite as wrong as it would be otherwise.
AG: You know, when I was over in Japan, somebody said just a great one-sentence quote. They said, “If you accept nuclear power, you accept that there’s a chance of a nuclear accident.” And we seem to not do that. As a country, our leaders just don’t believe that one in a million can ever really happen.
DL: It’s kind of like the nuclear Titanic; that an accident in a nuclear power plant is unthinkable, just as the Titanic was thought to be unsinkable.
AG: (6:34) Yeah. So how did this problem get resolved at Byron and nationally?
DL: It’s still a work in progress. The petitioners are seeking to end the stalemate and have the Nuclear Regulatory Commission compel other owners to implement the fix that has already been installed in Byron.
AG: I’ve got to back you up there, Dave. Because there’s this thing called IE – industry experience – and every plant is supposed to go through the information notices and look at problems and say, whoa, that definitely applies to me; I should do something about it. So there’s an individual initiative expected here when a problem happens at one plant. Did that industry experience get filtered through the nuclear industry?
DL: Yes, but it didn’t lead to the fixes being implemented, for a couple of reasons. One I can understand. It wasn’t until July of 2015 that the NRC published it’s answer key (?7:28) on what it would find as an acceptable fix that came through a revision or addition to the Standard Review Plan near 0800 (?7:38). Some owners would want to wait until they saw what the NRC would find acceptable before they spent the money for a fix that might otherwise be deemed unacceptable.
MG: I don’t quite understand, because this notice – original notice – was in 2012. And didn’t Byron find a fix in 2012? And didn’t they offer that hardware fix to the whole industry?
DL: They did. And Exelon implemented that fix at all of their plants except for Oyster Creek, which is going to be shutting down at the end of this decade. But all other plants they’ve already implemented that fix. Part of the problem is that the other owners are also waiting for enforcement discretion. If they voluntarily implement the fix, that will be an implicit concession that they’ve been outside federal regulations for decades. So part of what the industry is waiting for is immunity from past sins so they can go ahead and implement this fix.
AG: So enforcement discretion is sort of like a get-out-of-jail free card in Monopoly?
DL: It’s very much like that, yes. It removes all liability from plant owners for busting federal violations.
AG: Okay, so moving right along here, NRC staff then got involved and thought that there was a problem and pushed the NRC to do something about it.
MG: You said something like – let me quote from your article: “As a result, the NRC staff concluded that the plants may not be in compliance with existing regulations.” May not. “The NRC recommended that the NRC take action to require all owners to fix the design vulnerabilities at their plants.” So this is another design error. It’s been more than four years that it’s been recognized. And it’s been sitting there and still no action?
DL: (9:31) That’s the way the situation is, but it’s not an isolated case. Fukushima was more than five years ago and we’re still waiting for those fixes. The Browns Ferry fire was more than 40 years ago and Browns Ferry still doesn’t meet those regulations. So it’s not an isolated case of problems that are known and solutions that are not yet implemented.
MG: So for the NRC, what’s the big difference? I mean they’ve waited 40 years on one plant. So why wait – why have fixes made in only four years? Is that what you’re saying?
DL: Well, it took awhile. The NRC reacted to the 2012 event by asking all other plant owners whether they had the same problem or not. So basically, they were trying to get their arms around the scope of the problem. They had that answer by February of 2013. They got the NRC’s permission to go ahead and work towards solving the problem, which led to the answer key that was made public in July of last year. That’s when the staff felt management let them down by not taking the next step. We know the problem, we know who it affects; we have the answer key developed. Let’s go out and require plants to make this fix. That’s when those seven felt that the NRC was dragging their feet. So they sought some way to speed things up a bit.
MG: Well, I really want to talk about what happened on February 29th, 2016, when those seven NRC staff members submitted a petition to the NRC. Could you walk us through that a little more thoroughly?
DL: There is a measure on the NRC’s regulations called the 2.206 petition process that allows any member of the public to petition the NRC seeking enforcement action. In this case, the seven NRC engineers, acting as private citizens and not as NRC employees, submitted a petition under 2.206 asking the NRC to compel this fix to be implemented at all plants. Or if that’s not done, require all plants to be shut down immediately. That second measure is typically thrown in as just a carrot-and-stick thing to make the first option look more reasonable. But they basically – those seven had felt that they exhausted all internal options for getting this problem solved and felt that some outside pressure was needed to get a safety regulator to regulate safety. That’s really a very bad indication that the safety culture within this agency, the NRC, is not what it should be.
MG: So Dave, you were a nuclear whistleblower in what year?
DL: 1992.
MG: And Arnie was a nuclear whistleblower in 1990. So in all that time, nothing has changed. The culture is still the same.
DL: (12:19) When I took this job in 1996, because of my experience and Arnie’s experience and some others that we knew, I knew that this position, I’d get calls from plant workers who felt that they’d not gotten the right response when they raised safety issues. What I didn’t expect was that I’d get more calls from NRC staffers than I get from the industry combined. I get more calls from the NRC staff than all of the plants operating in the United States combined. So the NRC often talks about chilling effects at Millstone and elsewhere; yet they’ve got the largest refrigerator in town.
MG: Oh, that takes my breath away. Because we get a lot of whistleblower calls and a lot of questions from all over the world. But we don’t get them from NRC people.
DL: There’s hardly a week goes by that I don’t get a call or an email – I’ve had two today and it’s Monday.
MG: Oh, my gosh. When I think about the NRC, I think about what we went through with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and an office of inspection, to which OI said that there was nothing to Arnie’s concerns or allegations and nothing had happened. And Senator John Glenn and Senator Lieberman asked for an Inspector General investigation, and that report was scathing and there were several follow ups which showed that NRC staff covered up the entire fraudulent thing. So the first report was released in 1992 and we lost everything. We lost our home, our pension, savings because of NRC games with our life and their culture of never telling the truth.
AG: You know, it’s interesting how people have to go to extraordinary lengths to get a problem acknowledged. Now here’s these seven guys from the NRC writing a petition at night on a kitchen table so that they could do it as private citizens. And Maggie was a reporter back in ’92 and being a reporter, got us some publicity, which then led to the Inspector General becoming involved. How many thousands of people don’t rise to that level; don’t file a 2.206 petition as seven citizens or in our case, get Senator John Glenn involved? For every one or two that makes it over the top of the wall, there’s dozens of bodies that you’re climbing over to get to the top.
DL: That’s what concerns me. I’m heartened by the fact that these seven chose to put their careers on the line to get a safety issue – some attention to a safety issue. But I agree with you that I’m concerned about those who don’t want to risk their career. And I don’t fault them at all. This system is not at all sympathetic to people who raise safety issues. But I worry about those who don’t. Many of the materials I get are in plain brown envelopes with no return address. So hopefully, those are people who have a conscience and are looking for some way to get attention, addressed without putting a target on their backs.
MG: (15:35) I’d like to acknowledge the courage of these seven. It takes a lot of courage to do this, to put your career and your income and your family in such jeopardy. And we all know what that means firsthand.
DL: Again, I understand their remaining silent because the system just churns people out. I’ve heard people call it ethical cleansing. If you have ethics, you get cleansed out of the industry. But I do respect the courage of people. That’s part of what motivation for doing the blog was hopefully putting some attention on the issue will give them some protection against action – retaliatory action the NRC might take.
MG: I hope so. I sincerely hope so. Because I remember a few years ago, some whistleblowers came forward about the dams near the Oconee plant. And they were harassed, weren’t they? And drummed out?
DL: They’re still with the NRC. Larry Chrissone (?16:31) and Richard Perkins did go public with their concerns – Larry very vocally. And he was investigated now three times by the NRC’s Inspector General for alleged wrongdoing. After one investigation, they said he could voluntarily resign or they’d turn their efforts over to the Department of Justice for prosecution. He refused to resign because he’d done nothing wrong. They did turn it over to the Department of Justice, who declined to prosecute. And I have a copy of the letter that the Department of Justice sent back to NRC. And their reason for not prosecuting Larry was because he didn’t violate any statutes. So at least DOJ won’t prosecute you for doing nothing wrong. It didn’t bother the NRC. The other person was Dr. Michael Peck, who was the Senior Reactor Inspector for the NRC out at Diablo Canyon. He raised some issues about seismic protection near that plant and was subjected to Inspector General. He’s now had three – apparently he and Larry are in a race for the most Inspector General investigations. He said the handwriting on the wall. At the one meeting they told him, we have 32 investigators and plenty of time. We’ll find you doing something wrong eventually. So he saw the writing on the wall and actually applied for a different position with the NRC. He now is the BWR (?17:47) reactor technology instructor here at the training center here in Chattanooga. He took my old job. But people within the NRC – it’s a safety regulator – their job is to regulate safety and worry about safety issues. And yet, if you do so, the response by the agency is to investigate you for raising safety issues. And instead of getting awards, they fear for their jobs. And there’s just something wrong about that. And I don’t know how long – every three years, the NRC’s Inspector General surveys the NRC workforce. And for the third survey in a row, the biggest problem is that the workforce doesn’t believe that senior management wants to hear safety issues, or that they’re afraid to raise safety issues. We did a blog in the last year or so comparing the numbers from the NRC survey to the numbers from safety culture (?18:35) surveys conducted at Millstone and Davis Bessie when those plants were in the midst of their problems. The numbers are about the same. The NRC did not allow Millstone or Davis Bessie to restart until those safety culture problems were addressed. The NRC solution to their problems is just to do another survey three years from now and hope they change. They don’t really do anything to fix their internal safety culture problems. It’s do as I say, not as I do.
AG: (19:03) Hey Dave, do you think part of the problem in the back of the NRC’s mind is that nukes are barely competitive right now, and if they push any harder, they’ll cause other nukes to shut down?
DL: I think that’s a contribution. I don’t think any one answer explains a workforce of about 3,800 people. I think a larger factor, in the discussions I’ve had with workers and managers, is that they just don’t believe that a bad accident can happen. We were talking earlier about people just don’t believe meltdowns are possible. And I think the fact that these plants don’t meet fire protection regulations, the don’t meet seismic protection at Diablo Canyon, they don’t meet open phase anywhere but Exelon’s plants, is not a problem because we’re not going to have fires or earthquakes or shorts. We’re protected against those kind of accidents unless they happen (sic 19:54).
AG: You know, that’s exactly what the DIET report said. The DIET is the parliament in Japan. And they said the problem underlying all the other problems at Fukushima Daiichi was that management just didn’t believe that the plans were not robust. And when you’re in these things, they’re so huge and so impressive and nobody ever asks the question, why are they so huge. And the reason is that in a nuclear core that’s maybe 12 x 12 x 12, there’s 4 million horses running around. So it’s hard to keep 4 million horses in a 12 x 12 x 12-foot space. But when one of them trips, it can make for a helluva pileup. And we don’t look at the robustness as a sign of the amount of horses that need to be restrained. This hubris runs through you and you feel like you’re unconquerable.
DL: Also, I think related that the robustness tends to be a trap. People look at the concrete walls and the six-inch-thick reactor vessel and so on and think, well, the fact that this widget is impaired or degraded, that’s okay because I have six other widgets that are ready to stand in the place. Nobody looks at the common cause or the fact that multiple things can happen. These plants aren’t one step away, but when you start having a bunch of preexisting failures, you shorten the path that must then be filled in, to cause that bad day.
MG: I want to find out why the findings at Oconee - north of Oconee in the dams – was so important. And I want you and Arnie to talk about how the loss of a dam and the flooding, what that would mean. Those would cause Fukushima-type meltdowns. And then I want to talk about Peck and his seismic data has been more than substantiated. It’s many times. And there are three new faults that have been uncovered. So can you both talk about that technically?
DL: In June of 2010, nine months before Fukushima, the NRC issued a confirmatory action letter to the owner of the three reactors at Oconee in South Carolina. The NRC wanted – demanded – that that owner fix some flooding protection issues at Oconee and some associated problems with the Jocassee Dam about 20 miles upriver that could cause its failure. The NRC based that mandate on evaluations that if that dam were to fail, it would flood the Oconee site to 14 feet, which is about the depth that Fukushima was flooded to. And if that site was flooded to that depth or not even – anything above 7 feet – there was a 100 percent chance that all three reactors would melt down. These are the NRC’s numbers. And they very seldom underestimate a risk. So that risk, that fear is what prompted the NRC to issue that mandate in June of 2010. Those flooding protection problems at Oconee were reinforced by the problem at Fukushima nine months later. But ironically, the flooding at Fukushima, the meltdowns, slowed down the fixes at Oconee, and they’re still not fixed. If it hadn’t have been for Fukushima, the fixes that were supposed to be resolved by now. But somehow the actual event slowed down the potential event. The problems at Diablo Canyon were discovered most recently in 2008 when they found a shoreline fault about 300 yards away from the plant. Dr. Michael Peck was the NRC Senior Resident Inspector at the time. He looked at that newly discovered fault and the ground motion that it could cause at nearby Diablo Canyon, and pointed out that it didn’t meet the seismic protection. The homework had not been done to show that it could withstand that earthquake. His reward for having pointed that out was to be harassed by his agency. We issued a report looking at other times that U.S. nuclear facilities had been found to be unprotected against seismic events going back 40 years. In all prior cases, the NRC had now allowed the plant or the facility to operate until that seismic protection shortcomings were resolved. At Diablo Canyon, they’re letting the plant run. And it’s not clear to me why they departed from a longstanding policy of protecting American lives.
AG: I can remember back in the 70’s when Stone & Webster had a seismic calculational error, and the NRC shut down all the Stone & Webster affected plants for nine months until they rectified the analysis. When Peter Bradford – he was commissioner when they had the accident at Three Mile Island – Bradford and the other commissioner shut down the Babcock Wilcox Reactors for months until they got to the bottom of it. But here after Fukushima, we don’t do that with the Mark I reactors and like you said, at Diablo, we don’t do it with the seismic problems, either.
DL: I looked into the Davis Bessie case in 2002, where the workers discovered the football-sized hole in a reactor vessel head. The NRC Inspector General interviewed the NRC senior managers, because the staff at the NRC had prepared an order that would have required Davis Bessie to shut down. The NRC staff applied five criteria for whether a plant is safe or not and determined that Davis Bessie did not meet four of the five, and probably didn’t meet the fifth one. And that, not meeting four and probably not meeting the fifth, was the basis for the shutdown order. NRC senior managers set aside the order and allowed the plant to continue running. When those senior managers were interviewed by the Inspector General afterwards and they said well, in hindsight, do you think you made a mistake, they all said no, I’d have done the exact same thing because I require absolute evidence that a plant is unsafe before I can order it to be shut down. And you’ll never build a stronger case than four out of five not meeting safety requirements. It’s just not – I wonder what it would take for the NRC senior managers to shut down a plant absent people dying at the moment. I don’t know what other signs of absolute evidence will ever cause them to take the action that the NRC took in March of ’79 or even more recently in March of ’87 when they shut down the two reactors at Peach Bottom due to the sleeping operators. Since then, nothing seems to bother – problems at Oconee, problems at Diablo Canyon – the NRC doesn’t consider them to be unsafe.
MG: (26:41) I think that’s what really makes us afraid here at Fairewinds. We have contact from people all over the world. Arnie just came back from a month-long tour in Japan. And our listeners and viewers have seen our “Fukushima at Five” video and heard our Japan tour podcasts and know what he saw on the ground when he was there, the refugees that he met with and he spoke with. And what this ongoing tragedy means for the people of Japan and for generations of people because of the exposures, the high, high exposures they’re getting that are being denied by the Japanese government. And we look at that and we just can’t imagine. This industry, the nuclear industry, is not making cotton candy. It’s not making peanut butter. Look at the people who died in the peanut butter debacle. And look at what’s happened in Flint, Michigan. We have to get moving in a different direction. These are old, old plants that are very, very vulnerable.
AG: You said that if I had it to do over again, I’d do the same thing. That reminds me there was one person at the NRC who was responsible for botching the inspection that I discovered – the problems that I discovered at my employer in 1990 – his name was John White. So this is 1990 is when he knowingly and deliberately botched an inspection to screw me. So Maggie ran into him at a public meeting in 2012. He’s still at the NRC; he got a couple promotions along the way. And Maggie confronted him. And I’m going to pass it over to Maggie so she can, in her own words, tell you what he had to say.
MG: I was at one of those NRC dog and pony shows here in Vermont where they had all their people out. And he was sent there as the director of tritium issues for the region. I questioned him and I had the Inspector General report in my hand that said he was at fault for the fraudulent initial inspection. And he looked me right in the eye, and I have a filmmaker who has it on film, and he said, “If I had the chance to do it, I would do it all over the same way again.”
DL: It’s one of the reasons why the NRC keeps getting voted the best place to work for in the federal government, is that whether you make mistakes or not, you continue to get paid and promoted. That’s like a license to steal.
MG: (29:21) Well, on that note, I’m going to close that with that. And thank you, both Arnie and Dave, for all that you’re doing as you both travel and speak all over trying to help people – keep the public safe. So thank you very much and I want that takeaway. David if you could close with that one more time, I want that to be our listener’s take away.
DL: The NRC keeps getting voted as the best place to work in the federal government. And I think the experience is that we’re seeing is that you can make mistakes and still get promoted and paid is like a license to steal.
MG:I won't agree with you on that and I’ll close on that note. And thank you so much for joining us.
DL: Thanks, Maggie and Arnie.
