Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Editorials with
fangs
If there is a Patron Saint of Nuclear Power, he must be especially protective
of southeastern Connecticut.
This area has had more near-misses than a doe during hunting season.
And we’re not glowing yet, no thanks to Northeast Utilities and the manner
in which it has managed its four Connecticut nuclear power plants.
Company officials recently revealed two spectacular instances of sloppiness,
lack of adherence to regulations and neglect that could have threatened
the safety of those who live around the Connecticut Yankee Nuclear Power
Plant in Haddam Neck. Although several months ago NU voluntarily shut down
the plant for evaluation and Connecticut Yankee has not reopened, it is
in the complex nature of nuclear power that things can go wrong even when
a plant is not generating electricity.
What has thus far distinguished Connecticut Yankee from Millstone Station’s
three nuclear plants is that it isn’t on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s
watch list of unsafe nuclear plants. Yet the incidents in question may
make the NRC reconsider that omission.
Over the Labor Day weekend, a series of errors occurred at Connecticut
Yankee that allowed a nitrogen gas bubble to form in the reactor vessel
that holds the nuclear core. The nitrogen had forced out 15 percent of
the water that cools the core when the presence of the gas was finally
detected. If the problem had not been discovered in time, the core could
have been damaged and radiation released.
The other problem, just revealed, is that Connecticut Yankee has been
operating for years without an emergency-backup safety system. For decades,
company executives assured area residents that if some terrible incident
caused a loss of water that cools the nuclear core, systems existed to
replace the water and prevent a meltdown.
That was a lie. It was a lie because the safety system was blocked by
sludge, mop heads, nuts, bolts, and other assorted junk — enough to fill
five 55-gallon drums — all of which would have rendered the system inoperable.
The system got clogged for the simplest of reasons. A grate had openings
too large to prevent trash from spilling through. The mesh covers a sump
from which water would be recirculated in the event of an accident.
In balancing these latest revelations, it is clear that the lack of
a backup safety system is by far the more serious of the two. NU must have
ignored NRC notifications sent out over a dozen years that large openings
in the grates could create major problems. But NU’s own experience should
have alerted the company that the mesh covering the sump was inadequate.
The area was cleaned in 1975, seven years after the plant opened, and enough
junk was removed to fill six 55-gallon drums.
It is illustrative that the capital project’s budget for Connecticut
Yankee dropped from $29.5 million a year from 1986 to 1989 to $6.6 million
a year in the early 1990s when top NU management cut the budget, according
to a July 3 letter from the NRC. Even if management cared enough
to make sure that the emergency core cooling system could function, the
budget cuts made it less likely that needed changes would have been made.
In these latest problems are echoes of others that have troubled NU’s
management of its nuclear plants — the lack of adherence to rules, arrogance
and the attitude that no accident could happened because the company was
simply too good for such an unthinkable thing to occur.
Meantime, NU problems are getting nationwide attention. They were the
subject of a lead, front-page story in The Wall Street Journal on Monday,
and the target of a front-page, three-part series in The Boston Globe last
week. Members of the Board of Trustees are having doubts that Bernard M.
Fox, NU chairman of the board, is the right man to lead NU, The Wall Street
Journal article said.
The board members must be slow learners. It shouldn’t take a meltdown
for members to begin to reconsider their allegiance to the man who has
brought the company to this sorry place in history.
