U.S. Nuclear Industry Is Backsliding : There’s Sloppiness at Plants, Buck-Passing by Regulators

The catastrophe at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear plant near Kiev is a harsh reminder of the hazards of nuclear power.

The mathematical odds are that sometime in the coming century, there will be a core meltdown or similar disaster here in the United States. As radioactive poisons spread across the Ukraine and into Western Europe, it is again time to ask some questions of our own nuclear power program.

What are the lessons for us? The obvious one is that effective containment structures are an essential safety feature. A proper structure could have contained the plume of radioactive material that has now been unleashed and it would have enabled the Soviets to control the graphite fire by cutting off the outside air supply.

At Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, the site of the worst U.S. nuclear plant accident, in 1979, the containment system worked as designed, preventing radiation release except for a minuscule amount that got out because an employee opened a water pipe into the containment building. But we must remember that containment structures are not passive objects--they must be maintained and operated properly even when there is not an emergency. There are still all too many reports of negligent maintenance and operation, and this incident in the Soviet Union would be a good time for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to take another look at our own containment procedures.

There are still reactors, at Hanford, Wash., and Savannah River, S.C., that operate without containment structures. They are run by the Department of Energy to manufacture plutonium for military use and they are completely exempt from safety oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Now is the time for Congress to make careful inquiry into the safety conditions at these sites.

But the bedrock issue is still the safe operation of all American nuclear reactors. I served on the Kemeny Commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident. We learned that simple human error, inadequate training, sloppy maintenance and plain negligence is what usually causes nuclear mishaps.

Our commission made hundreds of technical recommendations, but we cautioned that the most important safety issue is strong, vigilant, technically competent management of plant operations.

Unfortunately, there is too much evidence that the American nuclear power industry has once again lapsed into sloppiness and complacency. Memories are short; already the lessons of Three Mile Island have been forgotten. The weak link is still the margin of human error.

The best example of this trend is the increasing frequency of reactor control problems. Until the 1980s, no American nuclear plant had ever failed to “scram”--the critical “fail safe” process that drops control rods into the nuclear core to shut down the chain reaction and prevent melting. Then, in 1983, there were two failures of the automatic scram system during the same week at the Salem plant in New Jersey. The technical capacity of the plant operators was so inadequate that the first failure went unnoticed until after the second event. And a subsequent investigation showed that faulty maintenance of the most essential safety feature in the entire plant caused the failure.

Similar incidents have occurred at Crystal River in Florida, Rancho Seco in California and Brown’s Ferry in Alabama, raising serious and so-far unanswered questions about the adequacy of reactor control systems.

The other half of our own plant safety problem is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself. In 1979 our report faulted the commission for its failure to address serious safety issues. Since then the faces have changed but the problems remain. The commission is still ineffectual at overseeing the operation and maintenance of nuclear plants.

Indeed, the very concept of a multi-member commission invites buck-passing, indecision and lack of accountability. When nuclear incidents occur, nothing changes at the NRC because nobody is held responsible. The commission should be abolished and supplanted by a single administrator directly accountable to the President, the Congress and the nation.

We must also start to take notice of nuclear power programs in other countries. We could begin with the two Soviet-built reactors operating nearby in Cuba. If the Americans and the Soviets are having their problems, it is hardly comforting to think of the level of technical skill being applied at the hundreds of reactor sites in Third World countries.

Several months ago American nuclear scientists took the initiative and organized an international conference to deal with the safe operation of nuclear plants. It will be held in Wisconsin this October. The Soviets were invited and they tentatively accepted. Then the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said no to Soviet attendance. Perhaps, in the light of events, the commission ought to reconsider.