This is Barry Quigley’s nightmare: It’s 95 degrees in Chicago and everyone with air-conditioning has it cranked to high. The Byron nuclear power station south of Rockford is running at full steam, pumping out 2,500 megawatts of electricity to the midwest grid. Quigley, a senior reactor operator, is at the helm in the plant’s control room, supervising other operators who are watching banks of lights, display screens, and alarms. Quigley’s shift is nearly over, and so far it’s been an easy day. Suddenly a cacophony of bells and sirens screams out, jolting everyone in the room into action. One of the plant’s two reactors has been shut down by control rods automatically inserted into the reactor to stop the atomic chain reaction that produces heat. But the reactor is still hot–more than 600 degrees and rising. Inside the control room, signals tell the operators the outside source of electricity to the reactor and its cooling systems has failed. If Quigley and his crew don’t get cooling water to the reactor, the decaying radiation will keep heating up, the reactor core will melt, and Byron will become the next Three Mile Island.
But nuclear power presents other environmental problems, its opponents say, including radioactive waste and daily low-level emissions of radiation. And they worry that pressure to produce electricity at the lowest cost could lead to a nuclear accident exposing thousands of people to high doses of radiation. They also worry, especially after this month’s deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that American nuclear power plants could be targeted by terrorists. “The [Federal Aviation Administration’s] version of security was asking passengers two inane questions,” says Dave Kraft, director of the Evanston-based Nuclear Energy Information Service. “That’s the same attitude we see [with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission]–going through the motions of regulating without providing substance.”
That same year, the Illinois legislature voted to deregulate electricity sales. This meant that in two years Com Ed would start to lose its monopoly over metropolitan Chicago and the northern part of the state. Under the old system Com Ed was guaranteed customers, and the huge debt from building nuclear plants was factored into the state-approved rates that consumers paid. But deregulation was a new game entirely. Supply and demand would determine rates, and if Com Ed couldn’t provide cheap electricity to Illinois, another utility–a coal-fired plant in Ohio or a natural-gas-powered turbine in Wisconsin–would be happy to sell its electricity to Com Ed’s old customers.
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At the same time, big changes were under way on Capitol Hill. Utility executives and lobbyists began an aggressive campaign to soften federal nuclear regulations. The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the industry’s lobbying arm, argued that nuclear plants were safer than ever. The industry did not deserve–nor could it afford–the stringent and expensive regulations imposed after Three Mile Island. The partial core meltdown near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979 had forever changed nuclear regulation in the United States. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission grew up and got mean. Its staff ballooned, its budget multiplied, and Congress expanded its powers. Inspectors no longer trusted utilities to do the right thing. They demanded maintenance records that proved pumps were being tested; they looked at valves and pipes and emergency plans; they started employee training and testing programs; and they levied huge fines when utilities failed to fix problems. The high cost of regulation had been factored into the state-approved rates that customers paid, thus guaranteeing stable dividends to shareholders. But with the end of the monopoly system, the industry knew its days were numbered if the rules did not change. In June 1998, utility analyst Steven Fetter of the New York bond rating firm Fitch IBCA, Inc. told the Senate’s nuclear oversight committee that NRC enforcement stymied investment in nuclear power. “Needless to say, a situation like this creates a great deal of unease among debt and equity investors and inhibits new investment in nuclear as competition comes to the electric sector,” Fetter said.
In 1996, the NRC, acting on a tip from a whistle-blower, found that a Maine nuclear plant had deliberately falsified safety data so that it could produce more electricity even though it knew its cooling system could not support the increase. At the same plant, NRC inspectors found that 16 feet of cable in a high-pressure water pump’s control circuit had been inadvertently cut and removed three to four years earlier. If the pump had been needed in an emergency, it wouldn’t have been usable. In 1998 the NRC discovered that a Michigan plant operated for 13 years with a severed piece of piping that in an emergency delivers borate solution to the reactor core. In an accident, there would have been no backup way to shut down the reactor. In Cordova, Illinois, Com Ed discovered during a 1997 drill that a fire would have cut off power to all its emergency pumps, leaving the Quad Cities plant with no way to cool the reactor. Twenty-two years after the NRC required all nuclear plants to revise their fire plans, Quad Cities was still vulnerable. In each of these cases, and in scores of others, equipment failure could have led to accidents as bad as or worse than Three Mile Island. Why didn’t those accidents happen? “These plants did not experience an initiating event which required the backup equipment to function,” says Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, which lobbies for better regulations. “Safety was achieved by not challenging the equipment rather than by having the equipment successfully fulfill the required safety systems. In other words, luck.”
Mike Stein was a lawyer with the NRC’s Office of Enforcement when Congress started pressuring the agency in 1998. He was part of the team that issued tickets and fines to utilities that broke rules. “[Congress] put a real scare into the NRC,” says Stein, who now works for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “That’s when the industry got its foot in the door.”
