The truth is out
(New London Day 11/18/00)
Featured in Perspective
Dominion's track record bodes ill for the 'New Millstone'
Published on 11/18/2000
The Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone takes issue with a statement in your Nov. 17 article titled, “Public Will See Little Change With New Millstone.”
The article refers to accidents, employee deaths and fines incurred at the Surry and North Anna nuclear reactors operated by Dominion Resources, Inc. in Virginia. It states, “Most of the challenges referred to incidents from the 1980s.”Clarification is in order.
Seven worker deaths at the Surry Station alone occurred in the 1980s. Five were scalded to death by superheated steam in pipe-rupture events. Others were critically injured. In 1972, two workers who were scalded with steam at Surry became the first workers in the United States to die as a result of an accident at a nuclear power plant. Dominion's company representatives could not say whether they had set a record of worker fatalities at commercial nuclear facilities in the United States. (The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not keep a record of worker fatalities at commercial nuclear power plants.)The company conceded, however, that two workers at the North Anna reactors suffered fatal heart attacks in 1996, one during a refueling outage when the company was racing to get the plant back online. In the first four months of 1996, seven workers at North Anna had heart attacks or serious chest pains.
This was in 1996, not the Dark Ages of the 1980s. The Coalition did not present more information about recent accidents and fines because, after three questions, the Nuclear Energy Advisory Council put an end to our questioning.
Had we been given the chance, the Coalition would have shared the following sobering facts —among many others — demonstrating Dominion's poor safety record of very recent vintage:
• On Oct. 24, two months ago, a worker at Surry started work at Unit 1. The problem was that he was assigned to Unit 2, which was shut down for refueling. As he began to adjust the pipefitting, a minor repair, Unit 1 violently shook into hot shutdown mode, going from 100 percent power to zero power in three seconds. The worker's error triggered a potential catastrophe and probably caused degradation of the reactor structure and its components.
• On July 23, less than five months ago, Surry Units 1 and 2 suffered a loss of function of a critical a safety computer system.
• On July 5, 1999, Surry 2 suffered a “Scram” (unplanned emergency shutdown) after a valve disk separated from a valve stem.
• On Nov. 2, 1998, a worker in the Surry 1 containment fell 29 feet through an opening that should have been covered with a grating. He suffered severe head injuries.
• On May 9, 1998, Surry 1 was forced to shut down to repair a reactor coolant pump.
• On May 20, 1998, Surry 1, already in hot shutdown, had to delay restart because of a similar seal leak
.• On Jan. 24, 1997, Surry 1 shuddered into emergency shutdown involving numerous equipment failures.
• In Dec. 1997, the NRC cited the company for inadequate fire protection at Surry.
• In Oct. 1997, the NRC fined the company $55,000 for failure to adhere to federally mandated maintenance standards at Surry.
• In Sept. 1996, Dominion was cited by the NRC for having two safety switches in the wrong position for ten years at Surry. The incorrectly positioned switches could have caused a 30-minute delay in analyzing hydrogen content in the reactor containment building if there had been a major emergency and jeopardized public health and safety.
• On June 14, 1995, the 61 sirens used to alert the public in the event of an emergency at Surry failed to sound for nearly three hours during a test.
• On Sept. 18, 1995, the company announced the elimination of 45 jobs in its nuclear quality assurance division.
• On June 10, 1996, the company announced 106 job cuts in its nuclear operations, including the department that monitors radiation. The previous month, the company announced 200 other job cuts in nuclear support.
• On June 3, 1994, Surry 2 was shut down for three weeks when it was discovered that copper and iron were shedding off pipes and clogging the plumbing system.
The Surry plants made it to the NRC's Watch List in 1988 and paid out record fines. Two years after being taken off the Watch List, Public Citizen, a public-interest group, listed Surry 1 and 2 as the fourth and 12th worst run reactors in the country.
In July 1992, Surry was assessed a $50,000 civil penalty by the NRC for failing to properly align safety injection pumps.
A few more facts that did not make it into your report. At a recent meeting, Dominion acknowledged it paid a $32,500 fine for making false statements to the NRC. (The company did not recall a second fine of $20,000 for filing falsified information.) A young mother from the Millstone emergency evacuation zone asked Dominion's CEO to please commit to giving the public advance warning of planned radiation releases to the air so she could know when to keep her children inside. He refused.
The same CEO was asked earlier in the week to commit to not using plutonium-based MOX (mixed oxide fuel) at the Millstone reactors. He refused and even extolled the virtues of commercial use of deadly plutonium as a “patriotic” gesture.
Your headline, at least, got it right. Northeast Utilities will be remembered for its flagrant safety violations, cost cutting and lying to the NRC. Dominion, back in Virginia, is known for flagrant safety violations, cost cutting and lying to the NRC. Precisely because the “public will see little change with new Millstone owners,” the Connecticut Department of Utility Control must tell Dominion to pack its bags and attend to its troubled reactors back in Virginia. It is time for The Day to end its perverse romance with the Millstone menace.
It's past time to mothball Millstone.
Nancy Burton, of Mystic, is counsel to the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone.