Power play - citizen oversight of nuclear power plants

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1992 by Christopher Georges

Twenty-four-year-old Jim Horn, an engineer new to California's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, was flipping through a copy of the reactor's blueprints when he spotted a design flaw so massive it could have been a Cal-Tech marching band prank. Huge segments of the plant, which was just weeks away from full-power operation, had been assembled backwards. Many of the cables and supports for the two reactors, which were mirror images of each other, had been erected exactly opposite where they should have been. Although construction at the $2.3 billion Southern California plant was 97 percent complete, no one before Horn--not the thousands of engineers and construction workers, not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) team of inspectors--had spotted the screw-up.

Horn's finding back in 1981 made a lot of people unhappy, especially at the utility, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), and the NRC. Perhaps the only ones who came out pleased were the activists who made sure that the NRC paid attention to Horn's allegations.

It wasn't the first time interveners--a euphemism for the activists best known for stunts like chaining themselves to reactor gates --had helped bring to light flaws at Diablo Canyon. Seven years earlier, before construction had begun, they dug up evidence that the plant site was just three miles from the second largest geologic fault in California. PG&E was forced to build reinforcements. And later, after the botched construction had been uncovered, they pushed the NRC to undertake a full reexamination of the plant's construction, a review that unearthed 111 new safety-related errors. "I don't think any of us anticipated the 'scope of the problems," said an NRC commissioner at the time.

In hindsight, the unrelenting, if often annoying, prodding of activists at Diablo Canyon not only made the plant safer but arguably averted a massive disaster. And Diablo Canyon is just one of nearly a dozen sites where grassroots interveners have rabble-roused the NRC and utilities into fixing defective plants or mothbailing clunkers. Sure, the activists can cause construction delays and cost overruns, but in the long run, the record shows that they've made nuclear power safer and smarter.

But now, thanks to a decade-long effort by the industry, and the tacit approval of a utility-friendly NRC, activists and the rest of the public are quietly being regulated out of nuclear power oversight. A spate of NRC rules enacted in the past four years essentially allows the industry to power up the next generation of reactors without having to deal with their long-- time nemesis--ordinary citizens like you. And all just in the nick of time: The sagging nuclear power industry, paralyzed by public distrust, skyrocketing costs, and an aging complement of reactors, has been stymied--not a single new reactor has been ordered since 1978. After decades of optimistic projections, the nuclear power industry suddenly finds itself in danger of extinction.

The industry's logical response to its woes should be, of course, to win back the confidence of the public by shutting down dozens of old, decaying plants and working to replace them with lower-cost, safer plant models. And while there's no question that the industry is lumbering in this direction, it's taking no risks on its financial future: Four new NRC rules, all supported and in some cases co-written by industry lobbyists, will allow utilities to design, construct, refurbish (or not refurbish), and disassemble power plants in coming years while answering to no one but themselves and the NRC. The agency's subtle effort ensures that the businessmen who control the industry will have virtually unchecked control over where, when, and how nuclear power is used in the future. And with a track record like theirs--from Diablo Canyon to Three Mile Island to Shoreham--that's not a particularly comforting thought.

There's little mystery about why the industry has pushed the NRC to change the rules. In the seventies, when it became clear that nuclear power was more expensive than nonnuclear sources, the public mood began to sour. Safety concerns mounted after Three Mile Island, and the enduring waste problem furthered public grumbling.

In the meantime, public interveners had become enraged and savvy enough to litter the plant approval path with enough obstacles to give the utilities fits. By 1978, ordering a nuclear power plant had become a utility's version of Russian roulette. Just ask the managers at the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO), whose attempt to build Shoreham in the seventies and eighties ran headlong into an angry, unrelenting public who argued that evacuation would be impossible in the event of an accident. After a 20-year struggle, a battle-weary LILCO threw in the towel last February, after spending more than $5 billion.

But you can't really blame feisty granola-eaters for fiascoes like Shoreham and Diablo Canyon. After all, the interveners wouldn't have had a case unless the utilities' work was shoddy and the NRC's oversight lax. And at plants including Aliens Creek (Texas), Byron (Illinois), Seabrook (New Hampshire), Midland (Michigan), Comanche Peak (Texas), Zimmer (Ohio), and Jamestown and Shoreham (New York), utilities have given activists plenty of mistakes to capitalize on. And it's hurt them. As cost overruns ran into the billions of dollars and delays ate up years, Wall Street financiers grew gun shy and new funding dried up. By the mid-eighties the industry found itself in a meltdown, unable or unwilling to take on new projects. But instead of heeding the message of more emphasis on safety, it blamed the messenger, saying, as did one industry spokesman recently, that "frivolous intervention is the bane of our existence."