Activist faults NRC's report on Millstone
Mar. 31--WATERFORD -- By Thomas D. Williams, The Hartford Courant, Conn. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
The head of the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone has accused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of failing to properly regulate the operators of the plant's two nuclear reactors, which produce a large share of the state's electric power.
During an earlier, hourlong discussion of Millstone, the NRC representatives
offered a limited critique of Millstone, mostly praising the plant's security,
operations and environmental controls during 2004. The NRC report says that
overall, the nuclear power plant "operated safely" and "preserved
public health."
When the public was invited to comment, there was a moment of silence with no
response. Then, Burton, the sole responder, walked out of the sparse audience
with a large briefcase of documents, sat next to a microphone and spent an hour
questioning and more often lecturing the regulators and the regulated.
A number of times, Burton cut off the answers to questions she posed to the
NRC panel, prompting protests from panel members. Several times, she interrupted
an NRC official by insisting he should answer her questions without reading from
a document. But another official countered that Burton was herself reading from
documents.
Burton accused the NRC of not scrutinizing cancer-causing emissions from the
plant, ignoring plant workers' job-related health concerns, not taking into
account the wear and tear on the plant from repeated emergency maintenance
shutdowns, and failing to detect signs that might have prevented what she termed
a dangerous plant fire two months ago.
"We believe that Unit 2 has shown dismal performance record,"
Burton said, "and the NRC should call for a shutdown of this aged reactor
before Dominion puts large amounts of money into it."
Days before the meeting, NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said the commission's
inspectors have taken a close look at malfunctions that caused shutdowns, and at
Millstone's reactions to those problems. "It's an example of how our
reactor oversight process should work. If performance shows an anomaly, we
expect we will go in and take a closer look, and that's exactly what we did in
this case," he said. Overall, Unit 2 was subject to 4,685 hours of
inspection work. Unit 3 was subject to 4,205 hours, he said.
Tuesday Paul Krohn, an NRC representative, promised to supply Burton with
plant air emission readings he insisted were harmless to people living around
the plant. And, he said, federal safety regulations are so strict and strongly
enforced that it is unlikely workers are exposed to harmful radiation.
Krohn said the NRC inspection for fire safety was general in nature. So it
was not extraordinary that NRC scrutiny did not anticipate a fire two weeks
later, he added.
After the meeting, Peter Hyde, a spokesman for Dominion, said some of
Burton's information about hazardous worker exposures creating cancerous tumors
is pure fabrication. He said Burton's claim that the Jan. 14 fire in a Unit 2
turbine building electrical power switch dangerously compromised plant security
for hours, is simply not true. The fire was relatively minor and backup security
systems took over immediately, said Hyde, who added that he was an eyewitness to
events that night.
Hyde said plant air monitoring on top of the building where the emission
releases occur shows no dangerous levels of strontium-90, a cancer-causing agent
that turned up in Dominion's goat milk samplings miles from the plant several
years ago. That means the strontium-90 readings in goats' milk probably
originated from fallout from past nuclear weapons testing, Hyde said.
Each time Unit 2 shut down, he said, it was closely inspected and parts were
replaced as needed.
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