MIDDLETOWN, Pa. - The company that operates the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant said it has investigated five incidents of inattentive employees in the past two years including two reports in December.
AmerGen Energy Co. said it has hired an outside company to investigate a report last month that involved a shift manager. The company also will look into how common inattentiveness is at the plant.
Plant employees are not allowed to be inattentive, an industry term that can mean sleeping. The reports also involved security guards not responding promptly to employees waiting to enter the plant and an employee in a lunch room.
In each case, the employee in question was disciplined by AmerGen, company spokesman Ralph DeSantis said. None of the incidents affected the safe operation of the plant, he said.
Eric Epstein, chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, a watchdog group, blamed the incidents on understaffing at the plant and called for an independent investigator to look into the facility's operations.
Three Mile Island, located about 10 miles southeast of Harrisburg, was the site of the nation's worst nuclear accident when a partial meltdown occurred in 1979.