Jun. 11--The nuclear power industry is so shorthanded that workers often put in numbingly long hours on the job, with critics warning that safety at nuclear plants could be endangered by employee fatigue.

Union officials and plant workers say that overtime, sometimes a remarkable numbers of hours, has increased in recent years as the pool of skilled employees shrinks. The workload has grown so onerous that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, giving consideration to safety issues, is weighing whether to tighten regulations on how long people can work.

In an official document issued recently, the staff of the NRC states that industry work scheduling policies do not ensure "that personnel are not impaired by work-related fatigue."

Concerns about overwork date to the late 1990s, when the Union of Concerned Scientists and others asked the commission to limit work hours to prevent excessive fatigue that could compromise safety.

"The NRC must establish clear requirements for working hours that reduce the potential for weary workers making grave mistakes," the Union of Concerned Scientists said in 1999. The group says it has the same concerns today as it did then.

The overtime stems from a declining workforce.

The Nuclear Energy Institute says nuclear plant workers, excluding security personnel and contractors, numbered 56,400 in 2002. In 2003 that dropped to 55,700. In 2004 it dropped again, to 53,750.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents nuclear workers in Illinois and other parts of the country, said staffing has been declining for years.

An official at IBEW Local 15 said, for example, that at the plants it represents in Illinois, its membership has fallen from 2,175 members in 2000 to 1,525 this year.

The NRC has been studying the issue of worker fatigue since 1999, with no certain indication of when a decision will be made. The long delay is attributed in part to the agency having to deal with security concerns at nuclear plants after the Sept. 11 attacks.

A nuclear plant is a remarkably complex machine that runs full speed, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It demands constant human attention and meticulous maintenance.

The plant sets the schedule for the people who operate it.

The lights in a reactor control room are never turned off because people are always at work there. The safety response team must be on the job at 3 a.m., just as it is at 3 p.m. The worker whose job is to make sure no one is overexposed to radiation can't leave work until his replacement arrives, no matter the time of day or night.

Todd Newkirk studies fatigue and work-hour issues for the IBEW, and he says overtime is increasing.

"It's a fallout of electrical deregulation," he said. "It is doing more with less."

Mark Sadeghian, a Morningstar utility analyst, said utilities are under pressure to get as much profit as they can from their plants and workers to satisfy shareholders. In the past, the benefits would have gone to ratepayers.

Just as the nuclear fleet is aging, so are its workers.

The average nuclear plant operator is 48. New workers are difficult to hire because for decades, nuclear power was seen as a dying industry. Training new employees is an expensive, time- consuming process that many would-be workers fail.

Goodnight Consulting Inc., which tracks nuclear employment, says the number of workers fell 20 percent between 1997 and 2004 but has since leveled off. The company declined to provide details.

As a result of tight staffs, nuclear workers can put in remarkable amounts of overtime, up to 600 hours a year, the NRC says. It is not unusual for a plant employee to work 12 hours a day, with no day off, for several weeks at a time, according to the commission.

Consider the workload at the 10 nuclear plants in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey owned by Chicago-based Exelon Corp.

The company says its nuclear workforce has held steady at about 7,000 for the past three years. During that time each worker's average annual overtime has risen from approximately 157 hours to 173. Because some workers are not needed for overtime, that means other employees in critical jobs work 300 hours or more of overtime each year, employees at Exelon say.

While 300 hours or more annually is already a significant amount of overtime, those extended shifts also can come in intense weeks- long bursts during refueling.

Exelon Nuclear spokesman Craig Nesbit said the company complies with current NRC guidelines and is careful not to overwork its employees.

And in most cases, Nesbit said, employees like the overtime because of the money it yields. "Very little of our overtime is involuntary. You have some people who work a whole lot of overtime because they want to."

The industry's practice of extensive overtime has the NRC concerned. Commission staff wrote that nuclear operators need "controls to prevent situations where fatigue could reduce the ability of operating personnel to keep the reactor in a safe condition."

Numerous studies prove what common sense predicts: People make mistakes when they are tired. For example, the NRC examined several studies, including one by the Department of Transportation, which found that extended overtime and lack of time off impairs performance.

12-hour shifts routine

David Leonardi works at the Pilgrim nuclear plant, located a few miles from Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. He knows what happened when Entergy purchased the plant as deregulation of the utility industry began in the late 1990s.

"The overtime started to increase," Leonardi said. "We are a deregulated entity now."

Fewer workers means higher profits for nuclear operators.

The workday shifted from 8 hours to 12, as it has at nuclear plants across the country. The 12-hour shift is popular with some employees because, in theory at least, it would lead to extra days off. But Leonardi, a plant operator for 20 years, said time off from work was elusive.

"I worked on the order of 300 to 600 hours of overtime a year," he said. "One time in a [refueling] outage, I worked 50 12-hour shifts in a row."

During that work marathon several years ago, Leonardi said an alarming event happened on his 47th consecutive day on the job. He bungled a simple equipment installation, a mistake he says he never would have made if he were rested. He said it was fatigue that caused his error.

Another worker quickly caught the mistake, which would not have caused a dangerous situation. Leonardi was not comforted, however, because the goal in a nuclear plant is not to minimize errors but to eliminate them.

"Any mistake you make is important," he said.

Leonardi has since taken a job training workers at Pilgrim because it requires no overtime.

Entergy, owner of the Pilgrim plant, said it follows NRC guidelines on overtime.

Critics, like the Union of Concerned Scientists, say that is the problem. The NRC issues guidelines but does not impose restrictions on the hours a nuclear plant employee can work.

Stricter rules in other fields

That stands in stark contrast with other federal agencies, which regulate the hours of workers in such critical occupations as air traffic controllers or interstate bus drivers.

There are hard and fast rules for commercial truck drivers. The Transportation Department prohibits truckers from working more than 14 hours in a shift or 60 hours in a week.

The comparable NRC guidelines call for nuclear operators to work no more than 16 hours a day and no more than 72 hours in a week. Exceptions are freely granted.

The NRC says no serious incident in a nuclear plant has been the result of worker fatigue. But the agency also warns it doesn't know whether fatigue is a factor in problems that do occur.

"The number of events attributable to fatigue could not be reported with certainty," the commission said in a report on the issue.

Leonardi, the nuclear worker, says the industry isn't overly curious about the role of fatigue in causing problems.

"Nobody ever asks that question," Leonardi said. "I don't think they want to know."

No mandates on horizon

Since 1999, Barry Quigley, a worker at Exelon's Byron nuclear plant has been pushing the NRC to tighten its rules on overtime. He says fatigue as a threat is hard to determine, and in any case, the nuclear industry isn't looking.

"The problem with fatigue is that it is hard to detect" he said. "In the nuclear industry, we don't dig that deep."

The NRC is continuing its study of overtime and employees so weighed down by fatigue that they are unfit for duty. It has drafted a proposal that would encourage nuclear operators to limit overtime among workers but has yet to formally approve it. The agency isn't considering turning its regulations into mandatory rules on hours, and nuclear plant operators could still easily obtain waivers from the guidelines.

In the meantime, the nuclear industry opposes tighter restrictions on workers' hours.

Jack Roe, director of operations support for the Nuclear Energy Institute, says his organization, which represents the nuclear industry, is willing to consider monitoring work hours to determine how it affects performance. But he said limiting overtime would drive skilled workers into other industries where they could make more money.

Regulation on work hours isn't needed in the nuclear industry anyway, Roe said.

"In my view, they are not working people too hard," he said.

rmanor@tribune.com