Feb 29 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Sean Adkins York Daily Record, Pa.

Nuclear industry workers who inform the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission of a specific problem at a plant should expect to be approached by the agency regardless if the person has requested not to be contacted.

In March, the commission honored such a request when John Jasinski, a former head of Wackenhut security at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station, drafted a letter to the NRC.

In his correspondence, Jasinski described how guards at the power station had witnessed other officers sleeping inside the plant's bullet-resistant enclosures, or guard towers.

Within the body of the letter, Jasinski requested that he not be contacted by the commission.

"We should have contacted that person," said Dale E. Klein, chairman of the NRC. "The person said not to contact him; that should not have been honored."

As a result of Jasinski's letter, both the plant and the commission launched investigations among the station's guards but found no evidence of officers sleeping on the job.

"It was hard to substantiate the inattentiveness," Klein said. "With the BREs, you have to climb up metal stairs, and it's very hard to sneak up on somebody in the tower."

Last fall, CBS News aired video footage, recorded between March and August by a guard at the plant, that showed other Wackenhut officers sleeping in the plant's ready room.

Klein, along with other officials from the NRC and Exelon Generation, discussed the events surrounding the inattentiveness at a federal hearing Thursday.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works' Clean Air and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee hosted the hearing to highlight what happened at Peach Bottom and the changes that took place on a federal and company-wide level to ensure that such a security lapse is not repeated, said Sen. Thomas R. Carper, chairman of the subcommittee.

Both U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., requested the hearing last month.

"We must fully understand what happened in this instance, and this hearing is a good first step," Casey said. "We must ensure that people who report incidents at our nuclear plants ... can do so freely and with peace of mind when they make those reports."