Scathing Look at Nuclear Safety

Lax operations and loose regulations lead to calls for change

The radioactive gas and particles that rose from the stacks of a nuclear power plant at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island last March may turn out to be as harmless to humans as many radiologists predict. But the cloud of uncertainty cast over the future of the beleaguered industry by the nation's scariest nuclear accident remains as dark as ever. This week the best-regarded of half a dozen commissions probing the accident will issue a scathing report that raises new questions about the safety of nuclear reactors and makes some important recommendations.

The twelve-member commission selected by Jimmy Carter is headed by Dartmouth College President John Kemeny, an eminent mathematician and nuclear expert, and has as members a balance of leaders from the sciences, politics, labor and academe. Nuclear power proponents had hoped that an unbiased investigation would find the Three Mile Island accident such a rare and isolated sequence of equipment failures and human errors as to have no implications for the safety of the other 72 U.S. nuclear power plants or the 88 new plants for which construction permits have been granted. But the commission's report places the blame so widely on federal regulators, the plant's builders and managers and control room operators that six of the twelve members voted to ask President Carter to ban the construction of any new nuclear plants until suggested reforms could be enacted. This moratorium failed to gain a majority only because Kemeny, who had supported other forms of a ban in preliminary voting, inexplicably abstained on the final ballot.

Instead, the commission urged the President to prevent the start of construction or operation of any new plants in those states that have not completed satisfactory plans for dealing with a nuclear accident. Only 14 states have emergency plans that have been approved by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The report implies that the so-called

China syndrome, in which the reactor core melts and burns its way into the earth, releasing potentially catastrophic radiation, had been a possibility at T.M.I.

The commission found that at least 30 tons of fuel in the upper portion of the reactor core, which had lost the protection of cooling water, had reached the dangerously high temperature of 4,000DEG F or more. A reactor would hit the meltdown point at about 5,200DEG F--a level that ''may have'' been reached by a small but still undetermined portion of the fuel.

In assessing blame, the report claims that General Public Utilities Service Corp., which constructed T.M.I.'s Units No. 1 and No. 2, ''lacked the staff or expertise to discharge its responsibility'' for designing a safe plant. Then G.P.U.S.C.

turned the facility over to Metropolitan Edison, but Met Ed, contends the commission, was ''lacking sufficient knowledge, expertise and personnel to operate the plant and maintain it properly.''

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week proposed to fine Met Ed $155,000, the maximum permitted by law, for safety violations at Three Mile Island. But the NRC itself comes in for considerable censure in the Kemeny report. Kemeny and colleagues conclude that Met Ed's training program for control room operators met regulations set by the NRC--but finds those standards ''shallow'' and ''inadequate for responding to the accident.''

The NRC itself, says the Kemeny report, reacted to the Three Mile Island mishap ''in an atmosphere of uncertainty,'' and took actions that were ''ill-defined.''

The commission cites many specific failings to back up the broad charges.

Met Ed's Unit No. 1, which had been routinely shut down before the accident in adjacent Unit No. 2, had been so poorly maintained that ''boron stalactites more than a foot long hung from the valves, and stalagmites had built up from the floor.'' (The improper operation of some valves in the containment building of Unit No. 2, which is still far too contaminated with radiation to be entered, contributed heavily to the accident.) At a critical time when the NRC, which is headed by a five-man board, should have been deciding whether or not to seek evacuation of the T.M.I, area, ''the commissioners became preoccupied with the details of evacuation planning and the drafting of a press release.''

Some of the report's toughest language is aimed at the ''understaffed and conceptually weak'' training of the control room operators at T.M.I. There is an indirect accusation that such training may be even more deficient elsewhere in the industry. The T.M.I, operators, the report notes, scored higher than the national average in the NRC licensing and operating examinations. Nonetheless, in these tests, ''emphasis was not given to fundamental understanding of the reactor and little time was devoted to instruction in the biological hazards of radiation. The content was left to the instructors, who had no greater formal education qualifications than those of their students.'' In fact, there is no minimum educational requirement for control room operators.

How should these failings be corrected? Starting at the top, the Kemeny commission urges abolishing the NRC and replacing it with a single Director of Nuclear Regulation to be appointed by the President. Explained a Kemeny commission member: ''We felt that when you have a collegial body, you delay decision-making while searching for the lowest common denominator of agreement.'' A single director, on the other hand, ''can't pass the buck in an emergency.''

This new czar of nuclear regulation would be required to improve greatly the training of all nuclear power plant control room operators. The commission also wants the control rooms to be redesigned, claiming that ''problems with the control room contributed to the confusion during the accident.'' At present, NRC is continuing to license control rooms with ''outdated technology.''

The commission urges that the federal licenses for utilities to operate nuclear plants be periodically reviewed--and suspended if public hearings show that the plants have been running unsafely. Currently, they are licensed for their expected lifetime, generally 40 years, with no review at all. Explains Arizona Governor Bruce E. Babbitt, a commission member who supports nuclear power:

''We must find some way to drive out of the business the utility companies that prove to be incompetent.''

Also, the commission recommends that no new plants be placed near large population centers. NRC has stopped approving sites near metropolitan areas, though it has not specified any rigid distance requirements. Of the 100 U.S. sites where nuclear plants are operating or under construction, only ten are within ten miles of 100,000 or more residents.

These recommendations, even if adopted, will not by themselves assure a future for nuclear power. Long before the T.M.I, accident, that future was being gravely threatened by so many problems that construction of new reactors has come to a near standstill.

One reason is that the annual growth of demand for electricity has fallen to around 3%, from the steady 7% through the 1950s and '60s. Meanwhile, the time required to bring a reactor ''on line'' has stretched out to a dozen years after the start of construction. Reasons for the delays: public opposition, cumbersome regulatory and licensing procedures, and the fact that reactor designs have not been standardized; each plant is custom-built, and the NRC demands many design changes while it is being erected.

The delays run up the cost of building a reactor, as does the rocketing rise in interest rates on the money that utilities must borrow to build plants. One example: the estimated cost of Long Island Lighting Co.'s Shoreham, N.Y., plant has quintupled from $300 million to $1.5 bil lion during the ten years it has been under construction. Nuclear plants now operating produce electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power stations (1.50 per kw-h for nuclear in 1978, vs. 2.30 for coal), but the cost of finishing those now under construction will be so enormous that there is some question whether that competitive advantage can be maintained.

The waste-disposal problem is getting worse. Scientists cannot agree on the safest method of permanently burying nuclear garbage, some of which remains radioactive for thousands of years. At present, the most highly radioactive wastes, such as spent fuel rods, are stored under water in plant "swimming pools," but reactor operators are running out of pool space. Wastes that emit less radioactivity are placed in sealed containers and trucked to dump sites for burial. However, some of the containers have leaked, either underground or in transit, and dump sites have been closed in Hanford, Wash., and Beatty, Nev. This leaves only one dump in the entire country that still accepts nonmilitary atomic trash, and South Carolina Governor Richard Riley has closed that site, at Barnwell, to wastes brought in from out of state.

Despite all those woes, there still is a case for keeping nuclear plants in operation and finishing those now abuilding, while rethinking how many more the nation needs in the long run. Until such power sources as solar energy and thermonuclear fusion become commercially feasible, nuclear plants are indispensable. mainly because the alternatives are worse.

Oil has risen so high in price that the costs of burning it to produce electricity make even the costs of atomic power pale.

Relying on imported oil opens the U.S. to economic and political blackmail. Coal can replace uranium as a power-plant fuel, but only at the price of severe environmental damage: a steady, though undramatic, toll of respiratory ailments among the people who breathe the air near a coal-fired plant, and the long-range possibility of a ''greenhouse effect'' in the atmosphere that could cause an irreversible change in the earth's climate.

If nuclear power is to retain any future at all, however, the plants must be made safe and the public convinced that the industry and its regulators have learned the lessons of T.M.I. The Kemeny commission report is especially disturbing. Beyond its specific criticisms, it suggests that the trouble with nuclear power is people:

the fallible humans who operate a very unforgiving technology, and who are harder to change than machines.

The recommendations for better training and closer supervision of reactor operators are worthy, but some experts imply that they do not go far enough.

Physicist Alvin Weinberg, one of the developers of commercial nuclear power, believes that the U.S. should establish a ''nuclear priesthood'' of superbly trained reactor technicians and free them from the supervision of power-company executives. These technicians could shut down a reactor any time the gauges misbehave, without thinking about costs. Weinberg also suggests that the nation investigate whether some types of reactors--the graphite-moderated, gas-cooled kind used in Britain, or Canada's ''Candu,'' cooled by liquid sodium--might be safer than the pressurized-water reactors built by the U.S. industry.

On the other hand, nothing in the Kemeny commission's conclusions suggests that the problems of safety are insurmountable, and the scorching tone of its criticisms ought to convince a public grown justifiably suspicious of nuclear reassurance that this report is no industry whitewash.

Indeed, the Three Mile Island accident has prompted some finger pointing that nonetheless indicates salutary soul searching. Says the NRC, in a report of its own: ''Everyone connected with nuclear power technology must accept as a fact that accidents can happen. Operations personnel in particular must not have a mind-set that future accidents are impossible. The experience of Three Mile Island has not been sufficient to eradicate that mind-set in all quarters, and the effects of that experience will fade with time. We have no easy answer to suggest, but attitudes must be changed.'' If Three Mile Island was not enough to change them, the Kemeny report ought to further the cause,

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