GEORGE BETANCOURT LOOKED UP FROM HIS DESK AS George Galatis burst into the office, a bundle of papers under his arm. On that morning in March 1992, the two men--both senior engineers at Northeast Utilities, which operates five nuclear plants in New England--were colleagues but not yet friends. Apart from their jobs and first names, they seemed to have little in common. Betancourt, 45, was extravagantly rebellious--beard, biker boots, ponytail sneaking out the back of his baseball cap--while Galatis, 42, was square-jawed and devout: Mr. Smith Goes Nuclear. But Galatis respected Betancourt's expertise and knew he could count on him for straight answers.
On this day, Galatis wanted to know about a routine refueling operation at the Millstone Unit 1 nuclear plant in Waterford, Connecticut. Every 18 months the reactor is shut down so the fuel rods that make up its core can be replaced; the old rods, radioactive and 250 degrees F hot, are moved into a 40-ft.-deep body of water called the spent-fuel pool, where they are placed in racks alongside thousands of other, older rods. Because the Federal Government has never created a storage site for high-level radioactive waste, fuel pools in nuclear plants across the country have become de facto nuclear dumps--with many filled nearly to capacity. The pools weren't designed for this purpose, and risk is involved: the rods must be submerged at all times. A cooling system must dissipate the intense heat they give off. If the system failed, the pool could boil, turning the plant into a lethal sauna filled with clouds of radioactive steam. And if earthquake, human error or mechanical failure drained the pool, the result could be catastrophic: a meltdown of multiple cores taking place outside the reactor containment, releasing massive amounts of radiation and rendering hundreds of square miles uninhabitable.
To minimize the risk, federal guidelines require that some older plants like Millstone, without state-of-the-art cooling systems, move only one-third of the rods into the pool under normal conditions. But Galatis realized that Millstone was routinely performing "full-core off-loads," dumping all the hot fuel into the pool. His question for Betancourt was, "How long has this been going on?"
Betancourt thought for a minute. "We've been moving full cores since before I got here," he said, "since the early '70s."
"But it's an emergency procedure."
"I know," Betancourt said. "And we do it all the time." What's more, Millstone 1 was ignoring the mandated 250-hr. cool-down period before a full off-load, sometimes moving the fuel just 65 hrs. after shutdown, a violation that had melted the boots of a worker on the job. By sidestepping the safety requirements, Millstone saved about two weeks of downtime for each refueling--during which Northeast Utilities has to pay $500,000 a day for replacement power.