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For now, however, nuclear power provides 20% of the electricity consumed in the U.S.; New England depends on nuclear plants for more than half its supply. Long-term, says Northeast senior vice president Donald Miller, Millstone and her sisters will survive only "if we start running them like a business [and] stop throwing money at issues." New England's largest power company, with $6.5 billion in assets and $3.7 billion in revenues last year, Northeast is slashing its nuclear work force of 3,000 employees by one-third over the next five years. Company ceo Bernard Fox says the move will not undermine safety.
GEORGE GALATIS WENT TO WORK AT NORTHeast Utilities in June 1982 with a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and experience with a top manufacturer of nuclear components. At Northeast, he started in the division that oversees the utility's 15 fossil-fuel plants, then moved to the nuclear group, specializing in performance and reliability. Eric DeBarba, Northeast's vice president of technical services, describes him as a solid engineer. "Nobody here ever questioned his honesty or motives," DeBarba says.
Galatis tells it differently. In March 1992 he began working on Millstone 1, one of three nuclear plants perched on a neck of land that juts into Long Island Sound from the shore of southeastern Connecticut. He was checking specifications for a replacement part for a heat exchanger in the spent-fuel cooling system. To order the proper part, he needed to know the heat load. So he pulled a safety report that should contain the relevant data.
But they weren't there.
"The report didn't contain the safety analysis for what we were doing," says Galatis. "No heat-load calculations." It was then he realized the plant had been routinely operating "beyond design basis," putting 23 million BTUs into a pool analyzed for 8 million, which is, he says, "a bit like running your car at 5,000 r.p.m."
Galatis raised the issue with members of Northeast's division of nuclear licensing. "They tried to convince me they had it analyzed," he says. He asked them to produce the documents, and they could not. Galatis sensed trouble when, in later talks, "they began denying that the first discussions had taken place." In June 1992 he spelled out the problem in a memo, calling the fuel pool a license violation and an "unreviewed safety question"--NRC lingo for a major regulatory headache-and adding other concerns he had found, such as the fact that some of the pool's cooling pipes weren't designed to withstand an earthquake, as they were required to do. Northeast sat on the memo for three months, until Galatis filed an internal notice-of- violation form, and Betancourt, a leader in the spent-fuel field for years, wrote a memo backing him up.
"When I started in the industry, 20 years ago," Betancourt says, "spent fuel was considered the ass end of the fuel cycle. No one wanted to touch it. Everyone wanted to be on the sexy side, inside the reactor vessel, where the action and danger were. No one noticed fuel pools until we started running out of room in them."