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Lochbaum and Prevatte reported Susquehanna to the NRC and suggested improvements to its cooling system. The NRC, Lochbaum says, didn't read the full report. He and Prevatte called Congress members, pushed for a public hearing and presented their concerns to NRC staff. Conceding that Lochbaum and Prevatte "had some valid points," the agency launched a task force and in 1993 issued an informational notice to the 35 U.S. reactors that share Susquehanna's design, alerting them to the problem but requiring no action. One of the plants was Millstone 1.
IN 1992, GALATIS DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT Lochbaum's struggle to get fuel-pool problems taken seriously. He did know he would face resistance from Northeast, where the bonus system is set up to reward employees who don't raise safety issues that incur costs and those who compromise productivity see their bonuses reduced. (Northeast says it has a second set of bonuses to reward those who raise safety issues. Galatis never got one.)
"Management tells you to come forward with problems," says Millstone engineer Al Cizek, "but actions speak louder than words." A Northeast official has been quoted in an NRC report saying the company didn't have to resolve a safety problem because he could "blow it by" the regulators. An NRC study says the number of safety and harassment allegations filed by workers at Northeast is three times the industry average. A disturbing internal Millstone report, presented to ceo Fox in 1991 and obtained by TIME, warns of a "cultural problem" typified by chronic failure to follow procedures, hardware problems that were not resolved or were forgotten, and a management tolerant of "willful [regulatory] noncompliance without justification." The report, written by director of engineering Mario Bonaca, changed nothing. "We've been working at this," says Fox, "but making fundamental change in a complex, technical environment is really hard."
A 1996 Northeast internal document reports that 38% of employees "do not trust their management enough to willingly raise concerns [because of] a 'shoot the messenger' attitude" at the company. In recent years, two dozen Millstone employees have claimed they were fired or demoted for raising safety concerns; in two cases, the NRC fined Northeast. In one, Paul Blanch, who had only recently been named engineer of the year by a leading industry journal, was subjected to company-wide harassment after he discovered that some of Millstone Unit 3's safety instrumentation didn't work properly.
Galatis had watched that case unfold. "George knew what he was getting into," says Blanch. "He knew Northeast would come after him. He knew the NRC wouldn't protect him. And he did it anyway."
IN JANUARY 1993, GALATIS PUSHED FOR A meeting with Richard Kacich, Northeast's director of nuclear licensing. Galatis outlined the pool's problems and asked for a consultant, Holtec International, to be brought in. Holtec agreed with Galatis that the pool was an unanalyzed safety question; later the consultant warned that a loss of primary cooling could result in the pool's heating up to 216 degrees F--a nice slow boil.