Oh well, GE consultants at Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station did not did not get along with the reactor plant operators. So they squealed here and there. A consulting outfit got involved. That consulting outfit apparently is either now defunct or bought out. INPO, operating in its standard mode of indoctrination, talked everywhere and ultimately a lot of good men got stabbed and the nuke business has been a good place to stay away from ever since (unless you have an aptitude for playing along with the games of indoctrination). Anyway, the good men were forced out of the scene after they “confessed.” The reactor plant operators wound up in uniforms that highlighted their rank. And, the press had a field day as they made good dough by catering to Rickover’s offspring.
So, here is the New York Times in action over 20 years ago when they were already adept at producing fiction. I’ve put paragraphs in bold that refer to INPO. Otherwise, this copy is unadulterated.The Peach Bottom Syndrome
new_york_times:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE6DC1E3EF934A15750C0A96E948260&sec=&spon=
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: March 27, 1988
THEY came to work in jeans and T-shirts, and passed the hours with magazines, video games and rubber band fights. Often, they took turns sleeping, and sometimes everyone on the shift was dozing.
The scene was not an obscure back office operation, but the control room of the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station here, 65 miles west of Philadelphia and 45 miles down the Susquehanna River from Three Mile Island.
When the sleeping on the night and weekend shifts was finally discovered, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shut Peach Bottom, the first time a nuclear power plant had been closed by the agency for a non-mechanical reason.
That was a year ago, on March 31, 1987, and the intervening months have been tough ones for the four utilities that own the plant. Led by the Philadelphia Electric Company and the Newark-based Public Service Electric and Gas Company, which each hold a 42.5 percent stake, the four have been spending about $14 million a month for replacement power, most of the cost borne by stockholders.
Philadelphia Electric, which was already facing a financial squeeze from another nuclear plant that it is building, has taken other, even harder lumps as Peach Bottom's operator: its president and chairman both announced their early retirement this year following a scathing report by an industry group. The group, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, called Peach Bottom ''an embarrassment to the industry and to the nation,'' and said the fault lay in the very culture of the company and how it was managed. For the industry, however, the episode is not a simple embarrassment but rather the most dramatic sign to date of a basic shift in safety concerns since the accident at Three Mile Island nearly a decade ago.
Where once regulators focused on machinery and backup systems to insure ''fail-safe'' operations, they have now come to stress the importance of the human operator in anticipating problems and solving them before they become disruptive.
NOW the message seems to be that faulty operators will not be tolerated any more than faulty equipment, and that top management will be held more accountable when there is a human problem.
The shutdown of Peach Bottom was ''a wakeup call for the nuclear industry,'' Senator John Heinz, a Pennsylvania Republican, said at the time.
As the first anniversary of the shutdown nears, questions remain about just how responsible upper-level management was for fostering an atmosphere in which sleeping at the nuclear switch became possible. Most regulators and critics within the industry say that top management should have known of the problems and acted to cure them, and that lower-level management did know and did not care.
They also note that the problems were not confined to control room personnel. Four Philadelphia Electric workers and two contract employees elsewhere in the plant were indicted last fall for drug dealing. Two were acquitted and the others were convicted or pleaded guilty. Just last week, Philadelphia Electric announced it had discharged or suspended 17 employees who the company said had been using drugs, including the four who had been indicted.
Now the industry is watching closely as Philadelphia Electric, after floundering for much of 1987, tries to re-engineer its culture and convince Government officials that the management problems have been solved and that Peach Bottom 2 and 3, the two reactors at the plant, should start operating again.
PHILADELPHIA ELECTRIC, known as Peco, has not been the only utility with troubles in its control room. The Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison Company was fined in 1980 when two of its operators were caught sleeping on duty in its Dresden plant near Morris, Ill. The following year, the Florida Power and Light Company was fined after its operators left a control room unsupervised while a reactor was running at full power. And last August, four and a half months after Peach Bottom was shut down, an operator was removed by the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company from its Susquehanna plant for sleeping on the job. Even the General Public Utilities Corporation, owner of Three Mile Island, discharged a shift supervisor last November who had repeatedly slept on duty.
But these incidents apparently have been isolated. At Peach Bottom, for at least five months, they were the norm. The lax environment here was ironic in light of the plant's special role in the industry's development. Peach Bottom 1, which opened in 1966 and is now retired, was one of the first commercial reactors in the United States, making Philadelphia Electric one of the nation's most experienced nuclear operators and a pioneer in developing safety rules.
A variety of reasons have been offered to explain how the staff's alertness in Peach Bottom's pioneer days turned into the kind of dangerous overconfidence that put operators to sleep. Management and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were more concerned with the problems starting up the company's new Limerick plant, 50 miles to the northeast, than with changes going on at Peach Bottom, investigators say. In addition, Limerick drew personnel away from Peach Bottom, creating a shortage of operators and a need for excessive overtime.
But most of all, according to the N.R.C. and the Atlanta-based Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, there was a break in the chain of command that kept critical information from going to headquarters, and no one there seemed to notice.
Indeed, the problem with the sleeping technicians was finally brought to light by outsiders, six General Electric engineers with frequent access to the control room, who went to the N.R.C. with their complaints after two levels of Philadelphia Electric executives at the plant turned deaf ears.
After the shutdown, the company's top executives found flaws far down the chain of command. Referring to tighter safety rules implemented after the Three Mile Island accident and other mishaps, Philadelphia Electric's departing chairman and chief executive, James Lee Everett 3d, said, ''The attitude of some of our operating force to enthusiastically receive and endorse these new requirements has been less than the best.''
But in its report, given to Mr. Everett in January, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations implied that the executives at the top should quit, referring to ''grossly unprofessional behavior by a wide range of shift personnel'' that ''reflects a major breakdown in the management of a nuclear facility.'' The institute said that both Mr. Everett, 61 years old, and the company's president, John H. Austin Jr., 59, had failed to understand basic aspects of the problem.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also found fault at the top, and gave Mr. Austin and Mr. Everett a public dressing-down of a kind seldom seen in the industry. At a commission hearing in Washington last Sept. 14, Lando W. Zech, the N.R.C.'s chairman, argued that problems with corporate management were as serious as those at the plant.
AT the hearing, Mr. Everett and Mr. Austin presented a 100-page plan for re-starting the plant. The plan noted that 12 of the 36 operators and supervisors in place at the time of the shutdown had been assigned to other jobs or had retired and the rest were enrolled in an extensive retraining program. Many new people with strong technical backgrounds were being trained as replacements, it pointed out. And it listed 300 separate hardware improvements in the works, and said it was well on its way to a complete change in the corporate culture that had been so heavily criticized.
It was apparently not enough for Mr. Zech, a retired admiral who was the chief of technical training in the Navy for two years. ''You've told us a lot of things,'' the chairman said. ''You've got to get to the next layer. What does it mean? What are your real commitments to excellence?''
Many in the industry thought Mr. Zech simply wanted some heads to roll. They finally did in February, when Mr. Austin announced his retirement. Early this month, Mr. Everett said he would step down, too, effective April 13. Joseph F. Paquette Jr., 53, a 30-year man at Philadelphia Electric who spent the last two years at the Consumers Power Company in Michigan, was brought back to replace Mr. Austin and will also be given Mr. Everett's titles.
In the utility industry, where succession is usually planned years in advance, and at Philadelphia Electric, where posters and in-house publications refer to ''The Peco Family,'' the changes of the past year amount to a painful revolution. But they may pay off soon.
''For the first time we're starting to hear realistic estimates of how long it's going to take'' to reopen the plant, William Russell, the N.R.C. administrator for the region covering Peach Bottom, said last week. ''They're no longer talking about reopening this summer. They're talking about the first of the year, and it's positive that they realize what they have ahead of them.''
The company is expected to disclose its latest schedule to reopen the plant on April 8.
WHAT is happening now at Peach Bottom is something of a nuclear novelty. Where the documents for restarting a reactor might once have spoken of neutron fluxes and rod insertion times, they now talk about beliefs, values, missions and vision. What Philadelphia Electric offers now is not apology, but anthropology.
Culture is the buzzword. The N.R.C. and plant management have taken to using that term to describe the shared attitudes of operators, their supervisors, their supervisors' supervisors and so on, all the way up the chain of command to the chairman.
Corbin A. McNeill Jr., a former chief of the Navy's Nuclear Power School and Philadelphia Electric's new senior vice president for nuclear operations, one of seven new senior executives brought in to clean up the company, speaks of giving the operators a new culture. The company's plan for restarting the plant even lists as a basic cause of its problems that ''the station culture, which had its roots in fossil and pre-Three Mile Island operations, had not adapted to changing nuclear requirements.''
Those requirements have evolved over the years since Philadelphia Electric ordered the reactor from the manufacturer, the General Electric Company, in November 1958. The N.R.C., with its stricter views, replaced the Atomic Energy Commission in 1975, and at plants around the country the fires, ruptures, leaks, procedural errors, instrument failures and other mishaps over the years gave hints of the pitfalls of the new technology.
With a growing appreciation of what can go wrong, what it can cost to fix and how much radiation exposure is potentially involved, the culture that the N.R.C. is trying to foster takes a much more aggressive stance on safety. For example, at first the N.R.C. sought assurances from plants that the automatic shutdown systems would stop a reactor if any of 100 pieces of equipment malfunctioned. Now, each such shutdown is considered a black mark, to be avoided by preventive maintenance or anticipation of problems before they occur.
THERE was change here, too, at the foot of Atom Road: Peach Bottom 1, a small 40-megawatt reactor, was retired in 1974 and replaced with Units 2 and 3, twin reactors each producing 1,035-megawatts, enough power to light all of Philadelphia.
But memories of the early days were still strong. That was a time before each control room contained a cross-indexed looseleaf notebook three feet thick to provide the operators with a procedure for every eventuality. ''We invented some of these procedures,'' said Raymond R. Betz, an operations support superintendent who was one of Unit 1's first reactor operators.
Long-time employees like Mr. Betz, who is 54 and has been at Peach Bottom for 25 years, view themselves as pioneers and take pride in that. But for some workers, according to recent studies, the pioneer mentality turned to complacency.
Another problem was Peach Bottom's remoteness from Philadelphia. About four miles north of the Mason-Dixon line, in a bucolic, agrarian setting, Peach Bottom was not much on the minds of the corporate executives, and vice versa.
Headquarters was preoccupied with other problems, notably those at Limerick, another twin-reactor project for which ground was broken in 1967. After extensive cost overruns, the state Public Utilities Commission in Harrisburg told the company that $369 million of the overrun was an imprudent expense, incurred because of mismanagement, and that it would not be allowed to recover that portion from ratepayers.
Limerick's Unit 1 is now running and the ratepayer ruling is under appeal, but Unit 2, almost 90 percent complete, has had an uncertain course. Rapid shifts in construction costs and a start-stop pattern in the rate of growth for demand for power had Philadelphia Electric begin work on Limerick 2, suspend it and then start again. In addition, environmentalists have blocked construction of a pumping station along the Delaware River that is needed for cooling water if the Limerick reactors are to run at full power in the summer.
IN the Peco family, Peach Bottom had become a quietly troubled adolescent that was being neglected in favor of a seriously ill younger sibling. Making things worse, Peach Bottom was giving its sibling transfusions, sending some of its most talented and ambitious personnel to Limerick, where the possibilities for promotion were greater.
Operations at Peach Bottom began to suffer. ''We should have changed management at the plant a lot earlier than we did,'' said Mr. Everett in an interview last week. ''We should have recognized the kind of attitude problems we had.''
The bombshell did not hit until last March, but there were telling signs earlier. The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations had told the company in December 1984 that it found ''clear evidence of declining performance'' by station personnel and in January 1986 that ''standards of performance at the station are unacceptably low.'' Presaging events to come, at 6:05 A.M. on June 10, 1985, an N.R.C. inspector entered the control room at Peach Bottom and spotted a reactor operator with his head tilted on the back of the chair, his eyes closed, according to an agency report. After much discussion with company officials, the N.R.C. decided that it would not pursue disciplinary action because the inspector was not able to prove that the operator was sleeping.
Another indication of trouble was fines by the N.R.C. on six separate occasions since 1981 for a variety of rule infractions. But the signs apparently were not being picked up at corporate headquarters or at the plant, where plaques hung on the walls to mark reliability and electric production records in past years.
''We thought we were doing a great job,'' said one of the reactor operators, John S. Deni. ''One year we set an all-time record for what a generator could do.''
Mr. Deni was one of two operators made available by the company for an interview. He is one of the 24 operators undergoing lengthy psychological screening and retraining.
While Philadelphia Electric concluded that ''essentially all'' of the control room personnel had slept on duty or had been inattentive, none were discharged. Those who are being kept on as operators have been through an ''enforcement conference'' with the staff of the N.R.C., a quasijudicial procedure. They face a possible loss of license, fine or reprimand, but a decision on sanctions has been postponed, presumably because it will be linked to the decision on reopening the plant itself. If the operators are suspended, it could delay the plant opening beyond the end of the year.
Philadelphia Electric executives, asked why the operators were not simply fired, pointed out that they are the cream of the station's staff, each trained at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars over many years. In addition, licenses are plant-specific; that is, operators from Limerick or other reactors could not be brought in to run the Peach Bottom plant without first being extensively retrained.
And a nuclear reactor is like a jet liner that never lands. Even when all the fuel is removed from the reactor vessel, as has been done at Peach Bottom 3 for repair work, licensed operators must still be present in the control room 24 hours a day, monitoring equipment that prevents the release of radiation.
Besides, the new executives at Philadelphia Electric say, sleeping on the job is not something for which the operators should take all the blame. ''If everybody's been driving 60 in a 55 mile per hour zone, you haven't explained to them what the speed limit really is,'' said Dickson M. Smith, a retired rear admiral and former senior military staff assistant to Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, who was hired late last year to go to Peach Bottom as plant manager and then promoted to vice president. ''Right or wrong, it was something that was acceptable,'' said Mr. Smith, who is still based at the plant.
Mr. Deni described a hunkered-down mentality in the control room in the months before the shutdown. Part of the problem, he and others said, was a shortage of personnel. ''We were down to maybe 10 guys to cover the two units, and we circled the wagons,'' he said.
If someone fell asleep, Mr. Deni said, ''it seemed natural to cover for each other.'' He added: ''We thought we had a handle on things, and it was hard for anybody to give us any input.''
The report by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations also hints at poor relations between the reactor operators and employees of G.E. This may eventually have spelled the operators' downfall.THE other operator provided by the company for an interview, J. Michael Weaver, who has since been promoted to shift supervisor, pointed out that even if the overtime was excessive, it was attractive. An operator who worked eight-hour shifts on two consecutive scheduled days off would earn time-and-a-half for the first shift and double-time for the second. Reactor operators earn about $20 an hour. In that setting, sleeping became the norm, and a very lucrative one.
The remedy offered by the company has concentrated on group dynamics and a retraining course, ''People, the Foundation of Excellence,'' that was developed by the Management Analysis Company, a consulting firm based in San Diego with wide experience in the nuclear field.
The operators seem to be developing a new self-image. Eschewing jeans and T-shirts, they are instead wearing - voluntarily, they insist - gray slacks and color-coded shirts: light gray for reactor operators, blue for senior reactor operators and white for shift supervisors. It enhances their authority, they say.
The entrance to the plant is dominated by a banner promoting ''The Power of Excellence,'' a slogan selected from employee nominations by a jury of employees. In an effort to make employees feel more a part of the operation, Mr. Smith has installed suggestion boxes, which have drawn more than 1,100 responses. Some were trivial and quite a few were colorful, but only two, according to papers filed with the N.R.C., were outright hate mail.
Workers at the plant say that much has changed, often citing the sheer volume of personnel transfers that have left them with new supervisors and upper-level managers. They also talk about a different mood. ''My job has changed,'' said Michael R. Smith, an instrumentation and control engineer who has been here for two years. ''It used to be day to day, to get through the day and get the job done. Now it's to streamline efficiency, to improve quality.''
Managers are changing their style, too, according to the company. The Philadelphia Electric plan for re-starting the plant refers to several new strategies, including ''management by walking around.''
HOW much attitudes have really changed among the 3,000 people at the plant - more than 1,000 are Philadelphia Electric employees and the rest work for contractors - is difficult to tell, management concedes. Mr. McNeill, the new head of nuclear operations, drew an analogy to the change in attitudes that came when racial segregation ended in schools. ''You can't change everybody's attitude but you can change behavior,'' he said.
And old procedures are also giving way. Formerly, there was little regular maintenance work reserved for the night shift. Now some maintenance activity is deliberately scheduled for the ''back shift'' to keep the operators occupied.
The company is also trying to relieve the problems of shift work itself. ''If you're a shift worker at a generating station, you're a shift worker until you retire or die,'' said James Lange, president of the Independent Group Association, an organization that represents employees in negotiations with management but does not have collective bargaining status.
Now, however, Philadelphia Electric, according to its plan for restarting the reactors, is providing some shift personnel with ''alternative career paths.''
Perhaps more important, the company has cleaned house on a grand scale. Of the 21 highest-ranking officials in the company, a third got their jobs this year. Essentially all the management at Peach Bottom was reassigned, beginning with the shift superintendents, the level at which Philadelphia Electric says the problem was allowed to fester.
It was a dead-end job, investigators concluded later, and the men in it were therefore unmotivated. According to Mr. McNeill, they were ''put in a position where they didn't consider themselves true management personnel, yet they knew they were different from the operators.''
New management says the company will not rush the process of re-opening the plant, but that Peach Bottom has turned the corner. Yet after all the departures, there is still a touch of defensiveness.
Mr. Lange, of the employees' association, described the going-away party for Mr. Austin, the retiring president, as ''like a wake,'' with hundreds of people lined up to shake his hand. ''There's no reason either of them should feel disgraced,'' he said of Mr. Austin and Mr. Everett.
BUT they left amid criticism that even after the shutdown, they had not recognized their role in the problems. For example, Zack T. Pate, the president of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, argues that even months after the shutdown, the two men were insisting that the problem was at Peach Bottom and not in headquarters' response. In a letter to the chairman of a special committee of Philadelphia Electric's board, Mr. Pate described a meeting with Mr. Austin last Sept. 10. According to Mr. Pate, Mr. Austin said that Management Analysis, the consulting firm, had concluded ''that the problems were unique to Peach Bottom, and were not rooted in the corporate organization.'' But the next day, Mr. Pate related, the president of Management Analysis telephoned and said that ''he was concerned because the problems at Peach Bottom had their roots in the Peco corporate organization, and that management corrective actions were aimed principally at the plant.'' In his letter, Mr. Pate wrote, ''This is another example of Peco senior management's inability or refusal to face up to and deal with problems in their corporate nuclear program.''
Mr. Everett, in the interview last week, said that Mr. Pate may have misunderstood what Mr. Austin was telling him. Mr. Austin declined requests for an interview.
Mr. Everett said that ''our priorities were, let's fix what's wrong at the plant, then sit back and really do a deep study of corporate management, and try to organize to go forward in the future. If we had been smarter, in hindsight, we would have put that reorganization up front, at least while we were fixing up the plant.''But Mr. Everett said that he did not feel that he was hounded from office, and that he was leaving the company in good shape, with enough generating capacity on hand or near completion to meet its needs until the mid-90's. ''This company is positioned extremely well,'' he said.
The new chairman, Mr. Paquette, has acknowledged that his predecessors did not properly define the problem, but he stops short of blaming them. ''It doesn't matter whether they were guilty or weren't guilty,'' he said. ''We're starting fresh.''
''Everyone in the direct line from the former chairman, the former president and all the people in charge of the nuclear division at headquarters are no longer in those positions,'' he said. ''That's a very, very telling, dramatic point to make.'' THE FINES Civil penalties by Nuclear Regulatory Commission against Peach Bottom 2 and 3.
Two violations that would have allowed radiation to spread in case of accident, one violation that interfered with a reactor automatic shut-down system, and multiple violations of radiation protection procedures.
A violation that would have increased the spread of radiation in an accident, and failure to re-set valves properly on a test line.
Five violations of rules set in the plant's operating license.
Radiation protection violations.
Violations of operating procedures and poor management supervision involving four licensed reactor operators.
Firing of a contractor's employee who complained about radiation exposure.
ORNL found that if Nuclear Power Plants complied with "... well-known and established ..." methods, the nuclear power plants would have no problems in this arena. ORNL apparently complied with AEOD specifications in producing its report that was completed in April 1985 although INPO was invited to review a draft on November 9, 1964. AEOD's specifications to ORNL should have included UHI accumulators and ECCS accumulators. However, such a specification was beyond the experience. insight and talent at AEOD.
