Retired Millstone worker alleges safety compromises at Millstone, NRC

Source: The Day

Federal regulators are investigating allegations by a retired Millstone Power Station worker that plant owner Dominion puts profits ahead of safety and that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is not thoroughly managing safety issues.

David Collins of Old Lyme, a pro-nuclear retiree who took a company buyout in March, says the way Dominion has handled staffing cuts in key areas at the nuclear complex, along with an electrical mishap that forced a manual shutdown at the plant and the monitoring of fire doors, contribute to a "cover-up culture" that could compromise public safety just the way it was compromised in the late 1990s at the Waterford plant and in 2002 at the Davis-Besse reactor in Ohio.

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Collins submitted his detailed allegations and a call to reinstate laid-off workers in a 36-page paper to the NRC at a recent public meeting of the Nuclear Energy Advisory Council, a regional watchdog group. He has agreed with the NRC to be identified publicly, says Sheehan.

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A chief concern in Collins' paper, which has now been expanded to 57 pages, involves the potential impact on safety because of staffing cuts at the Waterford nuclear complex, which included 149 buyouts and 54 layoffs earlier this year, and reduced staffing to 1,085.

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Read more: http://www.theday.com/article/20100515/BIZ02/305159919/-1/BIZ

These stories about the cover up culture of corporate America that puts us all at risk have become so ubiquitous as to be almost non newsworthy anymore.
Let's just take for a given fact that corporations are at best amoral and at worst contemptible irresponsible greedy scurrilous scumbag operations that will sacrifice lives and country for any bit of profit whatsoever.

Thing is that Millstone has been poisoning the New London community and environs (including filling Long Island Sound up with radioactive waste and radiochemical byproducts from socalled "normal" operations causing infant deaths, foetal abortions and birth defects and deadly mutilation cancers for nearly 50 years.

Nothing to yawn about here.

This has been ice-veined mass murder for profit.

(see www.radiation.org for details on Millstone's record of death and mutations)

Some of us keep track of what's going on.




Tikki

Nuclear isn't the 'answer' people are making it out to be. Amazing, the amount of time the mass media will spend on Acorn or 100 strong Tea Party rallies, but I guarantee not a peep of this will be broadcast. These plants, if fully melted down, would endanger, combined, the lives of several million people.

I'm also in favor of taking it deadly seriously. Cost efficiency is exactly the wrong way to think of it.

The article comes across as a ex-employee with sour-grapes issue, but considering the magnitude of the issues involved, it's worth more than a single outside audit for *any* claims of dangerous conditions, bad working environments, etc.

"Collins also argues he was unfairly "held back" in his job with the organizational effectiveness division at Millstone and deserves an upgrade in his pension. Jordan says the company had Collins' job issues reviewed by an independent outside expert, whom he would not identify, and they weren't substantiated."

Great, so now get another different auditor, and review all of it again. And then do again. And do it for *every* worker who leaves, retires, or is grumpy while working.

These are people actively working with the extreme energies found in the fundamental physics of the universe, not DMV clerks.