A scathing new report by Commonwealth Edison’s peers in the nuclear industry concludes that the company still is not making progress on fixing its troubled plants, which are lagging ever further behind accepted safety standards.
The report, which will be released to Edison employees Wednesday, tempers recent evaluations of the utility by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has become moderately encouraging toward the company.
Although the signs of improvement noted recently by the NRC have been relatively piddling, the industry group found even less to celebrate.
“ComEd (is) the only large nuclear utility that has never had a culture that is conducive to a well-run nuclear program, and its nuclear program has never run well,” the report said. “And we most certainly do not see evidence that the culture is about to change.”
The 32-page report–by an industry group established to inspect nuclear plants–can be added to a vast library of documents that have found alarming problems with the way the company runs the largest fleet of nuclear plants in the country.
What sets the report apart, though, is that it is the first comprehensive inspection since Edison set out on its latest journey toward rehabilitation. And it found that as recently as July, Edison still had a long way to go:
– Some workers don’t even know who their bosses are.
– Managers are cycled through their jobs at an astounding rate, “failing” so rapidly that it suggests the problem lies with the company, not the managers.
– Attempts to solve problems aren’t working.
– Nuclear safety takes a back seat to short-term economics.
– Employee relations are so poor that a worker in the Zion Nuclear Power Station stormed off the job, halting an important operation. What set him off? He had been made the secondary nuclear station operator instead of the primary operator.
Overall, the utility was rated last among the nation’s nine large nuclear utilities.
“The company’s leadership and culture are not successfully and uniformly promoting the highest levels of safety and reliability in the operation of each of its nuclear stations,” the report said.
The report was issued by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, a group formed in 1979 by all 44 nuclear utilities after the accident at Three Mile Island. It was based on inspections done at the plant in July and was presented orally to the company’s board of directors in September.
In a sense, the institute serves as the industry’s own police force, curbing poor performers under the belief that the “industry is no stronger than its weakest link.”
Edison Chairman James O’Connor will discuss the report Wednesday morning, via closed-circuit television, with all 17,000 Edison employees.
“As a company, we find this exercise productive,” said John Costello, an Edison vice president. “When someone comes in from the outside and does a completely independent assessment and says, `These are your issues,’ it makes you as a company want to find out: Have you addressed them? Is it getting better?”
NRC Chairman Shirley Jackson said the report was “parallel” to criticisms made by the agency.
Jackson said that although the agency has approved of some of Edison’s plans for improvement, regulators are by no means satisfied with Edison’s performance.
“One can have improvements, but if they are improvements from down in the pit . . . it still does not put them in a satisfactory category,” Jackson said.
Nevertheless, the institute report is remarkable for its unrelentingly harsh tone.
The group found that Edison’s frenetic turnover rate for managers is a symptom of a troubled company. In the last 4 1/2 years, 104 different people have held the top 30 nuclear jobs at Edison, the report said.
“These sustained high rates of turnover and failures of managers and executives are unprecedented,” the report said. “They are a clear indication of serious culture problems and serious leadership problems.”
In turn, it makes it difficult to promote or recruit competent people into leadership jobs that appear doomed to failure.
“Those in the industry who are qualified today routinely tell me and my senior staff that there is no way they would go to ComEd,” one unnamed official said in the report. “Some of them want to help, but they don’t see a reasonable chance to succeed in ComEd’s culture.”
The report depicts managers unable to recognize their problems through a distorted corporate lens.
“There is a reluctance to face reality on the part of managers and senior corporate personnel,” the report said. “This reluctance manifests itself by managers highlighting any possible positive aspect of an issue, and diminishing any negative aspect of the same issue.”
On Tuesday, Edison officials pointed out that some of the criticisms in the institute report are already being addressed.
The company has set out to consolidate responsibility for nuclear operations under Oliver Kingsley, who was brought in from the Tennessee Valley Authority to head a new Nuclear Generation Group.
The report makes particular note of Zion, which it pointedly called “a special case.”
“No other station has a pattern of non-professional operator behavior that even remotely approaches that of Zion,” the report said.
The plant has been shut down since February, when an operator unintentionally turned off the reactor, then quickly tried to switch it back on. The incident began a cascade of events that revealed deep problems at the plant, on Lake Michigan just south of the Wisconsin border.
The Zion staff has since been through what Edison has depicted as an extraordinary series of evaluations and training sessions, emphasizing communication and professionalism.
But the institute report found that workers there “did not understand their individual roles.” The report also faulted workers for looking at the restart of the plant as a goal in itself, “rather than a step along the way to achieving and maintaining long-term nuclear plant safety.”
Coincidentally, the NRC on Tuesday said it would hold a meeting with Edison next week to discuss violations of procedures dealing with people suspected of drinking before work. From September 1996 through last June, five workers were suspected of having alcohol on their breath, but were not tested to see if they were impaired. None of the workers was involved with direct operation of the plant.
