A Nuclear Whistleblower at Home

By J.A. Savage, AlterNet. Posted June 6, 2003.

Oscar Shirani just didn't understand when his former employer, Exelon, wouldn't stop its high-level nuclear waste container manufacturer. The containers, like the ones Shirani say headed for the Dresden plant in Illinois, are being filled with radioactive spent fuel and installed at nuclear plants around the country. Shirani fears the shoddy work will result in affecting the health of millions of people.

Despite their delicate and deadly cargo, the casks "are nothing but garbage cans" if their fabrication violates government specs, said Shirani.

Instead of giving him a medal for thorough work and dedication, Shirani says Exelon convinced him to transfer to another job and then, conveniently, laid him off. The self-described "company man," turned freshly minted whistleblower, might be able to do what anti-nuclear activists have been unable to accomplish -- pounding nails into the nuclear casket, forcing old plants to shut down. Then again, the federal government could acknowledge the alleged sub-standard work and hope the casks don't leak anytime in the next few thousand years.

The nuclear industry has turned to on-site radioactive waste storage in what's called "dry casks" in order to keep nuclear plants humming. Commercial nukes all have spent fuel pools. When those are filled up -- and most are at, or near, capacity already -- environmentalists expected the industry would be forced to turn off the plants.

Like a clogged septic tank, you have to quit flushing when it's full. But environmentalists were out-flanked by industry when it figured out a new "sewage" storage plan.

Industry hoped that it would have a permanent waste site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, long before now. Nuclear plant owners, however, could see that a Yucca repository is a far off, if ever, possibility. They moved to simply build a new and different kind of above-ground septic tank.

What Shirani alleges is that those tanks (a company called Holtec designed them and uses U.S. Tool & Die to make them) are not being fabricated to Nuclear Regulatory Commission specs. While some believe NRC specs themselves don't provide much safety assurance, Shirani did.

"I thought the NRC was a big dog and a force," he said, but without the kind of oversight he maintains was thwarted, the safety of nuclear plants "is suspect."

Failure Points

Shirani's nuke casket story is akin to, say, ordering a new Hummer from the dealership. In the glossy brochure, the thick boxy steel can repel almost anything short of armor-piercing projectiles. But when you get the SUV home, you find it's made of glued fiberglass and spills passengers all over the sidewalk at every approaching pothole.

If the casks are shoddy, would they leak radioactivity and endanger public health? Shirani could only guess that it could affect "millions." Activists say they just don't know.

"Federal regulations should not make [Shirani], or us, or the NRC, or the cask owner guess about consequences," said David Lochbaum, Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear safety engineer. "The regulations require a certain level of performance and his findings were below that minimum level. It may not be that the cask will fail when challenged, but they are unnecessarily and illegally closer to the failure point."

Welds on the casks were performed by "unqualified welders" and materials control was inadequate for the casks, Shirani reported to Exelon in mid-2000. Fabrication engendered brittleness in materials, weakening them, Shirani notes. He maintains Holtec failed to report holes in the neutron shielding material. He allleges that Exelon "falsified" quality assurance documents and "misled" the NRC in last year's investigation of the problem. He found "hundreds of non-conformance items." Overall, he claims that what is being manufactured to hold nuclear waste is not what was approved in conceptual design by the federal government.

"I called my people in Washington and tried to get them to do something, but they didn't do anything," said Ross Landsman, NRC Region III inspector in a January deposition provided by Shirani.

"Every time I find some stuff wrong with any of the Holtec stuff, my brilliant cohorts in Washington say, 'Give them an exemption'," Landsman said sarcastically. "Holtec, as far as I'm concerned, has a non-effective QA (quality assurance) program and US Tool & Die has no QA program whatsoever."

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