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Reluctant whistleblowers charge NRC with secrecy about safety

Nuclear Power Whistleblowers Charge Federal Regulators With Favoring Secrecy Over Safety HUFFINGTON POST,  12/04/2012 Richard H. Perkins and Larry Criscione are precise and formal men with more than 20 years of combined government and military service. Perkins held posts at the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration before joining the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Division of Risk Analysis in 2008. Criscione landed at the agency a year later, after five years aboard the USS Georgia as a submarine warfare officer.

Now both men are also reluctant whistleblowers, stepping out publicly to accuse the NRC of being both disconcertingly sluggish and inappropriately secretive about severe — and in one case, potentially catastrophic — flood risks at nuclear plants that sit downstream from large dams.

A number of nuclear safety advocates who have looked into the matter in recent weeks have echoed their complaints, and a collection of documents obtained by The Huffington Post — including a 4-year old internal communication plan for NRC officials seeking to head-off criticism of its handling of the dam threat, as well as detailed correspondence between Criscione and NRC leadership on the issue — appears to lend credence to the engineers’ concerns.

Taken together, the documents and charges shed new light on an agency that has been repeatedly criticized for allowing plant owners to delay crucial safety improvements for years, and for diligently withholding information not as a way of protecting the public interest, but as a way of protecting itself.

“When you’re working with sensitive information, you just don’t talk about it, so what I’m doing I find to be both perverse and uncomfortable,” Perkins said. “But I had to do it.”…….

 

By September, Perkins says he felt it was his duty to speak out. He submitted a letter to the NRC’s Office of the Inspector General, the agency’s internal watchdog, charging that that the NRC was essentially involved in a cover-up.

“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff may be motivated to prevent the disclosure of this safety information to the public because it will embarrass the agency,” Perkins wrote. “The redacted information includes discussion of, and excerpts from, NRC official agency records that show the NRC has been in possession of relevant, notable, and derogatory safety information for an extended period but failed to properly act on it. Concurrently, the NRC concealed the information from the public.”……    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/04/nuclear-power-whistleblowers_n_2232108.html

December 8, 2012 - Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA

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