Q: Talk about Friday.
RT: I went to work Friday morning, as I said, mildly concerned over this
problem of core damage, intent upon getting some answers on that. I had no
sooner gotten settled in my office than I learned that a Doc Collins from the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission had recommended that we undertake an evacuation.
I didn't know who Doc Collins was. Furthermore, I didn't know what the basis
for that recommendation was. From about 45 minutes in my office, with all of
our team assembled, we set about on a crash effort to determine what had
prompted this evacuation recommendation out of Washington, D.C. And we
initially determined that we weren't gonna follow that recommendation 'til we
knew what was going on. Here's what happened. Very interesting, again kind of
coincidence of acts. There had been a release of gases from the site,
unauthorized, but, nonetheless, not of great consequence, early in the morning
on Friday, the third day. And at the very same time, as luck would have it, a
helicopter was over the plant taking readings of radiation. And with this
blast of emission from the plant, they picked up some very high readings, 1200
millirems, which, if taken off-site, would have been catastrophic, but
understandable given the fact that it was concentrated right out of the plant,
due to this unauthorized release. Somehow, as a result of what I was later to
call a "garble gap," this information was transposed in transmission to
Washington. At the NRC in Washington they got the impression that this was,
indeed, a reading taken off-site. And that prompted Mr. Collins to contact not
me, the person who was responsible for any action on evacuations, but the
emergency management people in our administration, who, in turn, before
advising me, contacted the local emergency management people, who, in turn,
with no advice to me, contacted a local radio station and the radio station put
out a report that an evacuation was imminent, that I would be issuing an order
for an evacuation. All of this happened before I even heard a thing. So we
had to do a number of things. In the course of this examination, Tom Gerusky,
our expert on radiation, unraveled the mystery very quickly. We knew exactly
what had happened. I commandeered the air waves and went on live to tell
people that there was to be no evacuation order, that the report had been
mistaken. But by this time people were literally piling things into cars and
trucks and cabs and getting ready to -- an uncontrolled evacuation of the area.
I got onto the phone line directly with Chairman Hendrie of the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission and, in effect, sayin', "What's goin' on down there?"
"What's up?" And he, by that time, somewhat sheepishly acknowledged that they
had figured out this mistake that had been made and, indeed, acknowledged the
evacuation order was not proper and rescinded it.
Q: How much does the NRC at this point really know about what's going on
inside the plant?
RT: To say that I was disappointed with the NRC's actions on Friday morning
would be an understatement. Clearly, we were looking to every possible source
of expertise to help us thread our way through a very difficult decision-making
process. We had already been let down by the utility. We felt we'd been let
down by some of the federal officials on-site. Now we felt that we had lost
some confidence in the NRC. That prompted us finally to talk to President
Carter about our need to have someone on-site to whom we could look for
authoritative information on an ongoing basis and spare us this matter of
trying to cross-examine and triangulate among competing sources of information.
To his eternal credit, in my eyes, he provided us with Harold Denton, the
Director of Nuclear Regulation within the NRC, who was just what the doctor
ordered.
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