FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, January 30, 2004 Contact: Eric Young 202-223-6133 Dave Lochbaum 202-223-6133 NRC Directs PSEG to Take Swift Measures to Improve Safety Culture at the Salem and Hope Creek Nuclear Plants Compelling evidence of worker harassment and indifference to safety issues provoke NRC to take unprecedented step WASHINGTON, DC. - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) sent a strongly-worded letter on Wednesday to top management at Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) requiring the utility to address what the agency views as serious problems with the safety culture at PSEG's Salem and Hope Creek nuclear reactors. The NRC gave James Ferland, the Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer, 30 days to provide a plan for addressing safety culture problems at the plant. The NRC based this action on a rising tide of worker safety allegations confirmed by onsite inspections by NRC personnel. "The NRC's unprecedented action reflects how serious the situation is," said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "PSEG has not provided a quality working environment at Salem and Hope Creek and must now do so, under the watchful eye of the NRC." Among the many factors prompting the NRC to question the safety culture at Salem and Hope Creek are the following: · Alleged harassment of and retaliation against workers voicing safety concerns. · Apparent unwillingness of management to listen to safety concerns raised by plant workers. · Disagreements between control room operators and senior managers on decisions about plant operations. · Ineffectiveness of the program to identify and correct safety equipment problems. "This action by the NRC, and its continued monitoring of the facility, is the strongest step to date to force safety to be top priority at the site and to hold PSEG officers and management accountable for the work environment," Lochbaum said. The NRC is intervening at Hope Creek and Salem upon strong signs that the safety culture is getting worse. As NASA was tragically reminded last year by the Columbia disaster, a good safety culture - the proper focus on safety by both management and workers - is as important as the quality of the hardware used in high-risk technologies. Poor safety culture caused lengthy and costly outages in the late 1990s at the Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut and more recently at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Ohio. In these cases, the plants' owners and the NRC waited until the safety culture problems became both endemic and painfully obvious before taking steps to correct them.