Double standard: Nuke and bus operators

By Tom Henry

A school bus driver, but not a nuclear plant operator?

What gives in terms of the public’s right to know when one of them runs afoul of the law on alcohol consumption or use of illegal drugs?

As scary as it is to think of an impaired or possibly drunk bus driver shuttling your kids around in a clunky yellow school bus, wouldn’t you also want to know if someone might have been stoned on cocaine or coming down from a high while operating a nuclear power plant along the western Lake Erie shoreline?

The federal government apparently doesn’t want you to know.

Consider what has happened recently.

On April 29, Chad Bachman resigned from his job as a bus driver for Wauseon Exempted Local Schools, which is in northwest Ohio’s Fulton County and about an hour’s drive west of Toledo.

Authorities had received rumors of him imbibing on the job. So, they administered a breathalyzer to him after he finished making his rounds that day. He failed, blowing a blood-alcohol reading of 0.223 blood-alcohol, more than five times Ohio’s 0.04 legal limit for a commercial driver.

Parents were naturally horrified, expressing their outrage at a Wauseon school board meeting.

Bachman’s name was put out there for the world to see. Local authorities, though, never actually charged him with a DUI.

The rationale of Wauseon Police Chief Keith Torbet and others was that the local prosecutor’s office might hit a legal roadblock because nobody had evidence of Bachman swerving or driving erratically. Chief Torbet and Wauseon Superintendent Marc Robinson said they were motivated to get Bachman away from buses as soon as possible. Mr. Robinson has said he would have fired him if he had not resigned. The two said they were trying to avoid drawn-out legal maneuvering.

Now consider what happened on May 5 at DTE Energy’s Fermi 2 nuclear plant in Michigan’s Monroe County.

A licensed operator for that is administered a random drug test.

He or she (we still don’t know the gender) failed.

There were no press conferences, no public meetings, no speeches, no grandstanding at a podium. The only reason I found out about it is because someone who checks event reports on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Web site daily tipped me off about a sentence or two that had acknowledged this had occurred.

The event reports section of the NRC’s Web site is public record, yet suffice it to say it’s not the kind of thing most people check daily unless they’re real junkies for nuke news.

Most of it’s mundane. It’s an overnight blotter, often things that elude the masses.

My point is that neither the government nor the nuclear industry were exactly trying to draw it to anybody’s attention.

When I attempted to get information, their lips were sealed.

They refused to give me the operator’s name, gender, the type of drug he or she had been taking, and any other details, claiming it was protected by privacy laws.

Hmm.

What should be so private about a nuclear operator potentially endangering the lives of millions of people — not to mention the quality of one of the greatest freshwater reservoirs on Earth?

State and local officials in Ohio could drag the name of a school bus driver through the mud, even though he was never even charged. Yet our federal government won’t divulge the name, gender, drug or other details of a licensed operator who has clearly violated the terms of his or her license while also risking many more lives and natural resources? Remember, there are more people living along the western Lake Erie shoreline between Detroit and Cleveland than any other place in the Great Lakes region.

Viktoria Mitlyng, the senior NRC spokesman for the agency’s Midwest region, told me about the agency’s rules and regulations, which really wasn’t what I was asking about. I wanted to know then and still do want to know the logic behind the anonymity. Her boss, Eliot Brenner, the NRC’s public affairs chief in Rockville, Md., responded to an email I sent him, but not to the portion which pertained to this.

So how did I find out cocaine was at the root of this?

By tracking the public record.

Cocaine was mentioned in a May 16 letter from Gary L. Shear, acting NRC reactor safety division director, to Jack M. Davis, DTE senior vice president and chief nuclear officer.

In it, Shear said the agency is seeking information from the utility in six subject areas, including the operator’s name, responsibilities, and whether he or she “used, sold, or possessed

illegal drugs.”

The NRC gave DTE 30 days to respond.

The agency’s letter said it wants to know, among other things, if the operator “was at the controls or supervising licensed activities while under the influence of cocaine” and, if so, what procedural errors might have been made. It also wants to know the operator’s history of being tested for drugs, and how DTE will do follow-up testing if that person is reinstated.

The letter quotes a DTE official as saying the operator who failed the test was “not on shift” during the time it was administered.

The operator’s access to the plant has been revoked. The government gives utilities 14 days to decide if it wants to suspend or fire operators who fail random drug tests, the NRC has said.

Under the latest NRC fitness-for-duty tests enacted in 2008, first-time offenders may be able to keep their jobs if they successfully pass treatment programs that may be required.

David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer for the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists who has made a career out of being an NRC watchdog, told me the logic behind the secrecy is to give first-time offenders a break.

It allows them to get counseling or treatment “without undue fear of losing their jobs,” he said.

OK, I can see that.

But nobody was making such a generous offer to that school bus driver in Wauseon.

On one hand, I can see why the NRC may be protecting the operator. Lord knows I’ve made some bad decisions in my life. I have the empathy in my heart and believe people, in many instances, deserve a second chance.

Yet this is not your ordinary job. It’s nuclear power.

It’s an incredibly powerful technology that, when done right, offers great rewards.

But people need to come to terms with the fact there are inherent risks with it, too. Not for a busload of kids, but potentially millions of people.

Nobody forces people to go to college and become operators of commercial nuclear plants. They are paid handsome wages, far better than most bus drivers.

People have been suspicious of the nuclear industry for years because of how it was shrouded in secrecy as it grew up from the Manhattan Project.
The NRC itself has been under pressure to become a more effective regulator and hold the nuclear industry more accountable, most recently in a New York Times piece.

Is it me or is this just a little odd?

The NRC actually is far more transparent than it was when I began covering the nuclear industry 18 years ago.

But it still has a way to go.

Kudos to Canada and the United States:

Hard to believe, but the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge is now 10 years old. Spanning 48 miles from southwest Detroit to the Ohio-Michigan border, it is the only wildlife refuge jointly managed by Canada and the United States. The efforts were to be recognized at an annual benefit dinner May 21 on Fighting Island in LaSalle, Ontario. During the past 10 years, the refuge has grown to 5,700 acres, up from its original 300. Here is  a copy of the annual report.