Shut Down

After nuclear safety inspector Peter Atherton concluded that a power plant was unsafe 19 years ago, he lost his job amid concerns about his behavior. Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is trying to figure out if, on the safety issues at least, Atherton was right

Amid the imposing affluence of Cleveland Park, Peter James Atherton lives in an aging heap, in a third-floor room as spare as a monk's. A mattress and box spring lie on the bare wood floor. A folding metal chair is pulled out for the rare guest. A green recliner is beginning to show yellow foam at the threadbare corners. In lieu of rent, he does odd jobs for the owner. Sometimes he gets a few side jobs as an electrician.

This might be considered a comedown for a man who used to be a nuclear engineer, but for Atherton it's an improvement: He is no longer homeless, no longer washing dishes or pumping gas, no longer bouncing in and out of jail. His only child remains a stranger- -- he ventures that his son has likely shed his surname- -- but the young man is 19 now and no longer eligible for child support, which ought to keep the sheriff away. Meanwhile, Atherton has held on to his documents.

These he keeps piled high on an old metal coffee table by his bed. They date to the 1970s, and they bear the stamp of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and they are replete with references to the issues that consumed him 19 years ago: redundant cabling, fire suppression, Maine Yankee. Now, the papers offer him hope.

Just last December, the NRC shut down the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant in Wiscasset, Maine. At the time, it seemed like one more step in NRC Chairman Shirley Jackson's shake-up of her oft-criticized agency, a shake-up in which she has sent some of the old guard into retirement, pressed utilities on their operating methods, shut down power plants from Maine to Illinois and helped bring the issue of nuclear safety back into public consciousness. But in the months since, the shutdown of Maine Yankee has also forced the NRC to turn its investigative spotlight onto itself.

Peter Atherton had recommended shutting down Maine Yankee 19 years ago, while he was an NRC safety inspector. In fact, he had recommended it as forcefully as he knew how. But in doing so he initiated a chain of events that accelerated beyond his control.

"I was thrown into a mental health facility, kept there against my will, injected with Thorazine four times," says Atherton, who still speaks in the measured cadences of an engineer. "And I was put there by the United States Secret Service, all for the sake of discrediting me." He stops, swallows, looks down to his lap. "I was labeled a `White House case.' "

No one is disputing the events in Atherton's thumbnail account of his initial travail, though the Secret Service declines to confirm or challenge it. What is disputed are the events surrounding that incident and what they mean. In the last year, anti-nuclear activists have hailed Atherton as a whistle-blower and a martyr, a scientist who was punished for pursuing his convictions and his duty. In response, some of his former supervisors have said that they had serious questions about Atherton's mental health during the events in question, that his behavior -- including his attempt one night to talk his way into the White House -- gave them ample cause to doubt his judgment. Overall, the available evidence in the case of Peter Atherton holds the possibility that both the people who celebrate him and the agency that got rid of him are justified.

The NRC is pursuing several lines of inquiry in the Atherton matter, including, of course, the question of whether he was right all along. The agency's findings, some of which are due sometime this month, offer him the promise of vindication, but he is after something more. At 51, he is strong and squat, almost like a boxer, but his hair is going gray. What he wants, in effect, is to turn back the clock. What he wants, he says, breaking into a smile full of hope, is to have his old job back, "more than you could possibly imagine."

BREAK To gain some grasp of what happened, it helps to go back to the 1970s, when the commercial prospects of nuclear power were bright. Amid the oil shocks of the early '70s, utility companies were ordering new reactors almost as if out of a catalogue: 21 in 1971, 38 in 1972, 41 in 1973. A 1974 federal report, Project Independence, forecast the construction of 1,000 reactors in the United States by the end of the century. It was an engineer's market, and Peter Atherton was an engineer.

Born in the flush of postwar Texas, he had moved with his family to the Navy towns of Tidewater Virginia when he was 13. He enrolled at the University of Virginia in 1964 under a full Navy ROTC scholarship, majoring in electrical engineering. After graduating in 1969 and serving his obligatory hitch in the Navy, he went to work for Westinghouse's light-water breeder reactor program in Pittsburgh in 1972. His work focused on the electrical systems that controlled the nuclear fuel rods. He found it narrow and unsatisfying.

In November 1973, the Atomic Energy Commission went to Pittsburgh to recruit engineers for its nuclear safety division. While Atherton believed in the potential of nuclear power, he also believed that it should be pursued with care. With the AEC, he figured, he could broaden his skills and do important, challenging work for the public good. He and his wife bought a house in Sterling, Va., and he went to work for the government.

One Saturday night in March 1975, the future of nuclear power dimmed considerably. At the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama, some workers using a lit candle to check for leaks in insulation ignited a fire that burned more than 2,000 cables and disabled electrical controls. It took seven hours to shut down the plant's two operating reactors, one of which came close to boiling off its cooling water. Had that happened, meltdown would have followed.

"It was the first serious accident of a potentially catastrophic nature the NRC had faced," Atherton says. He remembers going into work that Monday and seeing a candle burning on his boss's desk -- a touch of gallows humor. The AEC had just split into an advocacy agency that would soon become the Department of Energy and a watchdog known as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The transition was still under way when Browns Ferry went up, and the fire sent the regulators into crisis mode.

Officials looked first at their licensing criteria for proposed reactors, then at the fire-suppression systems in existing reactors. Every reactor had to be inspected. "We had four teams, with an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, a fire-protection expert, usually a consultant, and some retired fire chiefs," says Robert L. Ferguson, who led the new fire-protection section in the division of operating reactors. "Each team had 10 plants or more to inspect. There were at least 40 operating plants, and we had to inspect all of them in a two-year period. It was a lot of work."

Atherton joined Ferguson's section and was assigned to inspect several plants, among them Maine Yankee. He had concerns about other reactors, too, but he finished his evaluation of Maine Yankee first, in January 1978. In those findings, which he summarized in a report dated March 1, he perceived a clear threat to the public: Safety equipment was being stored in the power plant's turbine building, "a non-safety-related area"; other conditions in the building presented the possibility of a hydrogen explosion. There were highly combustible and explosive chemicals throughout the reactor complex. In the battery room, chemical reactions within the batteries could produce pockets of hydrogen that could ignite. Most troubling, safety cables -- electrical cables that would be needed to shut the plant down in emergencies -- were supposed to be redundant, and separated so that a fire or fallen girder couldn't disable them all at the same time. At Maine Yankee, Atherton noted, they were routed in the same trays.

Atherton called specifically for new emergency lighting, new fire-suppression systems, including sprinklers, and new firebreaks to make the safety cables truly redundant. He also concluded that the plant should be shut down until the deficiencies were addressed.

Colleagues of his at the NRC would find his conclusion extreme. Usually, nuclear plants were kept running while safety problems were remedied. In more serious cases, changes were made during refueling, when the plants would be shut down for weeks. But in the prevailing climate -- a climate that eventually led to criticism that the NRC was too close to the utilities it was regulating -- nobody closed a plant down.

That February, while Atherton was still writing his report, the NRC notified the Yankee Atomic Electric Co., Maine Yankee's Massachusetts-based parent, that it would have to make several changes if it wanted to keep running the plant. That notice was based in part on some of the findings Atherton was writing up and discussing, but, he says, no one told him about it. Nor does he recall being told that the NRC had scheduled meetings with Yankee Atomic for March 2 and March 7. Nor did he know that the agency would prepare a response to his report, not for public release but for the files.

If his superiors had found reason to be concerned about Maine Yankee, they also had found reason to be concerned about him.

BREAK By then, Atherton was working 50 or 60 hours week. He was studying for the comprehensive exams for a master's degree in nuclear engineering at Catholic University. His wife had complained that he was spending too much time away; suffering from pregnancy complications, she moved out. Later, during divorce proceedings, a supervisor would testify that she had called one of her husband's supervisors and asked him to get Atherton to see a psychiatrist.

"Up until the time he went to Maine Yankee, I thought he was reasonably good," Ferguson recalls. "Pete came back and started writing a report, which the team had to do, and all of a sudden all the things he had seen were very horrendous. I mean, there was an element of truth to each one . . . but others were things that were blown way out of proportion."

In November 1977, Atherton recalls, one of his superiors suggested that he have a physical exam, so he saw his personal doctor. The following January, the same superior asked him to see an NRC doctor, but this time Atherton refused. When a higher-ranking manager ordered him to see the doctor, Atherton refused again, and he received a warning that his refusal could be grounds for dismissal.

According to some of his former colleagues, Atherton began to say some strange things. Ferguson recalls Atherton telling him that people were trying to poison the drinks he was buying out of the vending machines; that someone had broken into his house and rearranged the furniture; that someone was trying to poison him through the ventilation ducts in his office. At one point, Atherton moved out of his office and into a conference room.

Atherton scoffs at these stories and says the NRC is trying to discredit him. "Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for agencies to brand whistle-blowers as nut cases," says Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, a whistle-blowers' support group in Washington. "There are numerous examples, often connected to nuclear power plants."

Atherton acknowledges moving out of his office, but says it was because his eyes were bloodshot and he was having sneezing fits. "When the branch chief asked, I said I was having physical ailment problems," Atherton says. "When I came to the conference room, they disappeared."

He also acknowledges that later, after his son was born, he claimed that the NRC had switched babies on him. He says that his wife's obstetrician had told them that they were expecting a girl, no question, and that when he saw the boy in the hospital, he became confused. (He also became skeptical of the boy's parentage: For 17 years, he says, he demanded a paternity test. It established that the boy was his.)

Atherton's former supervisors dispute any contention that they treated him improperly. "The record was really clear on what surrounded [Atherton's] personal events at the time," says Victor Stello, who later rose to the NRC's top staff position, executive director of operations. "I can say with complete conviction there was absolutely no nexus between his personal situation and the technical matters" surrounding Maine Yankee.

Concern over Atherton's behavior, says Ferguson, is what led the NRC to prepare a response to the report he was writing. "Usually, when you release a report, the agency stands behind it 100 percent," Ferguson says. "We felt Pete was ill when he wrote [his evaluation]. How do you explain that to the public?"

The response, like the report, was not intended for public release, Ferguson says; it was to be kept on file in case the report was leaked. Atherton obtained a copy in 1980 under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

It covered his findings point by point: The safety equipment in the turbine building was inconsequential. The combustible and explosive chemicals "appear to be the normal materials found in nuclear power plants." The probability of a hydrogen fire in the turbine building "is extremely small." There was no requirement for the sprinkler system Atherton called for. His description of cable-separation problems was "essentially correct" but need not be addressed to the extent that he had specified.

Maine Yankee would remain open.

All along, Atherton had been getting more and more frustrated. On March 1, he finished his report in longhand, made some photocopies and took a copy to the typing pool, where it disappeared. Exasperated, he started showing around another copy -- that is, a document written in longhand. His colleagues took this as another example of his odd behavior. "I had a moral obligation to bring forth these technical matters," he says, still exasperated. "They had sent . . . cables willy-nilly throughout that plant."

On March 3 -- a day after NRC officials met with Yankee Atomic -- Atherton sought but did not get a meeting with Edson Case, then the NRC's executive director for reactor operations. He could no longer contain his frustration.

He climbed into his car, drove from his office in Bethesda to NRC headquarters in downtown Washington and brought his handwritten report straight to acting NRC chairman Victor Gilinsky. Gilinsky was considered at the time to be a maverick at the agency, unusually sympathetic to safety concerns. Atherton had trouble finding a place to park, he says, so he "rented" a spot at the Brazilian consulate.

Meanwhile, Gilinsky recalls, someone called to warn him that "someone who's lost his mind" was on his way. Gilinsky immediately flashed back to a night in 1976, when an NRC senior projects manager named Robert Pollard went anti-nuke on national television, exposing nuclear safety flaws on "60 Minutes." "We were all thunderstruck," Gilinsky says, chuckling. The reaction of one top NRC official was bizarre, he recalls. "He said, `We must send somebody to protect [Pollard's] wife and children.' He wasn't so worried about what Pollard said. It was as if anyone who would say this stuff about nuclear power must be crazy." So Gilinsky laughed off the warnings about Atherton and let him in.

The engineer entered wearing a raincoat. His head was cocked in a way that seemed oddly tense. He demanded that Maine Yankee be shut down, immediately. Gilinsky listened and glanced at Atherton's report.

"I said, `We'll put someone on this right away,' " Gilinsky says.

"He said, `No, that's not good enough.'

"I said, `Well, I can't just shut down the plant.'

"He said he was leaving.

"I said, `Where are you going?' But he wouldn't say."

Atherton remembers saying that his job description "permitted me to exhaust the chain of command in addressing safety concerns." He walked out, leaving the impression that he was taking his case to the only nuclear official who outranked Gilinsky -- President Jimmy Carter. Surely Carter, a fellow nuclear engineer and Navy veteran, would understand the gravity of the situation.

Now Gilinsky was alarmed. He called the White House.

Atherton spent three hours mulling over his next step. He took a walk, had dinner, drove around the White House pondering where he might park and which gate he might approach. At 8 o'clock, in the quiet darkness of a Friday night, he decided.

He parked, he believes, on E Street and approached the southwest gate, near the Old Executive Office Building. He presented his NRC credentials and asked to be admitted. "I thought the worst thing that could've happened to me was they would say no," he says. "Who knows? You've got to try."

The guard spent a long time on the phone, Atherton says, but then opened the gate and said Atherton would have to speak to the Secret Service before seeing the president. He was led from the gate toward the entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue, where Secret Service agents searched and questioned him. As they led him away, he still hoped to deliver his report to the president. They led him not to the Oval Office, but to a Metropolitan Police wagon. The wagon delivered him to St. Elizabeths, where he was held for three days and, in his account, forcibly injected with Thorazine four times. Hospital officials decline to comment for reasons of patient privacy.

Atherton tried to return to work March 8, but was put on mandatory medical leave. Nine days later, he was fired and his security clearance was revoked. The stated grounds, he says, were insubordination, taking leave without prior warning and refusing to go to an NRC physician when ordered.

The next month, the NRC specified which changes Yankee Atomic would have to make if it wanted to keep running Maine Yankee: New emergency lighting would have to go up. A sprinkler system and new hoses were needed in the turbine building. New firebreaks would have to be installed to make the safety cables truly redundant.

The measures echoed Atherton's report, which was already on its way to oblivion.

BREAK Getting fired was only the beginning of Atherton's troubles. Three months later, his wife filed for divorce. The court denied him visitation rights to his son but required him to pay child support. He started a search for engineering work that would go for nine fruitless years before he'd give it up. Without a job, he soon fell behind in his obligations to his son.

In February and October 1979, he spent time in the Loudoun County jail for failure to pay child support. In November, he lost the Sterling house to foreclosure and slept in the back of an old Honda for a few months. In February and March 1980, he did more time in jail for failure to pay. Then he landed a job washing dishes at the Red Fox Inn in Middleburg. "They didn't ask you about your previous work or education," he remembers. "They just wanted to know if you could wash dishes."

The job lasted until 1982, when Atherton took another one at an Amoco station in Potomac, thinking the sheriff wouldn't chase him across state lines. Atherton's old boss Robert Ferguson, a Potomac resident, had his daughter's car towed into the station one day and recognized Atherton pumping gas. He did not say hello.

Atherton was wrong about the sheriff: That June, he was hauled back to jail, again for failing to pay child support. This time -- his last time -- he stayed for six months.

After going homeless again for a while, he took a job as a janitor at Andrews Air Force Base, worked in construction, started law school, dropped out of law school and ended up in the courier business, working 60 to 70 hours a week. He sued his wife over visitation rights, without success. He sued his car insurance company without success, spending 10 years and $8,000 on a $1,800 dispute. He sued the government, disregarding advice from the Government Accountability Project that he get on with his life. "His concerns [about his firing] appeared to be reasonable," says Tom Devine. "The [NRC's] harassment was extreme to the point of being surreal, but it was unlikely that he would be able to marshal the resources and get the witnesses to prevail." Here, too, Atherton sued without success.

In time he landed in an apartment on Eighth Street NW, between N and O -- a neighborhood where local toughs gave him a hard time and a prostitute turned up dead in the alley by his building. In 1995, he rolled his car on a delivery run and cut short his career as a courier. Broke, he took out an ad in the Washington City Paper seeking to swap a room for his handyman services. The ad led him to the relative safety of Cleveland Park.

"I would term it, in a word, `existing' as opposed to `living,' " he says. "I have been effectively destroyed." He speaks without bitterness, and in another moment actually laughs when he says, "They did to me what I said should be done to Maine Yankee."

BREAK Meanwhile, the power plant hummed along.

In a letter dated May 31, 1978, Maine Yankee operators told the NRC that two of the agency's primary demands -- for a better system for shutting the plant down in emergencies and new fire-safety equipment, including sprinklers -- had been met ahead of schedule. Through the next decade, the plant developed a reputation as a model of efficiency and productivity. By the 1990s, Maine Yankee's production costs were the 11th-lowest among the 71 nuclear plants operating in the United States.

By then, however, there were also small signs of trouble: Leaks in the reactor, problems with gauges and monitoring equipment, difficulty in controlling the turbine that generates electricity. After years of smooth operation, the plant had to be shut down nine times in nine months starting in the summer of 1990.

And on April 29, 1991, a short circuit set off an explosion that rocked the turbine building.

Supporting steel beams in a transformer were bent. Bolts were sheared in two, splitting pipes that were carrying hydrogen gas to the plant's generator. Hydrogen fires burned for four hours. More than 25,000 gallons of transformer coolant leaked into the ground. At least 200 gallons reached the nearby Back River.

Atherton had warned of just such an explosion in 1978. "The potential for a hydrogen explosion within this building has . . . not been addressed," his notes read. The area "may be susceptible to a transformer explosion."

After the explosion, no dramatic regulatory action was taken, says Dan Dorman, the NRC's Maine Yankee project manager. The plant was down while it was repaired. The NRC monitored the cleanup, the reconstruction and the retrofitting of damaged equipment. Regulators commended Maine Yankee's managers for their response to the accident. The plant went back on line.

Then in November 1995, Bob Pollard -- the NRC renegade -- received an anonymous paper at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which he'd joined after his appearance on "60 Minutes." The paper, providing technical detail, said Maine Yankee operators had used a falsified computer program in a 1989 safety analysis -- a program that modeled the plant's reaction to a loss of coolant. The accusation had nothing to do with Atherton's issues, but it was grave: If the core were ever uncovered, meltdown would follow. Pollard investigated the paper's allegations on his own before forwarding the information to Uldis Vanag, Maine's nuclear safety adviser.

That was the beginning of another accelerating chain of events: Vanag forwarded the paper to the NRC. The NRC's inspector general largely confirmed the allegations. The agency mounted a full safety investigation, assembling a team of inspectors who had never been responsible for Maine Yankee oversight. That team found "significant items of nonconformance." The agency then ordered Maine Yankee's operators to comb their plant for other safety flaws. That self-examination was part of a nationwide crackdown the NRC had begun, but the circumstances lent it more urgency.

Last December, the people at Maine Yankee reported that they had found other problems. The most prevalent one was insufficient separation of safety cables and other wires. Some wires were so close together that they might short out.

This time the NRC shut the plant down, pending repair of the separation problems.

BREAK Up in Maine, one anti-nuclear activist went ballistic. For a decade Ray Shadis, the founder of a group called Friends of the Coast, had been waving around a handwritten report from 1978 saying that Maine Yankee had improperly separated cables. It was, of course, a copy of Peter Atherton's work. Shadis had stumbled upon it in a public documents room in Maine in 1980 or '81. Before the shutdown, he couldn't get anyone to pay attention to it. But this past February, he brought Atherton's report to an NRC meeting in Bethesda. He was allowed five minutes to speak, and this time people were listening.

"NRC Knew of Problems 20 Years Ago," read the headline in the Lincoln County Weekly. "Report From 1978 Targets Problems at Maine Yankee," said the Portland Press Herald. Still, substantial questions remained: Were the cables that Atherton cited the same ones that were found to be flawed 19 years later? Had Maine Yankee ever made the changes the NRC had demanded in 1978?

"How do you have a situation that was identified by the NRC 20 years ago and have the plant continue to operate?" asks George E. Mulley Jr., a section chief in the NRC inspector general's office. "We have something that sounds like a new issue when, in fact, what we hear so far is that it's an old issue."

After all the publicity, the NRC launched an investigation into the Atherton matter -- actually, two investigations. The technical staff has been trying to establish whether his original report accurately described conditions at the plant in 1977 and whether those conditions are the same as those identified last year. As far as can be determined, this is first time that the agency has accepted a report drafted under its auspices by one of its employees as a formal allegation against its operations. In communications with the NRC, Maine Yankee operators have said that Atherton's concerns did have merit, but that they were addressed long ago. David Lochbaum, a nuclear watchdog who succeeded Pollard at the Union of Concerned Scientists, contends that they could not have been resolved. "If the NRC shut the plant in 1996 out of fear of electrical shorts," he says, "those problems had to have existed in Atherton's day." An NRC report on this inquiry should be finished sometime this month.

The other investigation will be longer by some months, and it may hold even greater portent for Atherton: The NRC's inspector general is trying to establish the facts surrounding his dismissal -- to determine whether he was indeed run out.

Now, Peter Atherton's hopes hang not on the gratitude of anti-nuclear activists, but on the outcome of these investigations. "I'm a proponent of the safe operation of nuclear power plants," he says, "not a blind adherent to the cause of shutting nuclear power plants down." Exactly how vindication would change his life is unclear. "Do I want compensation for all my work and all my, what should I call it, all my suffering?" he asks. "I would rather debate and do battle over the evaluation I did 20 years ago."

By contrast, Maine Yankee's fate is just about sealed: In late May, Yankee Atomic's board voted to sell it or consider shutting it down forever. Given the economics of nuclear power plant repair, the chances of a restart are slim.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.