NUCLEAR SAFETY FALLOUT

Chief executives don't often confess corporate sins in public. But during a recent hearing at the suburban Maryland headquarters of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an electric-utility boss named Bruce Kenyon did just that. Kenyon, a respected nuclear-industry veteran with a raspy voice and a cocksure style, last fall became president, CEO and designated savior of Northeast Utilities' nuclear division, which operates five commercial reactors in New England. "At the time I arrived, [Northeast] was as close to a dysfunctional organization as I have ever encountered," he told the NRC. "The fundamental problem was leadership."

Strong words--yet Kenyon was, if anything, soft-pedaling the situation. Before he joined Northeast, the utility had become known as a nuclear scofflaw, an industry rogue that for years cut operating costs by ignoring NRC regulations, allowing chronic hardware problems to go unrepaired and harassing employees who raised safety concerns--employees such as George Galatis, the engineer whose crusade to clean up the company landed him on the cover of TIME one year ago this month ("Blowing the Whistle on Nuclear Safety," March 4, 1996). Galatis' most alarming discovery was that the NRC knew about Northeast's dangerous game but for years did nothing to stop it.

TIME's special report focused national attention on the NRC's failure to enforce its safety rules at Northeast's Millstone Station in Waterford, Connecticut. Then something extraordinary happened. Where past agency chiefs had routinely ignored such criticism, NRC chairman Shirley Ann Jackson, who had taken the job just 10 months before this scandal broke, called the TIME story "a wake-up call" and "a learning moment." Revving up its inspection program at Millstone, her agency found such pervasive noncompliance that it ordered all three plants there to shut down for sweeping repairs. A year later, Northeast is facing $1 billion in shutdown costs; the Millstone plants remain idle, with thousands of compliance problems still to be resolved; and a fourth Northeast reactor, Connecticut Yankee, has been permanently mothballed.

In their fight to win back public trust, both Kenyon and Jackson have shaken up their moribund organizations. Many of the senior Northeast and NRC officials identified in the original TIME story have either retired or been forced to resign. This spring, as the Justice Department concludes an investigation into alleged criminal misconduct by Northeast--illegal operation of Millstone 1, violation of environmental laws--indictments are possible and more departures likely. The NRC has become a more aggressive regulator, displaying new teeth in January when it added eight plants to its "watch list" of problem reactors, a move the industry protested as "political" and nuclear critics applauded. "Jackson is the toughest chairman we've seen," says Bill Magavern, director of the Critical Mass Energy Project at Ralph Nader's Public Citizen watchdog group. "But she's fighting mighty economic pressures."