New rules would force outage workers to limit hours to 48 hrs a week!
Fatigue complaints by Barry Quigley of Byron Ops drive NRC proposal
Monday, April 03, 2006
BY GARRY LENTON
Of The Patriot-News
The nuclear plant security officer said he normally works 46 hours a week, but it's often more than that.
Mandatory training, high turnover rates and covering for absent colleagues frequently mean additional 12-hour shifts and fatigue.
"We have people dropping off [to sleep] all the time," said the officer, who spoke on condition that his name and employer not be identified.
His complaint is not unique. Security workers and other nuclear plant employees across the nation have complained to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for years about the effect of working sustained long hours.
After nearly eight years of study, the NRC is poised to tighten limits on individual work hours and increase the number of rest days per week.
The goal is to eliminate "sleep debt," said David Desaulniers, a senior human factors analyst for the NRC.
Barry Quigley knows about fatigue. He asked the NRC to change its rules in 1999. He was a senior reactor operator at the Byron Station nuclear plant in Illinois, where he and his co-workers sometimes worked 72 to 84 hours a week.
The proposed rules, which are expected to be finalized in January, are not what Quigley asked for, "but it's better than nothing," he said.
The changes proposed by the agency include requiring a minimum three days off each week for employees who work 12-hour shifts and eliminating shift averaging, which allows plant operators to bypass individual work limits.
NRC rules limit workers to 48 hours a week, but plant owners could allow some to work longer by averaging the hours of all workers on a shift. Three people on a 10-person crew could work 60 hours a week as long as at least three others worked no more than 36 hours.
Industry officials who attended a hearing on the proposed rules last week said they would hamper their ability to manage plants safely. Strict limits on individual hours could break up work teams, resulting in poorer communication and work performance, said James Davis of the industry group Nuclear Energy Institute.
Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, chief of the division of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, said the NRC is correct to demand the three-day rest, especially for 12-hour night workers.
Night workers suffer most from fatigue because their bodies' circadian rhythm, or sleep cycle, is disrupted, Czeisler said. Surveys of night-shift workers at nuclear plants conducted by Harvard found that 50 percent admitted falling asleep at least once a week.
This year, the owners of Three Mile Island acknowledged five cases of worker inattentiveness since March 2004. All occurred during the night shift.
The revelation prompted the state Department of Environmental Protection to start a surprise inspection program for the state's five nuclear plants.
Czeisler said reducing workers' time off "would be a mistake."
David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety expert with The Union of Concerned Scientists, agreed.
"I think the regulations should regulate the industry, not the other way around," he said.
Fatigue is a concern for the NRC and the industry because mistakes by inattentive workers can cost millions of dollars and risk lives.
Industry representatives argue they need flexibility to meet growing production demands. They say that the number of unplanned shutdowns at nuclear plants have declined steadily for nearly two decades.
Mandating three days off a week is a "killer issue," said Davis of the NEI. He asked the agency to reduce it to two days, which would allow plants to keep workers on the job for 60 hours when needed.
But the NRC's Desaulniers chafed at the suggestion.
"It seems as though you only see flexibility as being able to bring somebody in on their day off," he said. "The answer is having enough [workers], not bringing them in on their day off."
