Only the patterns of response across all incidents in the entire focus group can provide those lessons. The most serious finding of our monitoring program throws the safety of the entire nuclear power industry into question. None of the internal auditors at any of the focus group plants identified a single one of the more than 200 problems reported last year. Their entire purpose is to detect problems. This widespread breakdown in quality assurance clearly reflects a lack of industry and NRC emphasis on safety.
Federal regulations require plant owners to inspect and test to find safety problems.
In practice, the NRC inspectors identified about the same number of problems as the plants' testing programs did, showing testing to be surprisingly ineffective. Poor procedures and worker mistakes were responsible for most of the problems. The gravity of these findings cannot be overemphasized. Human error and faulty procedures were major factors in both the Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl disasters. On the other hand, few of the problems resulted from maintenance activities.