Transcipts: VY radioactive plume and NRC coverup

Mr. Mulligan, I will turn it over to you
5 to provide any information you believe the Petition
6 Review Board should consider as part of this petition.

7 PETITIONER MULLIGAN: Thank you, Mr.
8 Hiland.
9 Words are, the definition of words is,
10 pretty important in this thing. You spoke of the
11 Petition Review Board discusses this with me. You
12 have done it repeatedly over I don't know how many
13 petitions, but not once has anybody ever discussed
14 anything with me. You usually send a
15 couple-of-sentence explanation on what is going on and
16 that type of thing. It's never discussed. It's
17 always in a written form. So just if words mean
18 anything, I just wanted to bring that up.
19 I was curious, you know, why my full 2.206
20 petition is not on the Vermont Yankee docket. It
21 might be there. I looked a couple of times. I
22 couldn't find it. There are a lot of issues with the
23 search features on the NRC site, but I am surprised
24 that 2.206 isn't on the docket itself, the whole
25 thing.
1 I spoke a lot in the beginning about
2 Palisades. And I last testified on October 26th and
3 on September 19th at Palisades. They had a reactor
4 trip. And they found a broken valve, and there was
5 leaking.
6 Then on September 26th of the same year,
7 they had a broken breaker. And so I am just making
8 the case with that petition that Palisades and Vermont
9 Yankee are related in that it is operated by Entergy.
10 I think the major fault with Entergy is
11 they haven' t developed a strong centralized management
12 system. They usually defer their management to the
13 local plants and stuff.
14 There is a lot of under-funding that goes
15 on and not adequate skills. And that's where a heart
16 of a lot of these problems lie. I think that in a big
17 organization, there has to be a strong centralized
18 power that creates order in all of the branches, the
19 rest of the organization.
20 In my last testimony, I said, "Well, you
21 know, I know the NRC is in a process. I will know
22 when the NRC is in a process of repairing itself when
23 they redo the 2.206 process." I basically think we're
24 there with this.
25 I think essentially the NRC maliciously
1 goes through this NRC process. And the outcome is
2 known to be inaccurate and falsified and corrupted.
3 You might go through the process. You
4 might obey all the rules and stuff, but the outcome
5 leads to a false outcome and stuff. And everybody
6 knows you guys sign your names to these things. And
7 if it's inaccurate and if it's intentionally
8 inaccurate, there should be legal remedies.
9 On April 26th, Mr. Hiland was talking
10 about on the roof and trying to figure out where the
11 plume was going, where the plume was coming out of the
12 turbine building. I mean, you know, it's a picture
13 taken a couple of miles away.
14 I was kind of perplexed at that type of
15 thing, asking those kinds of questions. If I was a
16 confident agency and they were working for me, the NRC
17 would have had inspectors up on that turbine roof.
18 And they would have been feet away from it. And we
19 wouldn't be playing word games with how many
20 stanchions away is the plume. We would have known.
21 The inspectors would have been up there. And it would
22 have wrote an accurate report about it. And we
23 wouldn't be playing these kind of games. We're trying
24 to figure out what a photograph is saying.
25 It should be mentioned two days prior to
1 this, Entergy wrote up a condition report about the
2 plume, about my plume. They essentially admit that
3 it's an unanalyzed discharge. There's no
4 documentation at all with this through the history of
5 the plant. And they hired AREVA to do an
6 investigation and evidently take samples of the stuff
7 coming out of the pipe. It's too bad that we didn't
8 get that before the shutdown.
9 The theme here is there might be generic
10 issues with other plants as far as should they have
11 similar AREVA investigations as Vermont Yankee? You
12 know, a possibility if Entergy and NRC wanted to get
13 VY into an outage and on the other side of the outage
14 without making any modifications because they don't
15 have to take measurements if there are issues of
16 getting VY past the court case? And everybody could
17 have been stalling because of that.
18 And, you know, there are issues of
19 incompetent relicense of Vermont Yankee. How come
20 this wasn't caught during the relicensing problem?
21 Did not meet the criteria for review
22 because the petitioner failed to provide sufficient
23 facts that would warrant further inquiry. You're
24 right. You know, like I just talked in the beginning
25 of this thing, you know, I knew that the system wasn't
1 providing me with the facts that were ongoing at the
2 plant with the AREVA contract and condition report and
3 stuff.
4 So essentially two days before this, my
5 testimony, the completion of it, was this condition
6 report and stuff. And I know a lot of people were
7 wondering, asking questions about this and stuff like
8 that. And this evidence wasn't given to me prior to
9 the Petition Review Board meeting.
10 I think it's a cover-up. I suspect
11 there's a -- it's a pretty serious cover-up because
12 this stuff was withheld from me. And, you know, it
13 wasn't really withheld from me. It was withheld from
14 the public.
15 Honest guy asks an honest question. And
16 it was absolutely accurate and stuff. Everybody was
17 fiddling around behind the scenes, you know, in the
18 secret document chambers that the public can't get at.
19 And everybody could play like stupid, you know, "We
20 don't know what you're talking about, Mike. You have
21 insufficient evidence." You know, this is one of the
22 worst coverups I've seen in the NRC in a long time.
23 I would like to go over the timeline on
24 our August 26. I submitted the 2.206 and accurate
25 radiological environmental reports coming out of the
1 turbine building plume.
2 On September 8th, I made a request of Tom
3 Setzer to help me with this. Again, you know, like
4 you said, "Mike, you've got the Freedom of
5 Information. And you've got all of these ways to get
6 information, Mike."
7 You got 100,000 processes, but nobody
8 wants to talk to you. I mean, that's what the NRC
9 always come back to me with, "We've got all these
10 processes."
11 But you make an honest effort to talk to
12 somebody about a problem, like Mr. Setzer. And he
13 stiff-arms me by not answering me back. And I suspect
14 that's not an error with Tom Setzer. I suspect that
15 his bosses told him that's how they're going to
16 respond to Mike Mulligan, is to stiff-arm him.
17 So on September 8th, I made a request to
18 Tom Setzer to help me out with the developing
19 condition report and AREVA contract to figure out what
20 is going on with that plume.
21 On September 12th, like I said, Vermont
22 Yankee submitted a condition report, or
23 CR-VTY-2001-03628, rad pathway unanalyzed.
24 On September 14th, two days later, we had
25 the Petition Review Board. Just one wonders. Two
1 days beforehand, you know, all the stuff going on
2 behind the scenes as far as Mike is right and then
3 everybody coming to the conclusion that it's an
4 unanalyzed pathway.
5 There are no documents at all with this,
6 at all. It's mind-boggling to think that there are no
7 documents at all associated with the vapor extractor
8 emissions.
9 So what did I get down to? The September
10 14th Petition Review Board. It's when Vermont Yankee
11 had the evidence sitting in their hands. And, like I
12 said, you know, whether Mr. Entergy at these
13 proceedings could have talked to me about it or made
14 a few comments about it or Tom Setzer himself.
15 These people knew that I was right. They
16 essentially gave the environment of insufficient facts
17 for the Petition Review Board, which was wrong. It's
18 absolutely wrong.
19 And, like I'm saying, these people had had
20 the opportunity to be honest and truthful and admit
21 what was going on and explain it a little bit, but the
22 system -- you know, that's the way the system works,
23 forward a system to a falsified outcome.
24 And everybody is just getting sick and
25 tired of that. You know, I thought we were supposed

1 to be honest and ethical. I thought we were supposed
2 to be focused on a higher good, a societal good type
3 of thing and not, you know, necessarily following the
4 procedures and processes.
5 The processes and procedures doesn't make
6 it ethical and truthful and righteous, the outcome.
7 You know, it doesn't create the honest story of really
8 what was going on and what happened and what we are
9 going to do in the future.
10 So on October 4th, the PRB made the
11 recommendation. I didn't get the recommendation until
12 October 11th, 2011.
13 On October 12th, I called Uldis Vanage,
14 the Vermont State Nuclear Engineer, and left a
15 recording on his phone. The spelling of his name is
16 U-l-d-i-s V-a-n-a-g-e. I still have a hard time
17 pronouncing his name. So I left a recording on it.
18 You know, I told him my story and left a recording on
19 his name, nice picture I gave him, too.
20 On October 14th around, Mr. Vanage called
21 me back, explained -- I explained my story, said he's
22 heading to Vermont Yankee to ask my questions.
23 On October 18th, 2001, the State Nuclear
24 Engineer reported back his results of his talk with
25 Entergy, you know. I couldn't get this out of -- you
1 know, Entergy was quiet. I couldn't get it out of the
2 NRC in the Petition Review Board and stuff, you know.
3 What kind of -- how do you get information? How do
4 you get information from people when the Board kind
5 of, you know, through its rule says you can't give
6 information out to Mike Mulligan?
7 You know, you say it's a one-way check
8 valve we've got going here. I have to abide by strict
9 legal precedences. And you guys get to use ghetto
10 laws and stuff like that that nobody can understand.
11 You make up your own rules behind the scenes that
12 nobody can understand and ghetto drug laws or however
13 you want to term it, these laws that really don't have
14 any foundation of serving society and the greater
15 good.
16 So he reported that there is definitely a
17 plume. He got this from Vermont Yankee. It is coming
18 from the turbine seals. It is coming from the turbine
19 seals. And maybe seal steam is getting into the lube
20 oil or the suction of the lube oil. There is tritium
21 released from it.
22 It is unanalyzed and undocumented through
23 the life of the plant. And Entergy -- like I said,
24 Entergy hired AREVA to do an evaluation of what
25 happened for the license basis.
1 That reminds me. I hope you got my last
2 email of kind of memorializing this.
3 Hello?
4 MR. KIM: Yes. We received your email.
5 And it has been disseminated to the PRB members.
6 PETITIONER MULLIGAN: Okay. Thank you.
7 You know, I say that the state engineer
8 says that he only wanted to talk about tritium, but I
9 believe it has all the components of reactor vessel
10 steam stuff.
11 And, you know, basically -- and this isn't
12 a little thing. I mean, to give people a little bit
13 of background, you have got tons of engineers at
14 Vermont Yankee. They're like ants. There are lots of
15 them and stuff. I know they're busy now in that
16 thing. And they all have -- most of them have good
17 degrees. They come from good colleges. Some have
18 advanced degrees.
19 Certainly the NRC is in the same way. You
20 know, these guys were all -- they have all a lot of
21 experience. And the NRC people have, you know, even
22 broader experiences. You know, engineers at Vermont
23 Yankee are experts at Vermont Yankee.
24 But the engineers with the NRC that are
25 associated with operation of these plants, I mean,
1 they have information on many plants. And, you know,
2 they have a greater view, wider view, of the nuclear
3 world and stuff like that.
4 So, you know, there's a lot of experience
5 here on both sides of it, a tremendous amount of
6 experience. You know, how could all these people miss
7 this through all these years?
8 You know, it's just mind-boggling to think
9 that somebody couldn't see that plume up there and
10 say, you know, "How is that damn thing in documents?
11 How do we get that thing -- how do we got our asses
12 covered?" And it was missed. It's at the end of
13 life. And something like this is missed at many
14 plants. Like I said, it raises generic issues at
15 other plants.
16 Like I said, in my 2.206 last time, I
17 begged for information on what was going on here.
18 And, according to your process, you were prevented
19 from giving me the information.
20 I mean, I don't think anybody, I don't
21 think Mr. Entergy was prevented from giving me the
22 information. I don't think Mr. Setzer was either. I
23 think he could have spoke up and said something, you
24 know, "This is going on" or something like that. But
25 the process says, you know, "You've got to lie by
1 omission." Everybody's got to lie by omission.
2 Everybody's got to be untruthful by omission.
3 It's okay to be dishonest because the
4 procedure says it's okay. It's allowed. And, you
5 know, I think there's something more here, you know.
6 That's really important.
7 I'll give my blocks another thing. It's
8 the Potterville Town Hall if anybody wants to see the
9 pictures and my write-up of it. I think this
10 constitutes a pervasive attitude with the NRC and
11 Entergy with an inability to tell us the truth. You
12 know, I think it's -- I think their systems allow them
13 to not tell the truth, you know. They can play the
14 rules, and the outcome can be untruth. I just think
15 that can't happen. That shouldn't be happening. That
16 shouldn't be happening in the United States of
17 America.
18 Malicious compliance with agency process,
19 knowing the outcome is not ethical, a falsification.
20 I believe that with all of my heart.
21 You've got to wonder if there's shredding
22 of documents going on at Vermont Yankee.
23 (Pause.)
24 PETITIONER MULLIGAN: I'm just going
25 through my paperwork here for a second to make sure
1 I've got everything.
2 The Catholic Church has an interesting
3 take on -- with their economic report recently about
4 the world situation with our financial system. And it
5 talks about technology and how we can't turn
6 technology into materialism or ethic or rules or use
7 technology for excessivity for personal benefit, what
8 I'm thinking of, the whole of the planet. It says
9 that, you know.
10 The soul of the NRC isn't the rules and
11 regulations. There's got to be something above rules
12 and regulations. I mean, in intelligence, there's got
13 to be something. Rules and regulations are primitive.
14 There's got to be something higher than rules and
15 regulations.
16 And intelligence is the ability to catch
17 associations, the ability to be fixated on something.
18 You know, you might get turned off a couple of times
19 or turn the wrong corner but, you know, the
20 intelligence to keep at it until you find a problem
21 and stuff like that.
22 There's a sense, you know, of the soul of
23 the agency, who they serve and what do they think of
24 human dignity. Human dignity is not found really in
25 a group of people. You could respect a group of
1 people but each other. And you can respect the
2 group's dignity, but you might disrespect the greater
3 societal dignity by over-focusing on group behavior
4 and not -- you know, where are we heading? Where are
5 we headed?
6 Here is a quote if I can just spend a
7 couple of seconds. "However, if we think clearly
8 about the new social question, we must avoid the
9 error, itself a product of neo-liberal thinking of
10 regarding all problems that need tackling as
11 exclusively technical in nature. In such a guise, the
12 problem evades discernment and ethical evaluation that
13 are urgently required. In this context, Benedict
14 XVI," I think, "encyclical warns about the dangers of
15 technical ideology; that is, of making technology
16 absolute, which tends to prevent people from
17 recognizing anything that cannot be explained in terms
18 of matter alone. It also minimized the value of
19 choices made by the concrete individual who works in
20 the economic financial system by reducing them to mere
21 technical variables, being closed to the beyond in the
22 sense of something more than technology not only makes
23 it impossible to find an adequate solution to the
24 problems but empowers the principal victims of the
25 crisis more and more from a material standpoint."
1 You know, all you've got to do is replace
2 "financial economic" with "nuclear power" and stuff.
3 And that essentially asks us the question, is there
4 something more than technology?
5 And, you know, of course, language is
6 being used more and more as a technical instrument.
7 You know, language is engineered processes are
8 created. Outcomes are assured.
9 You know, language becomes technically
10 engineered. You know, you can abuse language in the
11 same way as you can abuse the financial system.
12 You know, I talked a lot about this, about
13 how the NRC comes up with a process that's immoral.
14 It's the same way with language. And in a lot of
15 ways, we use language. Most our institutional
16 problems and failures are related to using language as
17 a technology to come to a predetermined outcome, to
18 force people to come to a predetermined outcome, and
19 not use their greater intelligence to really figure on
20 what is going on and what is best for us.
21 And so I just want everybody to realize
22 that language is important on how we use it. And we
23 can use it for good or we can use it for bad. And
24 this technical language that everybody uses nowadays,
25 you know, it's particularly potent. It can be used
1 for unbelievable, wonderful things. And it can be
2 used for some really nasty stuff.
3 Just one more quote from this guy. "As
4 Benedict XVI exhorts us, agents on all levels, social,
5 political, economic, professional, all are urgently
6 needed to have the courage to serve and promote the
7 common good through an upright life. Only they will
8 succeed in living and seeing beyond the appearance of
9 things and perceiving the gap between existing reality
10 and tried possibilities." This is unbelievable.
1] "Pope Paul VI emphasized revolutionary
12 power of forward-looking imagination that can perceive
13 the possibilities inscribed in the present and guide
14 people towards a new future.
15 "By freeing their imaginations, humans
16 free their existence. Through an effort of community
17 imagination, it is possible to transform not only
18 institutions but also lifestyles and encourage a
19 better future for all people."
20 I think that's important: our souls and
21 the souls of our organizations and how we serve some
22 higher purpose.
23 You know, one last thing is the pope says
24 -- well, not the pope. The church says, "Unity is
25 truth." You know, it kind of says, you know, if we
1 come to unity, you are almost god-like or over
2 cosmic-like and stuff like that. Unity is truth. It
3 couldn't be more beautifully expressed.
4 Thank you very much for allowing me to
5 speak.
6 CHAIRMAN HILAND: Are you finished, Mr.
7 Mulligan?
8 PETITIONER MULLIGAN: Yes, sir, I am.
9 CHAIRMAN HILAND: Okay. At this time does
10 the staff or anyone here at headquarters have any
11 questions for Mr. Mulligan?
12 (No response.)
13 CHAIRMAN HILAND: Hearing none, does the
14 staff in Region 1 have any questions?
15 MR. DeBOER: I do not.
16 CHAIRMAN HILAND: Does the license, who I
17 believe is listening on the call, have any questions?
18 MR. DeVINCENTIS: No, Entergy has no
19 questions.
20 CHAIRMAN HILAND: Okay. Before we
21 conclude the meeting, members of the public may
22 provide comments regarding the petition and ask
23 questions about the 2.206 petition process.
24 However, as stated at the opening, the
25 purpose of this meeting is not to provide and
1 opportunity for the petitioner or the public to
2 question or examine the Petition Review Board
3 regarding the merits of the petition request.
4 (No response.)
5 CHAIRMAN HILAND: Hearing no members of
6 the public, Mr. Mulligan, thank you for taking time to
7 provide the NRC staff with clarifying information on
8 the petition you have submitted.
9 PETITIONER MULLIGAN: Thank you, sir.