on the cover / By Japhet Weeks

The Not-So-Peaceful Atom

Bob Rowen accidentally took on corporate nuclear power in the 1970s. Four decades later he remembers what it was like to be Humboldt County’s most infamous whistleblower.

(March 20, 2008) On a summer day in 1969,Bob Rowen, a nuclear control technician at the Humboldt Bay nuclear power plant, realized that for his employer, Pacific Gas and Electric, the bottom line was everything — it was even more important than the community’s safety.

It wasn’t the first time Rowen, a burly former Marine, had witnessed safety violations at the plant, but it was the first time he had the gumption to record the violation in a logbook, which would eventually be reviewed by the nuclear industry’s then government watchdog the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

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As for PG&E management, they were getting pretty fed up. Rowen was proving to be a real pain in the ass.

On Aug. 6, an 80-ton lead-shielded container arrived at the power plant to transport spent nuclear fuel across the country to New York State for reprocessing. The cask was placed into the plant’s spent fuel pool and spent fuel rods were secured inside. When it was lifted out, it was drenched in radioactive water, which had to be hosed off and the entire cask scrubbed down with alcohol and detergent so that it would be clean enough to ship. Problem was, no matter how hard the techs scrubbed, they kept getting readings that were way above the Department of Transportation radiation limits. They staggered their coffee breaks so that the decontamination process could go on non-stop. But even that wasn’t enough — the cask was still “crapped up.” In some places it gave readings of 4,000 to 6,000 disintegrations per minute per 100 square centimeters (more than twice the federal limit). At the seal, it read 20,000 per minute.

Holding the cask over for another day would have cost the company an extra $70,000. Rowen’s supervisor, Gail Allen, came up with a solution. He took samples from the cask using a very light touch and recorded measurements just outside the federal limit. Then he told Rowen to sign the release papers.

Shortly after doing so, Rowen recorded the incident in the plant’s radiation control log: “G. Allen asked Rowen to sign the release papers for the spent fuel shipping cask stating that the contamination level of the cask to be less than 2,200 disintegrations per minute, when in fact, they were greater than 2,600 disintegrations per minute …”

Rowen had worked his way quickly up the ranks at PG&E from a laborer to a nuclear control technician, the person responsible for maintaining the plant’s monitoring system. He didn’t realize it at the time, but by recording the shipping cask incident in the plant’s logbook, he had signed away a promising career in the nuclear industry and set off a chain of events that would end with his discharge from the company in 1970. In the eyes of his supervisors, Rowen would later reflect, his safety consciousness was tantamount to industrial sabotage. The local police would be called in to investigate him, and he and his so-called co-conspirators would be branded dissidents.

The day after the shipping cask incident, Plant Engineer Edgar Weeks called Rowen into his office. “I reminded [Rowen],” Weeks wrote in a confidential memo, cited in William Rodgers’ 1973 book on corporate malfeasance, Corporate Country, “that he had a responsibility to promote harmony, not disrupt it.”

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