Speech by NRC Engineer Larry Criscione reporting experience with NRC.

1. Thank you. I’d like to thank the Government Accountability Project for
nominating me for this award, and Joe Callaway for endowing it, and the Shafeek
Nader trust for this reception.
“Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems,
get things done.”
For those of you not familiar with that quote, it’s how Admiral Rickover began a
1982 speech at Columbia University.
“Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems,
get things done.”
He was, of course, talking about his people at Naval Reactors. About how no
endeavor can be successful without dedicated and hard working people.
Our government is certainly testament to that. The organizations put in place by
our nation’s founders do not function on autopilot. They are only as good as the
people implementing them. A submarine can only be as good as its crew. A
regulatory agency can only be as good as its engineers and scientists. The Office
of Special Counsel is only as good as its attorneys.
Of course, there is more to success than just people. As crucial as Admiral
Rickover’s leadership was, and as critical the hardwork and dedication of his
engineers, what was also integral to his success is the blank-check that was given
to him in the 1950s to develop nuclear powered submarines.
The Office of Special Counsel unfortunately has never had such a blank check.
They have been underfunded and understaffed since their inception. But we are
very lucky nonetheless to currently have excellent leadership there. US Special
Counsel Carolyn Lerner certainly falls into the category of people who get things
done.
I’ve heard complaints among many people in the whistleblower community
about the OSC but its mainly due to that lack of resources and it’s not to the
caliber of their current leadership or their staff.
We understand that they have limited resources and that when you are in that
situation you need to triage. You cannot look into everything that you would like
to.
And as far as those monetary concerns, they are certainly felt by Non-
Government Organizations like the Shafeek Nader trust. And I’ve had good luck
and bad luck with getting NGOs to assist me. I’ve always understood those
monetary and staff constraints. And I’ve always been appreciative when I’ve
gotten help. And I’d like to thank some of those people tonight.

2. Three years ago the NRC’s Inspector General sought a felony indictment against
me for sending some embarrassing information to Congress. Those documents
detailed a significant public safety concern. The issue was about flooding. The
type of flooding that caused the nuclear accident at Fukushima in Japan.
The Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina is less than ten miles from
Clemson. Its three reactors on the shores of Lake Keowee are about ten miles
downstream of the Lake Jocassee Dam. Since 1993, the US Nuclear Regulatory
Commission has known that, were the Lake Jocassee Dam to fail, the reactors at
Oconee would be more than 17 feet underwater.
In September 2008—two and a half years prior to the Fukushima accidents in
Japan—Duke Energy predicted the following sequence of events were the Lake
Jocassee Dam to fail:
The floodwaters would reach the Oconee Nuclear Station in about 5 hours and
would cause a loss of the equipment necessary to remove decay heat from the
reactor cores.
The reactor cores would start to melt down within 8 to 9 hours
The containment buildings would fail within 59 to 68 hours causing significant
radiation dose to the public
Now those are Duke Energy’s words. But what we’re talking about here is a
multi-state permanent evacuation.
Unlike Fukushima, Oconee is not along the coast. At Fukushima for about 85% of
the time that that accident was going on, the winds were blowing out to sea.
Now for that 15% when the winds were blowing inland, that’s why there’s
150,000 people in Japan who got permanently evacuated from their homes.
Clemson, SC is about 200 miles from the sea. Any way the wind blows it’s going
over farmlands, it’s going over population centers, it’s going over forests. It’s not
falling out to sea.
The risks that we are talking about at Oconee and a lot of these other sites that
are downstream of dams—the older reactors—they are about 100-fold greater
than what we would allow for a new, modern reactor.
But the NRC, just like a lot of the regulatory agencies, they give great exceptions
to moneyed interests that already have industrial endeavors in place. And these
plants still operate. My concern was more that we were hiding the issue—not so
much as the social issues behind whether or not the benefits are there are not.
But I will tell you that after the Fukushima accident really drove home a lot of
these concerns——and these concerns didn’t come from me. I’m the person

3. who brought them to Congress. They came from people like Jeff Mitman who’s
in the back here, one of my NRC colleagues. Richard Perkins led the team that
wrote the report on the [flooding] issue——these concerns were brought up
prior to Fukushima.
After Fukushima what happened was, [prior to Fukushima] we had had Duke
Energy commit to protect against 19-foot flood at Oconee. Now they only have
to protect against a 4½ foot flood. And that was really due to their
implementation of the Fukushima corrective actions—which doesn’t make sense
to a lot of us.
Which is one of the reasons that in 2012 I shared the Duke Energy
correspondence with several Congressional offices.
I’d like to point out that none of this information was classified. It wasn’t in any
way restricted from release by any statute. Now it had been stamped “Official
Use Only” but any bureaucrat can write that on a document. I can write that on
an email no matter what’s in it, it doesn’t matter—there’s no control over that.
And [Official Use Only] is not a legal marking.
You have to ask yourself why wasn’t this—if its so sensitive information—why
wasn’t it classified. Well the reason is because there was absolutely no basis for
withholding from the public a significant public safety concern like the flooding
induced meltdown of three reactors. It just didn’t meet any of our rules for
withholding.
However, the NRC was withholding it from the public nonetheless.
The NRC was not pleased with me sharing this information with Congress and
they were similarly displeased when the Congressional office leaked the
information to Greenpeace.
The Duke Energy correspondence I shared had been downloaded from the NRC’s
Agencywide Document Accession and Management System. Since I had
downloaded it from a government computer network, the NRC’s Inspector
General requested that I be indicted on computer fraud.
I don’t know who in this room has ever been interrogated by federal law
enforcement agents, but it’s a pretty unnerving experience: to be sworn under
oath by armed agents, to be told that you have a right to remain silent but your
silence can be used against you in administrative hearings regarding your
continued employment, and for nearly four hours to be asked questions.
And those questions are not being asked in order to understand what occurred.
They are being asked for no other reason than to build a felony case against you.

4. To discredit your motives. To paint you as unreliable. To question your
professional credentials.
One of the things I was grilled over was who in Congress released the
information. I was directed to speculate.
Well I didn’t really know who in Congress had released it. I had some ideas. Mr.
Riccio [Greenpeace] had asked me certain names of who I might have sent the
documents to. I gave him the list of the staffers that had it. One staffer asked me
a day later if I could re-send the information to him. These Congressional
staffers get hundreds of emails an hour so the fact that it got lost in his inbox
didn’t surprise me, and the fact that maybe if Greenpeace was asking him about
it he might want to review it again didn’t seem an issue to me. But it’s certainly
something that the IG [NRC Inspector General] wanted to know.
I personally have an issue with Executive Branch agents using their law
enforcement credentials to investigate the wholly legal doings of the Legislative
Branch.
We have laws against releasing classified information and I understand that the
FBI has every right to investigate illegal activity on the part of Congress, but you
have to remember that these are documents that there was no legal statute
restricting their release. I had administrative commitments that I couldn’t
release them publicly because some bureaucrat had stamped them “Official Use
Only”. That has no legal basis at all. Nothing preventing Congress from asking
Greenpeace their opinion on it. Nothing preventing Greenpeace from sharing
them with whoever they wanted to once they got their hands on it.
But yet the IG wanted to know who in Congress had release that and I’m sure
they wanted to know because they wanted to know what [Congressional] offices
the NRC shouldn’t be sending information to and they were abusing their law
enforcement authority to find that out.
It took a lawsuit, but I do have the audio disk if anyone wants to hear for
themselves what I am talking about.
I came out of that experience convinced that I was going to lose my job, and, at
the same time would be faced with the prospect of having to defend myself
against trumped up felony charges. I spoke with five attorneys, all of whom laid
out for me roughly the same scenario. They all told me,
The government has no case against you, however, it does not mean you will not
be indicted.
If you are indicted, the government will make you an offer—quietly resign from
your job and give up all your rights to any whistleblower claims and they will
drop the indictment.

5. If you are given this offer, you need to seriously consider it.
If you are indicted, you will need a criminal defense attorney. Defense attorneys
need to be paid up front every month. Expect to pay $60,000 to settle your case
and $400,000 if it goes all the way through a jury trial.
If you are indicted, not only will you immediately lose your job at the NRC, you
will likely be unemployable in the nuclear industry. Meanwhile, you need to
come up with $3,000 to $10,000 a month for your attorney bills.
If you run out of money along the way, you will find yourself with no job, no
healthcare, six figures of legal bills, and likely pleading guilty to a misdemeanor
you did not commit just to get the felony charges dismissed.
Well luckily for me the felony charges never materialized. The NRC Inspector
General venue-shopped all the way out to Springfield, IL in search of a US
Attorney willing to indict me but in the end the Department of Justice declined
his request.
At the time, and I believe currently still, the US Attorney in Springfield, IL is a
man named Jim Lewis who started off his career in the 1960s in Mississippi as a
Civil Rights attorney. So he’s a really good guy; he’s not the type of guy who’s
going to throw out trumped up felony charges at a federal regulator.
I don’t know anything about the US Attorney in eastern Maryland or in the
District of Columbia—the other two venues that the NRC could have used—but I
assume that the reason they didn’t go there is because they know that the US
Attorneys there are similarly ethical.
But we’re all adults here and we all know that there’s 94 US Attorney Districts in
this country; somewhere out there in those 94 districts there is a US Attorney
who would have played the government’s game and would have—even though
he knew there was nothing illegal with what I had done—granted the IG his
felony indictment to use as a bargaining chip to get rid of a wayward federal
employee. And luckily for me I didn’t live in that person’s district, whoever it
might be.
Of course, I didn’t know about Mr. Lewis’ declination for at least another 15
months. I found out about it through the Privacy Act. Well it was kind of a trying
time, especially for my wife. She had just finished breast cancer treatments and I
can tell you she didn’t sleep for five months: just worried about my job, her
healthcare, me even going to jail. I couldn’t really convince her that look, I didn’t
do anything wrong, it’s ridiculous that I’d go to jail. She’s not really as
knowledgeable of the law and things as a lot of people are.
One of the things that helped me get through that time was Tom Devine and the
Government Accountability Project. When Tom Devine and Louis Clark heard
about my situation, they offered to represent me pro-bono. I’ll tell you that
really was a big lift off my shoulders; knowing that I wouldn’t have to accept any

6. NRC offer to sign away my whistleblower rights, that I could fight them in court.
That I did have the resources now to do that.
Like the Office of Special Counsel, GAP does have limited resources. But they do
a lot with what they have. Tom and Louis are certainly people who get things
done.
In fact last Saturday, around noon I was in a church waiting for my daughter’s
wedding to start when Tom Devine called me to chat about my OSC referral.
That’s when he calls. On Saturdays. On Sunday evenings. I read emails that
were often sent close to or after midnight. He’s working late hours and
weekends to help us.
I’ve already mentioned in the audience are Richard Perkins and Jeff Mitman,
some of my NRC colleagues. They were instrumental in getting the flooding
concerns addressed from a technical perspective. There are a lot of other
colleagues I could mention. A lot of them probably wouldn’t appreciate me
mentioning their names—not that they wouldn’t want you knowing them, but
there’s people at the NRC who they would prefer not see their names. But it is
the technical staff such as them that allow our bureaucracy to function and to not
be captured by moneyed interests.
Also in the audience is Jim Riccio of Greenpeace. Jim was instrumental in getting
the nuclear flooding concerns exposed through the FOIA process.
I don’t know if Jeff Ruch is in the audience of Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility (PEER). PEER v. NRC caused most of the
documents I provided to Congress to be released under the Freedom of
Information Act. PEER’s assistance was really vital to my mental health. In 2013
I knew that if I could get a judge to release the flooding documents under the
FOIA, then I would be able to undermine the NRC’s efforts to indict me. But I
couldn’t afford to process my own FOIA lawsuit and PEER agreed to seek the
documents for me since the flooding issue was of concern to them as well.
I’d also like to mention Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear and Lucas Hixson of
Environmental Archives for their efforts in getting nuclear issues exposed via the
FOIA.
Dave Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists and former NRC Inspector
General agent George Mulley are not here tonight, but they were instrumental on
commenting upon the NRC’s response to the US Office of Special Counsel
regarding the flooding issues. Mr. Lochbaum’s assistance has been crucial in
many instances regarding the flooding concerns and in other nuclear safety
issues I have dealt with over the years.

7. A corollary to Admiral Rickover’s quote would be that human experience shows
that people, not organizations or management systems, retaliate against their
subordinates. That is, it’s people who retaliate, not organizations. People, not
organizations, accept and adapt to situations they know to be wrong. The
tendency to downplay problems instead of actively trying to correct them comes
from people, and not their organizations or management systems.
It was a person—the NRC’s Inspector General—who chose to use his law
enforcement authority to retaliate against me. But luckily, there have been other
people who have foiled that retaliation.
I’ve survived as long as I have at the NRC because I have been fortunate to have
immediate superiors who—although I might not always agree with their
decisions—they always do what they believe to be right. I unfortunately cannot
say that about the entire organization at the NRC.
I have found the NRC to be primarily concerned with protecting their own image
and that of the commercial nuclear industry. I cannot stress to you how
important Non-Government Organization are in balancing the influence of the
nuclear industry over NRC policies.
Non-Government Organizations have been a vital part of America for centuries.
The term “NGO” is pretty recent but when you think about it, abolitionism,
women’s suffrage, the civil rights movements, those were all initiated by extra-
government organizations, many of which—like politically active churches, the
NAACP, the ACLU—they’re still active and around today.
But in this modern era—in our lifetimes—we’ve seen a new type of NGO crop up
whose specific role is to ensure corporate influence does not diminish
government regulation. And although Ralph Nader might not have had a hand in
most of those, I am not alone in believing him to be the godfather of all of them.
Finally, I’d like to thank Kay and Leo Drey and all the philanthropists who—like
Joe Callaway—are vital to funding the NGOs that protect the public from
government abuses. Thank you.