BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Security guards caught sleeping on the job last year at a nuclear plant near the Maryland line have spurred federal regulators to pledge more frequent inspections and more open channels for whistle-blowers, authorities said this week.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission vowed to have more oversight of internal investigations, especially after facing sharp criticism for turning over the investigation of sleeping guards at Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania to the plant managers accused of ignoring it.

The NRC insists security at the plant was never compromised, but former Clinton-era Energy Department adviser Robert Alvarez told The Examiner that an accident at Peach Bottom — seven miles over the line from Harford County — “could create a contaminated area four times the size of the Chernobyl disaster.”

After new guard Kerry Beal noticed his fellow employees sleeping on duty in ready rooms and guard towers last February, he reported it to his superiors and even had a former security supervisor write the NRC. Dissatisfied with the lack of response from the NRC and his immediate supervisors, Beal secretly recorded the guards sleeping and sent it to a New York TV station in September.

“The NRC has no tolerance for sleeping or inattentive security officers,” NRC Chairman Dale Klein said. “When these allegations arose, we investigated but did not reach the right outcome. Upon learning the full extent of the problem, we looked at our own system for examining these situations, found areas for improvement and are making changes.”

The NRC said it would more closely supervise the way it forwards complaints to the energy companies running the nuclear plants, review its own policies for taking complaints from whistle-blowers, and conduct more frequent inspections for inattentive guards.

“We have never seen one incident have such a ripple effect throughout the entire industry and regulatory environment,” said Peter Stockton, an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group that has been critiquing the NRC’s response to the incident.

Stockton said he was pleased to see the NRC moving toward greater oversight and paying more attention to whistle-blowers, but he still hoped the NRC would address the long shifts, boring environments and inadequate supervision that led to the guards falling asleep on duty.

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com