I’m not entirely sure that your timeline is correct. The issue was that after the Three-Mile Island accident, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission required that all power reactors have an evacuation plan which had to be approved by the appropriate local authorities. At Shoreham, the local authorities refused to participate in the formulation of an evacuation plan. The site received permission to perform low power startup testing which includes acheiving criticality (self-sustaining neutron chain reaction) and it did perform this testing.
I believe that the utility was hoping that some arrangement could be made to get its evacuation plan approved and so loaded fuel and performed the testing while awaiting that arrangement.
The evacuation plan of a nuclear site is periodically tested with the agencies involved in the plan participating in drills. It isn’t good enough for a utility to formulate a plan, since it has to be tested.
And I readily concede that your timeline may be correct. These events happened over twenty-five years ago, and my mem’ry of things yesterday are already fuzzy.
You are correct. Under Cuomo’s prodding, the local authorities refused to work on an evacuation plan.