Nuclear Regulatory Commission dispute, as Chairman Jaczko wants more safety

A Philosophical Split at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Huffington Post, Elliott Negin, 12 Jan 12“…….For two days, a federal agency aired its dirty laundry in public. Both the House and the Senate held hearings on December 14 and 15 respectively that wound up focusing on a bureaucratic tiff between the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the agency’s four commissioners….

the split may be more philosophical than personal. A critical vote the five took on December 15, the same day as the Senate hearing, suggests that it is at least partly the latter. For the seventh time over the last three years, Jaczko was on the losing end of a 4-1 vote that went against a proposal that would have strengthened plant safeguards.

The good news on December 15 was the commission as a whole approved the highest-priority safety recommendations made by the agency’s Near-Term Task Force, which was created in response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. Those safety enhancements included reviewing earthquake and flooding threats, upgrading emergency equipment, and requiring plant owners to strengthen backup power capacity to cool reactor cores and spent fuel pools in the event of a loss of offsite electrical power. It was the loss of offsite power — a “station blackout” — triggered by the one-two punch of an earthquake and a tsunami that led to reactor meltdowns at Fukushima.

The bad news that day was the four commissioners — over Jaczko’s objection — declined to consider all of those safety upgrades collectively as necessary to ensure “adequate protection” of public health and safety. Instead, they voted to reserve the right to consider each proposed new safeguard separately under the agency’s rules on “backfitting,” the term for when a nuclear plant is modified or its operating procedures are changed…..

A case-by-case approach under the backfitting rule could doom some of the Near-Term Task Force recommendations. As my colleague Edwin Lyman pointed out in a December 22 blog, “NRC’s Post-Fukushima Response: Going in Circles?,” the fact that the NRC has not modified its cost-benefit analysis guidelines to reflect the lessons of Fukushima means “there is little chance any regulatory action based on a post-Fukushima understanding of risk would pass the test.”

Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, provided an illustration that shows why the December 15 vote was so wrongheaded:…… Each of the proposed safeguards now “will take months to years of NRC staff time to develop [and] will be subject to the whims of the current or future commissioners,” Lyman concluded. “… The bottom line is the [December 15 vote] could potentially undermine the NRC’s ability to promptly address critical safety vulnerabilities at U.S. plants that could well result in a Fukushima-scale disaster occurring here.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elliott-negin/a-philosophical-split-at-_b_1201916.html