nuclear-news

Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s poor oversight of safety enforcement

US nuclear watchdog questions oversight of safety enforcement, msnbc.com,  By M. Alex Johnson 13 Feb 12,  The federal government’s nuclear watchdog has faulted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for failing to follow through on safety agreements with nuclear facilities, saying its system for tracking corrective action raises questions about its oversight of nuclear safety and security.
After an eight-month audit, the NRC’s Office of Inspector General concluded last week that the commission has no centralized way to oversee or follow up on documents confirming that a nuclear facility has committed itself to address “significant concerns regarding health and safety, the environment, safeguards or security.” The documents — known as Confirmatory Action Letters, or CALs — are one of the last measures before the NRC cracks down with a stringent binding order like suspension or revocation of a nuclear plant’s license.

Because CALs are reserved for a small number of potentially serious cases — 15 to 20 of the hundreds of incident reports the NRC issues each year, according to its records — effective oversight of the confirmation process is of “utmost importance,” the inspector general said. But in some cases, the action letters are so poorly drafted that they don’t even make it clear who the intended recipients are, the report asserts.

Read the full inspector general’s report (.pdf)…

Bureaucracy to blame
The problem is one of red tape, not willful inaction or neglect, the report says. But the weaknesses — which include lack of consistent guidelines for regional NRC offices, regional offices’ failure to comply with those guidelines and some offices’ lack of any tracking system whatsoever — “degrade” the agency’s accountability, it says. …

About two dozen of those plants use the same containment system as the one that failed when a powerful earthquake and tsunami breached the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, msnbc.com reported last year.

(The containment system is manufactured by General Electric Co., which is a parent company ofmsnbc.com through its 49 percent stake in NBCUniversal.)

To date, the NRC has never rejected an application for a license extension… http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/13/10399062-us-nuclear-watchdog-questions-oversight-of-safety-enforcement?chromedomain=openchannel

February 14, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA