nuclear-news

USA’s nuclear safety regulations inadequate

Chief Nuclear Regulator Admits Safety Goals Are ‘Insufficient’, Aol Energy, By Margaret Ryan, March 15, 2012  US nuclear safety goals are insufficient, and don’t address effects like those seen after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the head of the US nuclear regulator says.

US nuclear safety goals have to change because, as they now stand, the Fukushima Daiichi accident is “acceptable” because no one was injured or killed by radiation, said US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko.

The goals, which undergird the US regulatory approach, focus on ensuring public health isn’t harmed by nuclear plants, he said. But those goals don’t directly address what is happening today in Japan: radioactive contamination of land that’s preventing up to 90,000 people from returning home, a year after the four-reactor accident.

Jaczko said that shows the goals are “insufficient.”

Evacuation Intolerable

“We somehow have to incorporate what the public is willing to tolerate,” and that “clearly” does not include long-term evacuations that bar people from their land, Jaczko told NRC’s annual Regulatory Information Conference…….    The NRC has looked at the potential costs of long-term land contamination before. In the early 1980s, when NRC was deciding on what post-TMI safety backfits to require, the commissioners debated including costs, like the losses to displaced residents that Fukushima’s neighbors are now experiencing, in cost-benefit analyses. They found those costs added up so quickly, they overwhelmed everything else, so the commission decided not to use them, over the protests of nuclear critics…..  http://energy.aol.com/2012/03/15/chief-nuclear-regulator-admits-safety-goals-are-insufficient/

March 16, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA