nuclear-news

Issa’s relentless focus on trivialities now threatens to bite him where it hurts. Safety issues are at the heart of the unfolding fiasco at Southern California Edison‘s San Onofre nuclear plant, which is in Issa’s district. San Onofre was completely shut down starting in February, after engineers discovered unexpectedly extensive wear in brand new generators installed at a cost of nearly $700 million.

By then, at least one leak had released a small amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere. It’s a good bet that the plant will stay offline through the peak electrical demand months of summer, posing the prospect of blackouts and higher costs for customers across Southern California.

The entire affair points to the possibility that the NRC allowed Edison to make design changes in the equipment without adequate regulatory input, which is the level of performance NRC critics have warned about for years, and which got short shrift from Issa…….    many independent NRC watchdogs think San Onofre raises more important questions about the NRC than those on which Issa did sound off….

It’s important to be mindful that all five NRC members are pro-nuclear to varying degrees. All are scientists or engineers…..

NRC watchers say their votes more typically reflect their attitudes toward regulating the nuclear power industry. Jaczko often finds himself on the losing side in 4-1 votes, with the majority favoring less stringent safety and security initiatives. “Greg’s not anti-nuclear,” says Christopher Paine, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, “but he’s pro-nuclear in a smart and considered way. He’s the first NRC chairman who’s been serious about nuclear safety in quite some time.”

The most important issue driving a wedge between Jaczko and the four other commissioners has been how to shore up nuclear safety in the wake of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed Japan’s coastal Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Extensive radioactive contamination was released into the environment while crews struggled in vain to contain the disaster. Jaczko convened a high-level task force to propose safety upgrades at U.S. plants in light of Fukushima — not least at California’s San Onofre and Diablo Canyon plants, which similarly are situated in coastal earthquake zones with limited options for large-scale emergency evacuations.

After the task force issued its report in July, Jaczko moved to make its 12 recommendations public and implement them promptly.

These included strengthening containment buildings and spent fuel storage, which proved to be weak spots at Fukushima, and safeguarding against total plant blackouts, which led to much of the damage at the Japanese plant. But the other commissioners thwarted this effort, moving instead to tie up the report and its recommendations in bureaucratic procedure — a “regulatory meltdown,” as Rep. Markey described it in a report in December.

“Jaczko wanted to use Fukushima as a galvanizing event to reform the NRC,” says the NRDC’s Paine. He’s been unsuccessful. As recently as Feb. 9, Jaczko’s attempt to write mandates for post-Fukushima safety upgrades into a new license for a nuclear plant in Georgia was voted down, 4 to 1, provoking him to complain that the commission was acting “as if Fukushima had never happened.”

Agency critics say its coziness with the utility industry may also be implicated at San Onofre, that full-featured facility on Interstate 5 a few miles south of San Clemente…….

the agency seems to have dropped the ball. “A major regulatory function was unacceptably cast aside,” says Damon Moglen, climate and energy director at Friends of the Earth, which has produced useful analyses of the redesign.

That happened under the supposedly more collegial pre-Jaczko regime. “The most Greg is guilty of is raising his voice and getting passionate,” says NRDC’s Paine. “Apparently you can’t get passionate about issues on the NRC, you have to be ‘reasoned.’ Everybody’s been reasoned and calm over there, but they’ve basically been doing industry’s bidding. So they tried to get rid of Jaczko.” http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120429,0,1556565.column