LA Weekly

As a longtime nuclear plant worker, I would say that, like all government agencies and all businesses, the NRC has its good employees and its less-than-stellar employees, its good programs and its bad programs.

I believe the executives at both the NRC and the US nuclear utilities understand that another Three Mile Island - type event will sink the industry (however much one may argue that TMI wasn't all that bad). They have every reason to want to focus on the key safety and security items. The industry represents a huge investment by the US and a huge national security issue because it provides 20% of our electric generation.

That being said, the NRC has some demons to battle with on a constant basis. One is the effect of legislative interest and media publicity on the nuclear industry as a whole. In a free society this overview is required, but many times it can resemble someone who's never looked under a car hood instructing a car mechanic how to fix an engine. The NRC has to be responsive to these comments, which can lead to a lot of activity that expends a lot of dollars and manpower for the government and the utilities (who then bill the customers) -- but ultimately much of this effort may result in little gain in safety or security.

One should not assume that the lawsuits with which the agency is being pelted are all valid, thoughtfully researched efforts to improve safety, just as one can't assume they are all baseless. I also believe the current regulatory situation, with the heavy role that politics and public relations plays in it, may also lead to more than the usual amount of political maneuvering within the agency (which could suppress "whistle-blowing"). But that's a guess.

A public and legislative branch better educated in the manner in which the US generates its vast sums of electricity - and what the realistic options for the future are - would be helpful in sorting out the above issues.

It is also interesting to note that the commissioners of the NRC have tended to be academics. lawyers and naval officers. These are very smart, motivated people perfoming an important government service - - but I don't believe any in the history of the agency have ever had any practical experience in operating a large scale nuclear reactor. Many of the senior NRC executives below the commissioners likewise have limited experience on the operational end of things (though they may have served at plants as regulators). While having a preponderance of ex-utility workers at the top of the regulatory heap wouldn't be a good idea, the current system seems to exclude most of their input entirely unless it is in an adversarial role. That may also be a poor way of focusing an organization on the things that really matter.

Another difficulty for the NRC is the lack of standardization of design among US reactors. Most problems found at nuclear plants are complex in both their nature and their effect upon safety (Davis-Besse is a clear exception) and the safety implications of the same problem may differ widely from site to site due to differences in plant design. This makes regulation of utilities a more complex and individualized matter - which really clogs up the machinery once you get to regional and national government offices. Then you also have to try to explain it to the media and public at large....

In my experience in the nuclear industry (none of it in the security realm) the fact that the NRC gets its funding from fees from the nuclear industry itself is not an issue - because the industry does not set up the fee schedule or system, it just pays out the cash when the bill comes due. If the NRC believes a site has a problem in a particular area and sends ten inspectors for two weeks to look into it, the utility will pay their salaries and expenses for that time period. The utility has no choice in the matter. Whatever impact utilities have over the NRC's fee structure would come primarily via Congress and the executive branch.

James Aach

Author of RAD DECISION - - The insider techno-thriller of nuclear power, designed to introduce the lay person to the good and bad of atomic energy. Available at no cost to readers at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com.

"I'd like to see Rad Decision widely read." - Stewart Brand, founder of 'The Whole Earth Catalog'

There are a number of other takes on the report that exist out there right now. Click here for what I wrote after talking to some people internally at NEI. Basically, the report is backward looking and rather than being a problem out of control, when you look hard enough at the data, safety and performance are improving:

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2006/09/on-ucs-report.html

A Musing Environment has another take that's equally interesting:

http://pathsoflight.us/musing/?p=181

"Nearly blew up"?! A provocative choice of words. At http://canteach.candu.org/library/20044102.pdf, p. 12, you can see a diagram of a Westinghouse PWR. (It is labelled "Figure 5-7 CROSS-SECTION OF A PWR CONTAINMENT BUILDING".

This should make it thinkable that a leak of hot water through the top of the steel bottle at bottom centre, or indeed a TMI-style half-molten slumping of the fuel inside it, is something that you, if you were designing a nuclear powerplant, might confidently expect to be handleable. It's not like, e.g., a refuelling accident at a gas station, where the hazardous stuff necessarily can't always be behind multiple massive barriers.

Sorry everybody for not posting comments to this sooner -- we've just switched over to a new server, and I didn't realize the sysadmins changed all comments not by registered users to "moderated."

GRL: Provocative, perhaps, but what would you call it, handleable or not? A near leak in a highly pressurized system is a blow-up, right?

Eric: Thank you for the reasoned counterpoint, as always. It struck me that the report was "backward-looking" as well. But I think the point I wanted to extract is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission isn't doing its job as well as we'd like it to -- and we need that job done if the nuclear industry is to move forward.

A Musing Environment's post is great. But I repeat: The point is that we need a regulatory agency that doesn't get its funding from the industry it regulates. Arguably the biggest impediment to the nuke sector's progress is the public's lack of trust in the technology. Better regulators would help.

Judith

Judith,

Not a problem with the comment delay. I run into similar problems with my own commenting system, and have had folks accuse me of trying to shut them up. So believe me, I sympathize.

As to your point about NRC, I don't see how it tracks with the data. If anything, the data shows that performance has been improving radically over the past decade or so, otherwise how is the avergage industry-wide capacity factor -- which includes all shutdowns planned and unplanned -- over 90%? If Lochbaum was right, the numbers wouldn't be anywhere near that high.

Another note: I think we need to be specific about how the NRC gets its funding. Congress appropriates the budget, and the nuclear industry reimburses NRC for 90% of their costs based on the annual fee schedule. It's just 90% because there are certain functions of NRC that are not related to commercial nuclear power.

This isn't a situation where we can refuse to pay NRC if we don't like regulatory rulings. Then again, maybe this is just another situation where the nuclear industry needs to make sure that our terms of operations are clear. After all, we still deal with folks who claim that taxpayers are responsible for paying for Yucca Mountain when the truth is every ratepayer that uses nuclear electricity pays into the Nuclear Waste Fund -- a fund that has a current balance of $27 billion. Too bad we don't have a lockbox for that.