Full Title: The NRC and Nuclear Power Safety in 2014
Author(s): David Lochbaum
Publisher(s): Union of Concerned Scientists
Publication Date: March 1, 2015
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) often claims to represent the gold standard for nuclear power plant safety regulation and oversight (Macfarlane 2013; Magwood 2013). Ample evidence, including the summaries of positive outcomes achieved by the NRC in this series of annual reports, suggests much validity to these claims.
One cannot count the number of nuclear disasters averted by the NRC’s effective regulatory performance, but one can generally count on the NRC to be an effective regulator. The NRC has done much to earn the gold standard label.
Chapter 4 of this report describes how the NRC conducted two extensive reassessments of its reactor oversight process— not in response to an accident demonstrating its inadequacy or to criticism suggesting an inadequacy, but as a proactive measure aimed at enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of the existing process. Chapter 4 also describes how a decade ago the NRC recognized it had an aging work force and developed formal programs to retain as much tribal knowledge as possible before its retirees hit the golf courses and beaches in their golden years. Such proactive actions enable the NRC to retain the gold standard label.
Chapters 2 and 3 of this report describe how the number and severity of near misses at nuclear power plants have been steadily declining since 2010, again consistent with the NRC being an effective regulator. But Chapter 5 reveals the gold standard to be tarnished. For the past decade, the NRC has been improperly withholding documents, including many about safety problems. By doing so, the NRC deprived the public of legal rights for regulatory decision-making and painted a misleading picture of nuclear safety.
Chapter 5 also describes how two NRC engineers who did their duties and voiced safety concerns were subjected to repeated investigations of alleged but unsubstantiated wrongdoing, sending a very clear message throughout the agency that “silence is golden.” Finally, Chapter 5 explains how the NRC has been using nonuniform answer keys to grade standardized tests administered via its reactor oversight process, yielding numerical outcomes less predictable than fluctuating gold prices. By improperly withholding many safety problem reports and jiggling the grading of other safety problems, the improving trends may be more fabrication than fact. If the NRC truly is the gold standard of nuclear regulators, it must restore the luster by removing this tarnish and preventing it from recurring.