NRC and public trust

Chronic problems at nuclear plants in his region of the country prompted Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden to ask the General Accounting Office to investigate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. His report, due in draft form next week and made final by mid-May, should speed changes at that agency, which is just now beginning to recognize its own deficiencies.

The GAO investigation has used three troubled nuclear facilities, including the Millstone plants in Connecticut, to test how the NRC defines safety, how it evaluates its performance indicators and how effectively the NRC determines whether a plant is safe. These are crucial questions for the nuclear-power industry and should lead to important reforms.

When he initiated the GAO investigation, Sen. Biden said, “I am deeply disturbed by continued reports of requlatory complacency on the part of the NRC, and am troubled by what appears to be a decidedly pro-industry tilt to this most troubled government agency. For too long, the American public has been forced to accept a regulatory agency that fails to administer the the highest standards of safety.”

His words have been reinforced in the last year by government watchdog groups and engineers within the nuclear-power industry who have complained about the lack of response from the government agency charged with overseeing the nation’s 110 nuclear power plants. They describe a disturbing pattern in a field where mistakes could be lethal.

Maine’s problem, too

The GAO investigation should be of particular interest to Maine, which is undergoing its own doubts about the safety of Maine Yankee. The Maine plant has undergone two years of turmoil and is not through yet. Just recently, it was reported that nearly 20 years ago substantial questions about Yankee’s safety were sent to the NRC by nuclear and electrical engineer Peter Atherton, who was a member of a team assigned to the plant as part of a nationwide fire-safety inspection program.

Atherton found numerous safety problems at Maine Yankee and tried to present them to the NRC, but said he was ignored, harassed and, eventually, institutionalized by the NRC when he tried to alert President Jimmy Carter to his concerns. Maine Yankee officials currently are reviewing Atherton’s notes from that time, which concerned the improper spacing of cables running throughout the facility, among other things.

Whatever Maine Yankee officials eventually conclude about specifics in the Atherton case, the Maine public should be concerned that Yankee and NRC officials knew in the late 1970s that crossed or improperly separated cables posed a safety problem, that the NRC allowed a retrofit of Yankee in the early 1980s that may has exacerbated this problem and did nothing about it until this year. Even if the NRC considered an independent power source for these cables adequate in the early 1980s, as Yankee argues, the retrofit contains safety problems that have been ignored for years.

The public has trusted both the operators of Maine Yankee and its watchdog, the NRC, to make sure these problems do not occur or are repaired swiftly. But there is evidence that the NRC was too often a partner and less a watchdog to the industry. A former NRC official Friday pleaded guilty to a federal charge of illegally disclosing confidential information to Yankee. The official admitted sending the plant the results of an NRC investigation into Maine Yankee’s potential failure to comply with the commission’s orders regarding the plant’s emergency core cooling system.

Who should the public trust now? Shirley Ann Jackson, chairwoman of the NRC, has been trying to clean up her agency and provided straitforward answers when she visited Maine last summer as part of the NRC’s inspection of Yankee. But Sen. Biden is right: an outside examination of the NRC is crucial.

Depending on the final version of the GAO report, congressional hearings are possible as well as further regulations to tighten day-to-day oversight of the nuclear power plants. Sen. Biden also has advocated for an independent safety oversight board to ensure that the NRC becomes more active and less reactive to nuclear-plant problems. Given the NRC’s recent and long-term problems, such a commission seems essential.