The tragic events in Japan have understandably shined a brighter spotlight on the safety of nuclear power in the United States and on the role and actions of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. As public servants, we pride ourselves on our transparency and openness and welcome the constructive dialogue about ensuring the facilities we license are operated safely and securely.
For more than six years I have served as a Commissioner and now Chairman of this independent federal government agency and I have personally seen the tremendous job the NRC staff does. Our employees are dedicated public servants who come to work every day to do one thing -- ensure that nuclear power plants and nuclear materials are safe and secure. Most of our 4,000 career employees make this a lifetime endeavor.
In the last several weeks, however, a skewed picture of the NRC has been painted in some stories -- one of missed opportunities and delayed enforcement suggesting an ineffectual regulator. Nothing could be further from the reality. Here are examples that demonstrate why I strongly disagree with the tenor of these recent accounts.
First, about 18 months ago the NRC staff acted to resolve a significant design concern they identified with the Westinghouse AP1000 reactor design, proposed for construction in Georgia. This is a multi-billion dollar project, but the NRC's effort and focus has been on determining if the design meets our stringent safety requirements and at one point our staff experts determined that it did not. Consistent with our focus on safety the NRC experts told the plant designer that changes were needed or the staff would not approve the design. It was as simple as that. Because of forceful NRC action, the vendor made significant improvements. This took place in full view of the public, including a dissenting opinion by one of our staff members. Despite this transparency, there was little public recognition that this highlighted the NRC's commitment to safety.
Second, also little noticed was our work on the reactor vessel head, the lid of the metal structure that holds the nuclear fuel, of a plant in Ohio known as Davis Besse. Last year, the licensee identified problems with the interim replacement head. The NRC immediately studied the safety significance of this defective component and made certain the plant owner did the right thing. Far from being a passive regulator, the agency demanded the plant owner accelerate replacement of the component years before the owner wanted to do so. Although this decision requires considerable cost on the part of plant owner, that had no bearing for the NRC safety experts. They simply put safety above all else, just as they had done in the case of the AP1000 reactor design. This is another example of the agency doing the right thing -- something routine for the NRC staff. But unfortunately this attracted limited media attention.
Third, during our Japan nuclear incident response, I approved a bold safety recommendation by our most senior, expert staffers. As we were monitoring the fluid situation in Japan, NRC staff became concerned that the situation could worsen and impact Americans living there. Using all of their training, the best available data, and centuries of combined nuclear safety experience, the staff recommended to me that we needed to advise American citizens to stay fifty miles away from the troubled nuclear site, recommendations that differed from the advice of the Japanese government. The staff did not focus on what might be popular with the nuclear industry but instead recommended action in the best interest of safety.
These three examples are just a few of the many ways the NRC staff works day-in and day-out to make sure nuclear power plants and nuclear materials will not cause harm to the public. I could fill the entire newspaper with just a fraction of the proactive safety measures taken by the staff in the last year. Yet as with most of our safety actions, these examples received little public attention.
Of course, we are not perfect. There are things we can do better. Among them is the need to better enforce our regulations designed to protect against the risk of fires at nuclear power plants, something the Commission continues to publicly debate. We are always striving to learn lessons and we will look to the tragedy in Japan to improve our programs, even though this event involved no U.S. nuclear facilities. In fact, just 12 days into the Japan incident the Commission created a task force to look at improvements to our regulations and oversight programs. That task force has already participated in one public meeting and is working systematically and methodically to make recommendations by July.
Ensuring nuclear safety is always challenging. We cannot guarantee the prevention of every possible accident and we seem to only make news when there are issues. But that is precisely our job -- to find problems and ensure they are resolved. The knowledge that the dedicated women and men of the NRC are there to advise me and my colleagues on the Commission leaves me confident in our ability to continue to successfully protect the health and safety of the American people.
Gregory Jaczko has been Chairman of the NRC since 2009 and a Commissioner since 2005
The Center for Public Integrity: U.S. Regulators Opening Up on Flawed Nuclear Power Plant Policing
On the issue of Tritium.
According to the following links tritium is a low beta emitter that is only potentially dangerous if breathed or swallowed. The state of CA allows a limit of 20,000 picocuries / liter which is estimated to give a annual dose of 1 mrem / year if a constant ingestion takes place over the whole year due to the biological half life of 10 days. (you drink all a power plant produces). This is a fraction of the background radiation in many places. At the same time there are NO studies that show a link between the ingestion of tritium and cancer. If I am wrong please link to those double blind studies of human subjects, or cohort tracing studies of human subjects. Thus, the comparison between warnings for potential cancer from gasoline and the cancer potential of tritium are roughly equivalent, since according to the Ill department of transportation the effects of exposure to gasoline over long periods are not well known.
However, the short term effects of gasoline are well known and a classmate of mine experienced massive scaring over his chest and neck after spilling gasoline while cutting grass and catching fire.
Links
http://www.idph.state.il.us/envhealth/factsheets/gasoline.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potassium-40
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_mass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becquerel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium
Nuclear power captivated me for three years because I lived in and around grinding poverty for the last twelve. I was constantly looking for ways to improve the lives of the people I slept and ate with. I researched every type of energy generation possible, from Micro Hydro, to Geo-Thermal, wave, solar, wind, and bio fuels. In every case the capital costs and the cost of maintenance were greater than the value of the electricity they produced.
Designs, like pebble bed reactors, Hyperion's uranium nitride, or Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors, and small light water reactors caught my interest because they are passively safe and small enough to place on a small island grid. The potential in breeder reactors amazed me. I found that Nuclear power is safe, abundant, and destroys Nuclear weapons. By reading both sides, I found that the health issues around radiation were vastly over blown, and in terms of actual dangers we face in the ordinary world, Nuclear power is way down on the list.
For the sake of my many poor friends I would love to see Nuclear power production increase and replace fossil fuels. Only Nuclear power has the potential to truly power the world for tens of thousands of years. The fears are overblown. How many times have you been food poisoned? I cannot count the times. Electricity providing refrigeration is a marvelous gift. Your assumption that I am a paid voice of the Nuclear Industry is wrong.
Look at the corroded head of the Davis Besse nuke in Ohio. How did you miss this for so long in the NRC inspections of the plant? Why hasn't the operator been fined to hell and back? Is industry coziness the primary mandate of the NRC?
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2011/5/24/environmental-coalition-defends-intervention-against-davis-b.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/07/connecticut-gas-explosion_n_452682.html
Care to comment on the possibility of the flawed ventilation system at the Fukushima GE Mark 1 reactors that may have been installed at U.S. GE Mark 1 reactors?
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2011/5/19/beyond-nuclear-and-co-petitioners-demand-nrc-come-clean-on-f.html
I am interested in how quickly your agency will review the applications for new smaller modular reactors that promise an even greater degree of safety. Your requirement that a SMR bring an customer to the table before even being considered is a catch 22. A customer cannot purchase a reactor before your approval and a company cannot get your approval without a customer....
Please change this rule.
This is a good think since you want hundreds of little radioactive terrorist targets spread around the U.S.
I am after all a total fool and idiot to think that terrorist would not be drooling to get their hands on uranium enriched to 5% and burned in a Nuclear reactor ..... Yep can't beat that bomb, way better to smash dry fuel casks than to fly airplanes into buildings, or to poison water supplies, or to blow up LNG terminals. Nope let's go for the easy nuclear stuff....
Stating that we cannot guarantee the prevention of every accident is unacceptable in an industry that requires absolute perfection. It is obvious that the NRC is relying on a technocratic acceptable risk model where risk can always be managed away through inspections, engineering and industry self-policing. This might be an acceptable NRC policy if it could be relied upon on all fronts. Unfortunately, it cannot as evidenced by the NRC's cozy relationship with industry due to the lack of strong enforcement through heavy fines and failure by the NRC to engage in thorough inspections that would have, for example, identified the corroded reactor head at Davis Besse long before it had become a safety issue for the residents of Toledo and Cleveland and Lake Erie.
These are just a couple of examples of how the NRC has fallen down on the job of inspections and enforcement. The entire Great Lakes region and the worlds largest body of fresh water is in jeopardy by the NRC's ongoing failure to get tough on the nuclear power industry by paying lip service to safety violations with slaps on the wrists of public safety violators. In fact, the NRC's band-aide approach to safety ensures that it is not a question of if, but rather when the next catastrophic commercial nuclear power accident will occur in America.
Continued
Another issue of public health concern of NRC inspection and enforcement relates to the underground piping that has led to multiple tritium releases at several reactors that has contaminated ground water. As a safety enforcement agency, why haven't the utilities been forced to install new above ground piping to eliminate the problem? Why haven't strong fines been levied against these utilities for ground water contamination? The lack of enforcement is just another indication of the agency's cozy relationship with industry that was to have ended when the AEC was dissolved. Lapsing back into industry coziness does not inspire confidence in the NRC's mandated role of regulator.
The AP-1000 reactor is the latest NRC experiment with public safety. You can pat yourself on the back for requiring design changes to the planned Georgia facility, but this will be the first U.S. operational AP-1000 reactor. It is should be labeled as a full scale experimental reactor with zero operating experience - a test of a new design with public exposure to the experiment.
So, for example, is the Tritium released by the US reactors more dangerous than getting gasoline on your hands while pumping gas at a local gas station? Is it more dangerous than laying on the beach for about 3 hours? How about more dangerous than moving to Colorado?
I am not a member of the Nuclear Industry, but have worked in the non-profit arena for more than 12 years. I have come to understand that there are those who want to eliminate the only source of electricity that can actually replace Coal, and Natural gas. I have also come to understand, after reading many sources that radiation is not as dangerous as it has been played up to be. Most people don't understand this because that fact is constantly downplayed, ignored and lied about. But a careful reading of the actual effects of radiation at various levels and a comparison to the medical uses of radiation lead to the conclusion that the "safety" levels for Nuclear Power Plants is nearly 1000 times greater (lower) than it really needs to be.
So, we get to run around screaming about "safety" and making false accusations about the NRC to block any real production of electricity that we really need.
I have talked to several senior staff members who have each been with the NRC for more than 2 decades. According to my sources, the Chairman acted either unilaterally or with "advice" from a very select group of appointees - not professional members of the permanent staff. The Chairman has a very short resume - before his six years as an appointed commissioner, it consisted of three jobs on congressional staffs during the period from 1999-2005. That's it. He is now acting like a monarch.
Rod Adams
http://www.japanprobe.com/2011/05/10/fukushima-radiation-map/ You can use this one if you know how to read maps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPcqedrhfgE Or this one if your verbal visual acuity is more perceptive.
The Fast Developing nations aren't slowing down on nuclear power development.
South Africa just announce it is staying on track!
The fuel pools at Fukushima were unaffected by the event. Did you happen to catch when the robot stuck a camerca in the Unit 4 pool and found 30 feet of water above the fuel and everything exactly where it was supposed to be?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110526/wl_africa_afp/safricaenergynuclear;_ylt=AsTQb5dJ96QIAj3qQYsipAS96Q8F;_ylu=X3oDMTJzZGw0bHAyBGFzc2V0A2FmcC8yMDExMDUyNi
Check out South Africa!
All in the name of reducing Climate Change,
http://www.thegwpf.org/international-news/2846-german-social-democrats-call-for-eight-to-ten-coal-power-plants-.html
A step in the wrong direction.
No, the future of energy is rooftop solar, offshore wind and waste bio char bio fuels. That combination supplies 24/7, clean, safe, cheaper, forever energy.
For decades critics have been asking the NRC to require that the spent fuel be moved to permanent dry-cask storage.
3/26/11 GE Mark I
American reactors of the same design and vintage as the ones damaged in Japan touted as safer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/27reactor.html
And it did work:
4/28/11 GE Mark I
Alabama nuclear plant shuts safely after tornadoes - on diesel power
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110428/us_nm/us_utilities_operations_tva_browns
But what about a double or triple whammy? Mr. Jaczko should be begging for dry-cask storage, not just telling us we are sooo OK.
My conclusion: The NRC will make reassuring statements until half the US glows green.
The best we can hope for is to tame the atom for peaceful purposes, because it is not going away.
Because, wind is a diffuse and intermittent source of energy. The power produced by a windmill is proportional to the cube of the wind speed. Most of the electricity generated by windmills is less than 1/3 of its operating time. There's also no control over when that power is produced. What does this all mean; it means that unless your utility has access to a large hydro source, integration of wind power must accompanied by quick responding thermal sources such as natural gas. Windmills may have limited harmful effects, but the extraction, transport, and combustion of natural gas doesn't.
http://www.energyindustryphotos.com/natural gas pipeline fire.jpg
It's worse than DDT when it comes to raptors.
See Green Light at www.aesopinstitute.org for an overview of the problem. The NRC is apparently doing nothing to safeguard the nation in the event of any long term outage at a nuclear plant.
A breakthrough indicates that nuclear waste can by converted into power on-site with new technology that will adapt large diesel engines to be powered by the waste. This and other revolutionary technology can replace any need to move the waste offsite - let alone to Yucca Mountain. Moving the waste elsewhere is another dangerous nightmare!