Top nuclear industry officials maintain the public has nothing to fret about - that the NRC is a tough regulator that asks tough questions.
Editor's note: This series is a collaboration between the Hearst Connecticut Media Group and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (www.necir-bu.org), a nonprofit investigative newsroom based at Boston University.
By SHAY TOTTEN | New England Center for Investigative Reporting
Internal government watchdogs and outside experts alike say the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is too lenient on the industry it is charged with regulating, often making decisions based on the industry’s profit margins rather than safety.
The charges are similar to complaints leveled against the Mine Health Safety Administration and the Minerals Management Service over the past year, after high-profile tragedies - the Upper Big Branch Mine collapse and the Deepwater Horizon spill - in the industries they are responsible for regulating.
In the wake of the events in Japan, there is a heightened sense of concern throughout the United States that a similar meltdown could occur, particularly in New England where reactors similar to those in Japan remain in operation.
Top nuclear industry officials maintain the public has nothing to fret about - that the NRC is a tough regulator that asks tough questions. NRC critics counter that the agency might ask tough questions, but is all too willing to accept easy answers.
Concerns about the NRC’s oversight are nothing new. A clear illustration is a series of reports issued since 2002 by the NRC’s internal inspector general and the U.S. General Accountability Office related to a near-catastrophe at Davis-Besse, a nuclear reactor on the shores of Lake Erie.
This photo provided by FirstEnergy shows the hole found in the Davis-Besse reactor's 6.5-inch-thick carbon steel reactor lid.From those reports:
• In 2002 the GAO found the NRC weighed the financial impacts of its safety-related decisions on the industry’s bottom line - stalling a forced reactor shutdown at Davis-Besse because the NRC fretted about the impact on the plant owner’s finances and the “black eye” an emergency shutdown might give the industry.
• In 2004 the GAO found that little had changed within the NRC’s safety and inspection culture since Davis-Besse. An internal NRC task force failed to look at more agency-wide issues uncovered during their post-mortem review, the GAO found.
• In 2009, the inspector general found that key NRC staff couldn’t name the four core areas of improvement the NRC had identified to better protect the public’s health and safety after Davis-Besse incident. In fact, the inspector general discovered many NRC staff didn’t know the “lessons learned” project existed.
A report issued last month by the nuclear watchdog group, the Union of Concerned Scientists, found 14 “near misses” at U.S. nuclear reactors in 2010, with the NRC’s response to some critical errors less than reassuring.
“If you still believe that the NRC is a nuclear watchdog, you are probably still sending your money to Bernie Madoff,” said Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear-industry executive turned whistleblower.
Key safety rule weakened
As detailed earlier in this series, an investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and Hearst Connecticut Media Group found the NRC has routinely allowed operators to pack spent fuel rods into cooling pools far beyond the pools’ original licensed capacity and design basis, rather than forcing the plant owners to move the fuel into safer but more costly dry casks.
But the investigation also has found that the NRC has weakened a key, decades-old safety standard, potentially saving owners tens of millions of dollars by removing a key requirement that could avert a nuclear tragedy.
The failing reactors at Fukushima Diiachi in Japan are of the General Electric Mark 1 design. There are 23 such reactors in operation in the U.S, including Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vt., and Pilgrim in Plymouth, Mass.
NRC Chairman Gregory Jazcko told a panel of U.S. senators recently during a congressional hearing that the NRC had required upgrades of the Mark 1 model in the U.S. that would prevent some of the failures seen in Japan.
Still, additional concerns with the Mark 1, as well as Mark 2 and Mark 3 boiling water reactors, have arisen thanks to the recent change in safety rules.
In 2005, both Gundersen and David Lochbaum, a former nuclear operator and now a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, questioned the NRC’s decision to allow some nuclear power operators the ability to use their containment vessel as a way to help cool a reactor before turning to emergency cooling water pumps.
If the containment vessel is allowed to absorb heat from reactor and spent fuel pool water, the overall pressure could add stress to the concrete containment shell, increasing the risk of a failure, Lochbaum and Gundersen contend.
While the analogy isn’t perfect, said Lochbaum, think of a plastic bottle half filled with soda. If you stick a straw down into the soda, you can drink the soda. But, if you put your thumb over the top and shake it up vigorously, the bottle is filled with foam. If you stick a straw into the foam region, you don’t get soda.
That, in a nutshell is what happens inside a boiling water reactor (BWR). Trying to use emergency pumps without containment pressure is like drinking foam from a soda bottle with a straw, added Gundersen.
“In the old days, we had protection, and nowadays, we’re relying on one thing, the containment remaining intact. If that’s gone, we lose our ability to cool the reactor cores, and we also open up a pathway for radiation to be released to the environment,” said Lochbaum.
NRC staff and industry officials disagree. In multiple filings, including an allowance at Vermont Yankee, the NRC claims BWR containment vessels can absorb additional heat for short periods of time without causing a drop in the reactor pressure levels necessary to push water through emergency pumps.
The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, Vt., from across the Connecticut River in Hinsdale, N.H. Although it uses the same General Electric Mark I reactor as the at Fukushima Daiichi reactor in Japan that was damaged as a result of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the Vernon plant has undergone a number of safety upgrades since it went into service.“These credits were granted to some licensees on their original licenses, so this issue is not new,” said Tony Pietrangelo, senior vice president and chief nuclear operator, of the Nuclear Energy Institute. The NEI is the industry’s chief lobbying and trade association. “I know there is some disagreement, but the NRC has reviewed this issue extensively.”
It’s not just external critics who disagree with the NRC’s position. The NRC’s own internal Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards has objected to the policy and believes the new stance is a “serious compromise” of reactor safeguards.
Lochbaum contends the NRC is unnecessarily putting industry profits ahead of public safety.
“The NRC sold out the American public in order to boost profits of companies,” said Lochbaum. “It’s put millions of Americans at undue and elevated risk, and it was done simply for business purposes instead of safety. There’s no excuse for doing that.”
Lessons learned - or ignored?
NRC’s blurring of lines between public safety and company profits isn’t a concern only raised by outside agitators.
The closest the U.S. has come to full-scale core reactor meltdown was in February 2002 when workers at the Davis-Besse reactor in Ohio found a pineapple-sized cavity in the reactor’s vessel head - a cavity caused by leaking boric acid used, in part, to help cool the reactor.
Davis-Besse’s owner, FirstEnergy Corp., had sought, and received, permission from the NRC to remain open 45 days beyond a required end-of-year inspection date.
This photo provided by FirstEnergy shows an aerial view of the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Carroll Township, Ohio. The plant's reactor was close to failure when corrosion was discovered.The NRC allowed FirstEnergy to remain in operation beyond the end of 2001 to conduct a more thorough inspection of boric acid-related damage during a scheduled February 2002 refueling.
In 2002 the OIG found the NRC backed away from forcing FirstEnergy to shut down Davis-Besse prior to the refueling because the NRC fretted about the impact on FirstEnergy’s finances and the “black eye” it might have on the industry as a whole.
It took two years, and millions of dollars in improvements, before Davis-Besse restarted in 2004.
The same year, a separate GAO report found that an internal NRC task force missed an opportunity to learn lessons from the Davis-Besse incident.
“Because the Davis-Besse task force did not address NRC’s unwillingness to directly assess licensee safety culture, we are concerned that NRC’s oversight will continue to be reactive rather than proactive. NRC’s oversight can result in NRC making a determination that a licensee’s performance is good one day, yet the next day NRC discovers the performance to be unacceptably risky to public health and safety. Such a situation does not occur overnight,” the GAO concluded in 2004.
An NRC spokesman disagrees.
“The NRC is a learning organization and always strives to incorporate lessons learned from previous events and developments,” said spokesman Neil Sheehan. “In the case of the reactor head corrosion identified at Davis-Besse in 2002, the NRC formed a Lessons Learned Task Force that produced more than 50 recommendations, 21 of which were considered high-priority.”
A 2009 OIG report found otherwise: Key NRC staff responsible for disseminating information about the Lessons Learned Task Force couldn’t name the four core areas of improvement the NRC had identified to better protect the public’s health and safety, according to the OIG report.
NEI’s Pietrangelo said it’s not just luck that has kept the U.S. safe from a serious accident since Three Mile Island in 1979.
“They are tough regulators who are devoted to their public health and safety mission and are not afraid to bring down a plant if it is not safe to operate,” said Pietrangelo. “I say, don’t look the reports, look at the record. We’re operating now at record levels of safety for a decade and the proof is in the performance.”
Lochbaum and the Union for Concerned Scientists think the NRC can be an effective regulator - if it forces the industry to live up to existing rules and regulations and not grant exemptions.
A UCS report of safety problems issued last month found 14 “near misses” at U.S. nuclear power plants, a high number for what Lochbaum calls a “mature industry.”
“This overview shows that many of these significant events occurred because reactor owners, and often the NRC, tolerated known safety problems,” the report said.
The report highlighted both effective and ineffective responses by the NRC to safety problems, including an ineffective response at Vermont Yankee, where the agency allowed the release of radioactively contaminated air in ways that had forced shutdowns at other reactors.
“The chances of a disaster at a nuclear power plant are low and current events remind us how important it is to keep them that way,” notes the report’s executive summary. “The NRC is capable of functioning as a highly effective watchdog, but ... much work remains to be done before the agency can fulfill that role as consistently as the public has a right to expect.”