Nuclear Safety Regulation in the US: 20 Years of NRC Inaction

David Lochbaum

David Lochbaum is an eminent physicist and Director of the Nuclear Safety Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Article courtesy: All Things Nuclear

Two decades, 20 years, 240 months, 1,040 weeks, 7,305 days, or 175,320 hours – plenty of time for an agency professing concern about nuclear safety to resolve one nuclear safety problem.

Yet that safety problem reported to the NRC twenty years ago remains unresolved today.

Is it because there wasn’t sufficient time to do so?

Or was it because there wasn’t sufficient will?

The smart money is on the latter reason.

On November 27, 1992, a colleague and I mailed packages containing a report titled “Susquehanna Steam Electric Station – 10CFR21 Report of Substantial Safety Hazard” to three addressees within the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC): 1) the Regional Administrator for NRC Region I where the Susquehanna nuclear plant was located, 2) the NRC resident inspector assigned to Susquehanna, and 3) the NRC’s Public Document Room (PDR).

Part 21 to Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations (10CFR21) legally requires that “any individual director or responsible officer of a firm constructing, owning, operating, or supplying the components of any facility or activity which is licensed or otherwise regulated” by the NRC to notify the agency of a substantial safety hazard. We dutifully reported our finding that the design of the spent fuel pool located inside the reactor building at Susquehanna – and very likely all other boiling water reactors with Mark I and II containments in the U.S. – could cause the failures of the emergency systems used to cool the reactor core and limit the release of radioactivity to the environment during an accident.

The package we sent the NRC contained a six-page letter summarizing the substantial safety hazard and 35 attachments – all the documents between the plant’s owner and us about the matter. All told, the package consisted of over 400 pages. We also mailed copies of the transmittal letter to the Director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, the NRC’s Chairman, and all of the other NRC Commissioners.

The NRC received our report and almost immediately began handling it, or rather, mishandling it. Here are just some of the things the NRC did with our report: