ML20196J332
| ML20196J332 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Issue date: | 06/18/1999 |
| From: | Shirley Ann Jackson, The Chairman NRC COMMISSION (OCM) |
| To: | Thompson F SENATE, GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS |
| Shared Package | |
| ML20196J338 | List: |
| References | |
| NUDOCS 9907070240 | |
| Download: ML20196J332 (5) | |
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NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION WASHINGTON, D.C. 20555-4001 n c
%...../ June 18, 1995 CHAIRMAN ,
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The Honorable Fred Thompson, Chairman Committee on Governmental Affairs United States Senate l Washington, D.C. 20510 .
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Dear Mr. Chairman:
In accordance with the statutory obligation to respond to recommendations by the General Accounting Office (GAO) within 60 days of receipt, I hereby submit our response to the recommendation made by the GAO in its report entitled " Nuclear Regulation - Strategy Needed to Regulate Safety Using Information on Risk"(GAO/RCED-99-95). The GAO recommendation )
and our response are presented in the enclosure.
My March 5,1999, letter to Ms. Gary Jones (included as Appendix i to the GAO report) l provided our perspectives on the draft version of the GAO report. I continue to agree with these perspectives and to believe that the report does not sufficiently acknowledge our initiatives and progress. Nonetheless, I recognize the need to continually work to better define and communicate our strategios, their associated implementation activities and schedules, as well as our expectations on the needed quality of risk assessment methods. As such, the staff 1 is developing, for Commission approval, a document describing the agency's strategy for risk- I informed regulation that will specify the scope and approach for implementation. It will describe the activities we want to be risk-informed, the actions needed to make them risk-informed, and i the schedule and resources needed to accomplish the activities. Our mechanism to catalog I and track progress of risk-informed activities (the PRA implementation Plan) will be restructured to more clearly link our risk-informed activities to our strategy. {
l should also provide one clarification to the discussion in the GAO report on the work of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Page 4 of the GAO report). In the GAO report,it stated that "the study's steering committee believed that the Center should focus instead on how safe NRC expects commercial nuclear power plants to be and how consistently NRC applies that expectation to the plants." The Center's work has been somewhat different, in that it has been focused on whether the NRC has a clearly defined safety philosophy that is consistently applied. I should also note that the Center's report was not completed in time to be published in April, as indicated in the GAO report. it appears now that the report will be l published in July 1999.
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I believe that, once established, our strategy document on risk-informed regulation and the restructured PRA Implementation Plan will improve the clarity of our risk-informed initiatives and accomplish the intent of the GAO recomme,qdation.
Sincerely, Shirley Ann Jackson
Enclosure:
Response to GAO recommendation cc: Senator Joseph I. Lieberman l
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! GAO Recommendation and NRC Response GAO Recommendation ,
in its report entitled " Nuclear Regulation - Strategy Needed to Regulate Safety Using Information on Risk"(GAO/RCED-99-95, dated March 1999), the GAO made the following recommendation:
To help ensure the safe operation of plants and the continued protection of public health and safety in a competitive environment, we recommend that the Commissioners of NRC direct the staff to develop a comprehensive strategy that includes but is not limited to objectives, goals, activities, and time frames for the transition to risk-informed regulation; specifies how the Commission expe. cts to define the scope and implementation of risk informed regulation; and identifies the manner in which it expects to continue the free exchange of operational information necessary to improve the quality and reliability of risk acsessments.
The GAO recommendation has three parts, each of which is addressed below.
GAO ... We recommend that the Commissioners of NRC direct the staff to develop a comprehensive strategy that includes but is not limited to objectives, goals, activities, and time frames for the transition to risk-informed regulation ....
N3Q We agree on the need for a comprehensive strategy and believe that we have already made considerable progress towards satisfying this need. Chairman Jackson's March 5,1999, letter to Ms. Gary Jones of the GAO (included as Appendix l to the GAO report) discusses a number of the initiatives completed or now under way within NRC to address the GAO recommendation. At a strategic level, we have developed strategic plans, policy statements, and a new planning, budgeting, and performance management process to help direct agency resources to the most important safety issues. These ;
plans have led to risk-informed regulatory guidance in a number of areas now being used by reactor licensees and our staff and to a new, risk-informed, reactor oversight l process to be tested this year and fully implemented in 2000. These plans have also led to developing approaches for making reactor regulations more risk-informed as well as a conceptual framework for making our regulation of materials licensees more risk-informed.
The mechanism used to catalog and track the progress of the activities in our risk-informed program has traditionally been the PRA implementation Plan (PRA IP), with the staff's August 1998 response to Chairman Jackson's tasking memorandum supplementing the PRA IP in the recent past. These documents are formattea in different ways and do not necessarily provide a clear link between strategic Goals and specific tasks and cchedules. They also focus on what is currently under way or planned, and not necessarily on a broader long-term vision for risk-informing agency activities. Accordingly, we are in the process of reexamining the mechanism for i describing agency plans and the implementation of these plans with respect to specific
! risk-informed activities. The staff plans to propose, for Commission approval, a i document describing our strategy for risk-informed regulation that will specify the scope and approach for implementation. It will describe the activities that we want to be risk-f s
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Informed, the actions needed to make them risk-informed, and the schedule and resources needed to accomplish the activities. The PRA IP structure and content will be restructured to clearly link our risk informed activities to our strategy.
DAQ ... We recommend that the Commissioners of NRC direct the staff to develop a comprehensive strategy that ... specifies how the Commission expects to define the scope and implementation of risk-informed regulation ....
N_BQ We agree with the implementation of this recommendation to be accomplished via the strategy document and restructured PRA Implementation Plan described above.
26Q ... We recommend that the Commissioners of NRC direct the staff to develop a comprehensive strategy that ... Identifies the manner in which it expects to continue the free exchange of operationalinformation necessary to improve the quality and reliability of risk assessments.
NRC We agree with the GAO recommendation. The free exchange of operational information noted in the recommendation is an important factor in our activities to improve the quality and reliability of risk assessments. As noted in Chairman Jackson's letter of March 5,1999, we are active in improving the technical validity of PRA )
methods, including developing standards and improved methods and tools and assessing operational events. The need to better specify how operational information will be freely exchanged will be included as an activity in our risk informed program.
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IDENTICAL LETTERS SENT TO:
r The Honorable Fred Thompson, Chairman Committee on Governmental Affairs United States Senate
- Washington, D.C. 20510 The Honorable James M. Inhofe, Chairmari
, Subcommittee on Clean Air, Wetlands, Private Property and Nuclear Safety l Committee on Environment and Public Works l United States Senate l Washington, D.C. 20510 i cc: Senator Bob Graham l
l The Honorable Joe Barton, Chairman Subcommittee on Energy and Power Committee on Commerce l l
United States House of Representatives Washington, D.C. 20515 ' l cc: Representative Ralph M. Hall The Honorable Jacob J. Lew Director Office of Management and Budget '
Washington, D.C. 20503 The Honorable David M. Walker Comptroller General of the United States General Accounting Office Washington, D.C. 20548 The Honorable Dan Burton, Chairman Committee on Government Reform United States House of Representatives Washington, D.C. 20515 cc: Representative Henry Waxman .
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