ML24211A051
| ML24211A051 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Issue date: | 07/31/2024 |
| From: | Jacqwan Walker, Thomas Wellock NRC/SECY |
| To: | |
| References | |
| NUREG/BR-0175, Rev 3 | |
| Download: ML24211A051 (1) | |
Text
A Short History of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-2024 by J. Samuel Walker and Thomas R. Wellock History Staff Office of the Secretary U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission July 2024
i Preface History, automobile maker Henry Ford once said, is more or lessbunk. Philosopher George Santayana was more upbeat in his assessment of this discipline when he declared that those who fail to study the past are condemned to repeat it. In a sense, both Ford and Santayana were right. Much of the past has little meaning or importance for the present and deservedly remains forgotten in the dustbins of history. However, other parts of the past need to be remembered and studied for us to make sense of the present.
Understanding the history of any given problem is essential to approaching it knowledgeably. It is the task of the historian to gather evidence, to separate what is important from what is not, and to explain key events and decisions of the past.
This history of nuclear regulation provides a brief overview of the most significant events in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commissions (NRCs) past. It is drawn from the NRCs six-volume history series published with the University of California Press.
Because of space limitations, not all important events are included, and those included are covered in abbreviated form. The first chapter of this account is taken from George T. Mazuzan and J.
Samuel Walker, Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962 (1984). The second chapter is largely based on J. Samuel Walker, Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment, 1963-1971 (1992). The third chapter is adopted in significant part from J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (2004). The text in this third revision has been supplemented throughout by material from Thomas R. Wellock, Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk (2021).
It has been 70 years since the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 launched the civilian nuclear power era, 50 years since the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 created the NRC, and over 30 years since A Short History of Nuclear Regulation was first published.
Much has changed in the last several decades; nevertheless, the full sweep of our history remains pertinent to the issues the NRC confronts today. While this third revision of A Short History adds enough new material that readers might suggest deleting short from the title, we hope it demonstrates that, far from being bunk, nuclear history offers valuable insights for the present and the future.
iii Contents Chapter One: The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962....................... 1 The Atomic Energy Act of 1954........................................................................................3 The Atomic Energy Commission and the Development of Commercial Nuclear Power.. 5 The Atomic Energy Commissions Regulatory Program...................................................8 The Power Reactor Development Company Controversy................................................9 The Price-Anderson Act...................................................................................................12 The Growth of Nuclear Power......................................................................................... 13 Radiation Protection....................................................................................................... 14 The Fallout from Fallout................................................................................................. 16 Chapter Two: The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963-1975................................................21 The Bandwagon Market...................................................................................................21 Regulatory Burdens of the Bandwagon Market.............................................................22 The Problem of Core Meltdown......................................................................................24 Thermal Pollution...........................................................................................................27 The Radiation Debate.....................................................................................................29 The National Environmental Policy Act and Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant............30 New Controversies and the End of the Atomic Energy Commission..............................32 Chapter Three: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Three Mile Island....37 The Three Mile Island Accident......................................................................................40 The NRC Response to the Accident at Three Mile Island................................................42 PRA and Safety Goals......................................................................................................43 Chernobyl........................................................................................................................45 Licensing of New Plants and Emergency Planning........................................................46 Oversight of Operating Reactors....................................................................................48 Radiation Standards....................................................................................................... 51
iv Chapter Four: New Issues, New Approaches in the 1990s......................................55 Decommissioning and License Renewal........................................................................55 Risk Assessment and Nuclear Safety.............................................................................57 The Millstone Controversy..............................................................................................58 A Near-Death Experience...............................................................................................60 Regulating Nuclear Materials.........................................................................................62 Chapter Five: Regulation in a New Century.............................................................. 65 The Impact of the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001..........................................65 Davis-Besses Hole in the Head...................................................................................69 A Nuclear Renaissance?.................................................................................................72 Fukushima......................................................................................................................74 The End of the Renaissance..........................................................................................76 And the Beginning of Another?......................................................................................77 Conclusion......................................................................................................................78
Chapter One:
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962
1
Chapter One:
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962 The use of atomic bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 ushered in a new historical epoch, breathlessly labeled in countless news reports, magazine articles, films, and radio broadcasts as the atomic age. After the end of World War II, politicians, journalists, scientists, and business leaders suggested that peaceful applications of nuclear power could be as dramatic in their benefits as nuclear weapons were awesome in their destructive power. Nuclear physicist Alvin M. Weinberg told the U.S. Senates Special Committee on Atomic Energy in December 1945, Atomic power can cure as well as kill. It can fertilize and enrich a region as well as devastate it. It can widen mans horizons as well as force him back into the cave. Others heralded a new age. Newsweek reported that even the most conservative scientists and industrialists [are] willing to outline a civilization which would make the comic-strip prophecies of Buck Rogers look obsolete. Practical applications ranged from the practical to the fantastic, and it cited a few examples: atomic-powered airplanes, rockets, and automobiles; large electrical generating stations; small home power plants to provide heat and electricity to individual homes; and tiny atomic generators wired to clothing to keep a person cool in summer and warm in winter. The development of nuclear energy for civilian purposes, as even its most enthusiastic proponents recognized, would take On August 1,1946, President Harry Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, establishing the Atomic Energy Commission, which preceded the NRC. (Pictured left to right are Senators Tom Connally, Eugene Millikin, Edwin Johnson, Thomas Hart, Brien McMahon, Warren Austin, and Richard Russell). Credit: Department of Energy.
2 many years. The governments first priority was to maintain secrecy over the military applications of nuclear technology. Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 as tensions with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) turned into a Cold War. It acknowledged, only in passing, the potential peaceful benefits of atomic power. The 1946 law created a virtual government monopoly of the technology to be managed by the five-member U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
While there seemed to be a stark divide in the way the AEC treated peaceful and military applications of nuclear energy, civilian nuclear power owed a great debt to the weapons program. The largest AEC nuclear reactors produced weap ons-grade plutonium, and these production reactors forged the safety philos ophy of the later civilian nuclear industry. Experts tried to prevent accidents at production reactors through an intellectual exercise. They imagined far-fetched catastrophes and, to prevent them, developed a conservative design approach, based on what are know as the Three Ds of reactor safety: design-basis accidents, deterministic design, and defense in depth.
First, engineers postulated maximum credible accidentstoday called design-basis accidents. To separate the credible from the incredible, they asked three questions that came to be known as the risk triplet: (1) What can go wrong? (2) How likely is it to go wrong?
(3) What are the consequences? In brief, what are the possibilities, probabilities, and consequences of the accident?
With no history of reactor accidents to inform them, however, experts could not answer question 2 except in a qualitative way, by subjectively judging that some accidents (such as a meteor striking a reactor) as incredible and not worth considering. It was a matter of judgment whether a particular scenario qualified as a design-basis accident, but once it was considered credible, it set the outer boundary of extreme accidents that safety systems had to cope with.
With design-basis accidents as their lodestar, experts turned to the second of the Three Ds. They deterministically (conservatively) designed safety systems to prevent and cope with a design-basis accident occurring in the most unfortunate way. For example, they assumed the accident occurred when heavy concentrations of radioactive isotopes had built up in the reactor and during weather conditions that would concentrate an escaping radiation cloud over a nearby population center. Even under such conditions, a deterministically designed plant would be able to limit the leakage of radioactivity to acceptable levels.
The Atomic Energy Commission seal.
3 Related to deterministic design was the third D, defense in depth. The ideal nuclear reactor had multiple lines of defense to prevent accidents or mitigate their consequences. Over time these lines of defense came to include a combination of fuel properties, shutdown systems, emergency pumps, auxiliary power, shielding, and remote plant siting. Particularly important were physical barriers to the escape of radiationencasing reactor fuel in metal tubes called cladding, then surrounding it with a thick reactor pressure vessel and primary coolant piping, and, if the coolant piping failed, a stout, pressure-tight containment building to serve as a last line of defense.
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 By 1954, the same Cold War calculations that had earlier curtailed the commercial uses of atomic energy led Federal officials to reverse course.
Nuclear power was not economically competitive with fossil fuel power plants, but government officials feared falling behind other nations in commercial development. The strides made by Great Britain in civilian nuclear power were disturbing enough, but the possibility that the USSR might surpass the United States was even more ominous. In 1953, AEC Commissioner Thomas E. Murray warned of a nuclear power race with the Soviets: Once we become fully conscious of the possibility that power-hungry countries will gravitate toward the USSR if it wins the nuclear power raceit will be quite clear that this power race is no Everest-climbing, kudos-providing contest.
Supporters of nuclear power were also eager to show that atomic technology could serve constructive purposes. So far, early assertions that atomic energy could provide spectacular advances in living standards remained unfulfilled, even while the nuclear arms race took on more terrifying proportions with the development of thermonuclear bombs. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, spurred by the detonation of the USSRs first hydrogen device, starkly depicted the horror of nuclear warfare in a widely publicized address to the United Nations in December 1953. At the same time, he emphasized that this greatest of all destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind. The enthusiastic international and domestic response to Eisenhowers speech led to the establishment of the Atoms for Peace program, intended to promote civilian uses of nuclear energy at home and abroad.
4 Congress responded to Eisenhowers initiative by passing the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which permitted the broad use of atomic energy for peaceful applications. It redefined the atomic energy program by ending the governments monopoly on technical data and making the growth of a commercial nuclear industry an important national goal. The act directed the AEC to encourage widespread participation in the development and utilization of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.
The legislation added to the agencys weapons program two new functions:
(1) to promote the com mercial uses of nuclear power, and (2) to protect against the hazards of those peaceful applications by providing adequate protection to the public.
Vesting the AEC with the twin responsibilities to promote and protect was, as Congress recognized, a conflict of interest, but creating a separate commission to regulate safety seemed impractical since the new agency would have to compete with the AEC for the same small pool of experts. Over the next two decades, the AECs dual mandate created the impression that it prioritized its military and promotional duties over protection.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers his Atoms for Peace proposal to the United Nations General Assembly, December 8, 1953. Credit: United Nations.
5 The Atomic Energy Commission and the Development of Commercial Nuclear Power The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 gave the AEC extraordinarily wide discretion to establish promotional and regulatory policies. This broad power was necessary, Eisenhower said: It would be unwise to try to anticipate by law all of the many problems that are certain to arise in developing civilian applications. It was up to the AECs experts to make the rules. The AEC would only grant a license for a nuclear power plant when, in its sole judgment, there was sufficient information to conclude that it met the adequate protection standard of the act. In 1968, a Federal court of appeals noted that the remarkable autonomy granted to the AEC by the 1954 law was virtually unique in legislative history in conferring on it the power to regulate free of close prescription as to how it shall proceed. Few challenges to the licensing authority of the AEC (or later the NRC) ever succeeded.
Democrats and Republicans shared the goal of developing nuclear power, but there were sharp philosophical differences over how to get there that played out in battles between Congress and the executive branch. The AECs congressional oversight committee, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, tended to be controlled by Democrats who favored support to public power utilities to develop nuclear power projects. Eisenhower, a Republican, favored a partnership between government and private industry. Lewis L. Strauss, Eisenhowers Chairman of the AEC, said, The Commissions program is directed toward encouraging development of the uses of atomic energy in the framework of the American free enterprise system. Competitive economic nuclear power would be most quickly achieved by construction and operation of full-scale plants by industry itself.
Members of the public tour the Atoms for Peace mobile exhibit. The program was launched under President Eisenhower to supply equipment and information to schools, hospitals, and research institutions. Credit:
Department of Energy.
6 To encourage a diversity of designs, the AEC announced a power demonstration reactor program in January 1955. The agency offered to perform research and development on power reactors in its national laboratories, subsidize additional research undertaken by industry through fixed-sum contracts, and waive for 7 years the fuel-use charges for the loan of fissionable materials. For their part, private utilities and vendors would supply the capital for the construction of nuclear plants and pay operating expenses. At that time, no single reactor type had clearly emerged as the most promising technology.
The 1954 legislation also removed many barriers to previously classified technical information. It offered utility companies an opportunity to participate in nuclear development and gain experience in nuclear technology. Vendors of reactor components welcomed the prospects of expanding their markets not only in the United States but also in foreign countries where the need for new sources of power was more immediate.
Despite those incentives, the capital and operating costs of atomic power were higher than those of fossil fuel plants. An American Management Association symposium in 1957 concluded, The atomic industry has not beenand is not likely to be for a decadeattractive as far as quick profits are concerned. Lewis Strausss oft-quoted 1954 statement that nuclear technology could provide electricity too cheap to meter expressed his personal speculation that nuclear power might someday become so inexpensive that users would pay a flat rate for unlimited quantities. The AEC and the fledging nuclear industry, however, knew nuclear power would require heavy investments.
In addition to technical and financial considerations, safety was a concern.
Based on limited operating experience and the prevailing faith in the ability of scientists and engineers, experts regarded the chances of a disastrous accident as remote but possible. Francis K. McCune, General Manager of the Atomic Products Division of General Electric, told the Joint Committee in 1954 that no matter how careful anyone in the atomic energy business may try to be, it is possible that accidents may occur.
7 Mindful of the costs and the risks of atomic power, the electric utility industry responded to the AECs incentives with restraint. The AEC was gratified and rather surprised that by August 1955, five power companieseither as individual utilities or as consortiumshad announced plans to build nuclear plants. Two of these companies decided to proceed without government assistance, and the other three submitted proposals for projects under the AECs power demonstration reactor program.
Congresss Joint Committee was less impressed with the industrys response. The Democratic majority of the committee favored a larger government role in accelerating nuclear development, which conflicted with the AECs commitment to encourage maximum private participation. The issue became a major source of contention between the AEC and the Joint Committee, thus adding to the bitter personal feud between Strauss and Joint Committee Chairman Clinton P. Anderson.
In 1956, two Democratic members of the Joint Committee, Representative Chet Holifield and Senator Albert Gore, introduced legislation directing the AEC to construct six pilot nuclear plants, each with a different design, to advance the art of generation of electrical energy from nuclear energy at the maximum possible rate. Gore and Holifield contended that the United States was falling behind the programs of Great Britain and the USSR. Opponents insisted that private industry should take the lead. Strauss declared that we have a civilian program that is presently accomplishing far more than we had reason to expect in 1954. The Gore-Holifield bill was defeated by a narrow margin, but it pressured the AEC to demonstrate progress.
The Shippingport Atomic Power Station, in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, was the worlds first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime production of electricity. It reached full design power in 1957. Credit: Library of Congress.
8 The Atomic Energy Commissions Regulatory Program The AECs determination to push nuclear development through a partnership with private industry had a major impact on the agencys regulatory policies.
The AEC struggled to draft regulations that protected public health and safety without imposing overly burdensome requirements. In 1955, Commissioner Willard F. Libby articulated a common AEC opinion: Our great hazard is that this great benefit to mankind will be killed aborning by unnecessary regulation.
The task of distinguishing between essential and excessive regulation was hindered by limited operating experience, the discovery of new safety issues, and disagreements over the value and reliability of certain safety systems. The safety record of the AECs own experimental reactors engendered confidence that safety problems could be kept to an acceptable calculated risk. However, limited experience meant little guidance was available on some important technical and safety questions. How did radiation affect reactor materials?
How durable and reliable were reactor materials and components under high operating temperatures and pressures? How could the AEC minimize radiation exposure in the event of a large accident?
The AECs regulatory staff had to write regulations and licensing procedures that ensured safety but were flexible enough to accommodate rapid technological change. They drafted rules and definitions on radiation protection standards, the distribution and safeguarding of fissionable materials, and qualifications for reactor operators. They also established procedures for licensing privately owned reactors. In particular, the regulations in Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations, (10 CFR) Part 50, Licensing of Production and Utilization Facilities, established a two-step licensing procedure: The AEC would first issue a reactor construction permit. After the utility finished construction of the facility and provided complete technical information, the AEC would issue an operating license permitting it to load fuel and begin operation.
Because of the AEC aimed to encourage diverse reactor designs, it had to judge license applications on a case-by-case basis. The regulatory staff reviewed the information that applicants supplied on the suitability of the proposed site, construction specifications, a detailed plan of operation, and safety features. An independent, part-time panel of outside experts, the Advisory
9 Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS), provided a second review. Separate recommendations from the staff and ACRS went to the AEC commissioners, who made the final decision. Later, the Commission delegated its decision authority to the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, although it retained final jurisdiction for appeals.
The AEC required less technical data to issue construction permits than operating licenses. Construction permits simply required that the application provide reasonable assurance that the final plant would meet the adequate protection standard. This allowed construction to move forward while the applicant investigated and resolved outstanding safety questions. Agency officials recognized the questionable wisdom of permitting construction before all safety issues were resolved. The industrys youth and the AECs promotional mandate, however, meant experts had to accept reasonable uncertainty. ACRS Chairman C. Rogers McCullough informed the Joint Committee in 1956 that because of technical uncertainties and limited operating experience, the determination that the hazard is acceptably low is a matter of competent judgment.
The Power Reactor Development Company Controversy An early licensing controversy led many to question whether the AECs promotional ambitions exceeded its commitment to public safety. In 1956, despite the reservation of the ACRS, AEC issued a construction permit for a commercial fast breeder reactora reactor that can produce (breed) more fuel than it consumes. The decision ignited an acrimonious dispute between the AEC and the Joint Committee and the first public opposition to a nuclear power plant.
The Power Reactor Development Company (PRDC), a consortium of utilities led by the Detroit Edison Company, had applied for a permit to build the breeder at Lagoona Beach, Michigan, located on Lake Erie within 30 miles of both Detroit, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio. The AEC had already received applications for two privately financed reactors, but the PRDC proposal was the first to come in under the power demonstration reactor program.
The PRDCs fast breeder was far more technologically complex than light-water models. There was only limited, troubled experience with them. An AEC test reactorthe worlds first breederhad suffered a fuel-damaging event.
10 The ACRS concluded in an internal report to the Commission that there is insufficient information available at this time to give assurance that the PRDC reactor can be operated at this site without public hazard. The ACRS was not certain that its reservations could be resolved within PRDCs proposed schedule, and it urged the AEC to expand its experimental breeder programs to obtain more data.
The public dispute over the PRDC case was triggered by statements from Chairman Strauss and Commissioner Murray in congressional budget hearings.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Clarence Cannon subjected the commissioners to sharp criticism when they testified in June 1956. Cannon, a strong public power advocate, badgered Strauss about private industrys lack of progress in atomic development and suggested that PRDC had no intention of building this reactor at any time in the determin able future. Strauss, who was anxious to show that industry was making headway, replied, They [PRDC]
have already spent 8 million dollars of their own money to date on this project. I told you they were breaking ground on August 8. I have been invited to attend the ceremony; I intend to do so. By stating that he would attend the ceremony, he implied that he had prejudged the PRDCs still pending application.
During hearings the following day, Commissioner Murray disclosed the conclusions of the ACRS on the PRDC application. Often at odds with Strauss, Murray even met with Joint Committee Chairman Anderson to outline the ACRSs conclusions. Members of the Joint Committee were angered by the revelations, not only because of safety concerns but also because of the AECs failure to keep the Joint Committee fully and currently informed about its activities as required by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. The Joint Committee demanded a copy of the ACRS document. The AEC resisted, believing the ACRS evaluation was, in government parlance, predecisional information that did not need to be publicly released. After long deliberation, the Commission offered to deliver PRDCs a fast breeder reactor under construction in Lagoona Beach, Michigan, in 1958. Credit: National Archives
11 a copy only if the Joint Committee would keep it administratively confidential.
The Joint Committee refused to accept the report under those conditions. The AEC also rebuffed Governor G. Mennen Williams request for the document on the grounds that it would be inappropriate to disclose the contents of internal documents. Even if procedurally correct, the AECs refusal proved politically unwise.
The AEC staff took a more optimistic view than the ACRS of the proposed reactor. Because the company had agreed to perform tests to answer the questions raised by the ACRS, the staff recommended that it be granted a construction permit. On August 2, 1956, the Commission decided to issue the permit by a vote of three to one (Murray was the dissenter). It acknowledged the ACRS concerns by inserting the word conditional in the construction permit to emphasize that the company would have to resolve the uncertainties about safety before it could receive an operating license. Commissioner Harold S. Vance summarized the majoritys reasoning. We are doing something that we ordinarily would not do, he said, in that we would not ordinarily issue a construction permit unless we were satisfied that reasonable safety requirements had been met. However, he added, It may be some time before reasonable assurance can be obtained. If we were to delay the construction permit until then, it might delay a very important program. If we didnt think that the chances were very good that all these questions would be resolved, we would not issue the permit.
The AECs decision elicited angry protests from the Joint Committee and Michigan labor unions. Congressman Holifield, citing Strausss plan to attend the plants groundbreaking ceremonies, charged that the AEC Chairman was acting in a reckless and arrogant manner. Anderson accused the agency of conducting star chamber proceedings and pledged that the Joint Committee would ascertain the full facts involved in this precipitate action. Although the AEC had issued two earlier construction permits without any public protest, labor unions now challenged the granting of a construction permit by filing a petition to intervene in the proceedings and requesting a public hearing.
Although the unions ultimately failed to halt construction, the Joint Committee acted to prevent a recurrence of the AECs conduct in the PRDC case. Anderson ordered the Joint Committee staff to prepare a study of the AECs licensing procedures and regulatory organization and to consider whether separate agencies should carry out regulatory and promotional functions. The staff concluded that the creation of separate agencies was inadvisable because it would be difficult to recruit qualified personnel for purely regulatory functions.
12 It did, however, suggest other reforms. Anderson followed with legislation to require hearings on all reactor construction permit applications, establish the ACRS as a statutory body, and mandate that ACRS reports on licensing cases be made public. The AEC opposed all three measures but muted its objections because Anderson presented them as amendments to a billthe Price-Anderson actthat the agency favored to provide indemnity insurance for reactor owners in the case of a major accident. The amendments made the AECs licensing process far more open to the public than envisioned in the original legislation.
The Price-Anderson Act The AEC regarded indemnity legislation as essential for stimulating private investment in nuclear power, a view that industry spokesmen and the Joint Committee shared. Since the chances of a severe reactor accident could not be reduced to zero, even the most enthusiastic industry proponents were reluctant to push ahead without adequate liability insurance. Private insurance companies would offer up to $60 million in coverage per reactor, an amount that far exceeded what was available to any other industry in the United States.
Nevertheless, that amount of coverage seemed insufficient to pay claims for the deaths, injuries, and property damage that would result from a serious accident.
Industry executives sought a Federal insurance protection program.
Consolidated Edisons Chairman H.R. Searing declared that his company would not load fuel and begin operation of its Indian Point facility without Federal indemnity insurance. General Electrics Francis K. McCune told the Joint Committee that without the indemnity legislation, his company would stop construction of Commonwealth Edison Companys Dresden Nuclear Power Station. He predicted that the market for civilian atomic energy would collapse and vendors would withdraw from the field.
The legislation introduced by Senator Anderson and Congressman Melvin Price proposed that the government underwrite $500 million of insurance beyond the $60 million available from private companies. The AEC initially opposed setting a specific upper limit on the amount because no reliable method existed to estimate the possible damages from a reactor accident. However, Anderson rather arbitrarily decided on the $500 million figure because he wanted to avoid giving the industry a blank check. The bill stipulated that Congress could authorize additional payments if necessary and also required licensees to contribute funds to the insurance pool. With strong support from the AEC and the industry, Congress passed the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act (Price-Anderson Act) in August 1957. In its final form, the measure also
13 included the reforms to the AECs licensing procedures proposed by Anderson in the wake of the PRDC controversy. The act epitomized the conflict in the AECs dual mandate to promote and protect. While the act made licensing a more public process, the reforms had to ride on the promotional coattails of indemnity insurance.
The Growth of Nuclear Power The PRDC case and the Price-Anderson Act illustrated the AECs emphasis on developmental rather than regulatory efforts. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 made promotion of nuclear power a national goal, and the AEC hoped the private sector would take the lead. But, with the industry hesitant to invest, the AEC had to subsidize its participation. The Joint Committee pressured the agency to speed progress. It threatened to require the AEC to construct prototype plants if private firms failed to act. In the regulatory arena, the AEC pursued its objective of private development by writing regulations designed to protect public safety without being overly burdensome.
The agency did not view its developmental efforts as more important than regulatory policies, but it clearly viewed the encouragement of industrial growth as a more immediate need. Safety questions often seemed hypothetical and accident scenarios implausible. AEC officials found it easier to assume that such issues would be satisfactorily resolved than to assume that reactors would be built at all. For example, when the Commission issued a construction permit for the PRDC fast breeder reactor, its vision of a technologically advanced plant showing the effectiveness of its power demonstration reactor program outweighed the reservations of the ACRS. In short, the desire for tangible progress was more compelling than the possibility of slowing progress to address speculative accident scenarios that might never occur.
By 1962, the AECs efforts to stimulate private participation in nuclear power development had produced some encouraging results. In a report to President John F. Kennedy, the agency proudly pointed out that in a few short years, six sizable power reactors had begun operation, two of which had been built without government subsidies. The agency predicted that by the year 2000 nuclear plants might provide up to 50 percent of the nations electrical generating capacity. However, despite the AECs claims, the future of the nuclear industry remained precarious. The 14 reactors in operation or under construction were far from being commercially competitive or technologically proven. Further investment by utilities was uncertain, making the AEC and Joint Committee anxious.
14 Radiation Protection To make matters worse for proponents of nuclear technology, there were growing signs of public opposition. In the early days of nuclear power development, public attitudes toward the technology had been highly favorable, as the few opinion polls on the subject revealed. Press coverage of nuclear power had also been overwhelmingly positive. For example, a 1958 article in National Geographic concluded that abundant energy released from the hearts of atoms promises a vastly different and better tomorrow for all mankind. However, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a national controversy developed about the hazards of low-level radiation from weapons testing fallout. The controversy quickly spread to the topic of low-level radioactive emissions from nuclear power plants.
Before World War II, the dangers of radiation were primarily of concern to a relatively small group of scientists and physicians. Soon after the discovery of x-rays and natural radioactivity in the 1890s, scientific investigators found that exposure to radiation could cause serious health problems, ranging from loss of hair and skin irritations to sterility and cancer. The use of x-rays and radium in ignorance of their hazards sometimes had tragic consequences. As experience and data accumulated on the effects of radiation, professionals developed guidelines to protect x-ray technicians and radiation workers.
In 1934, a U.S. committee representing professional societies and x-ray equipment manufacturers recommended a quantitative tolerance dose of radiation equivalent to 0.1 roentgen per day of whole-body exposure from external sources. The roentgen was a unit of measurement that indicated the effects of gamma rays or x-rays on cells. Committee members believed that levels of radiation below the tolerance dose were generally safe and unlikely to cause injury in the average individual. The following year, an international radiation protection committee composed of experts from five nations issued similar recommendations. Neither body regarded its recommended tolerance dose as definitive because empirical evidence was inconclusive. However, based on the available information, both were confident their proposals provided adequate safety for the small number of radiation workers exposed.
The atomic age made radiation safety a vastly more complex problem. First, nuclear fission created many radioactive isotopes that did not exist in nature.
Where experts had previously been able to focus on the hazards of x-rays and radium, they now had to evaluate a large number of isotopes. Second, new nuclear applications meant many more workers and members of the public would
15 be exposed to radiation. Radiation protection had thus broadened from a limited issue to a potentially major one.
As a result, scientific authorities reassessed their recommendations. They abandoned the concept of a tolerance dose below which radiation could generally be assumed harmless. Experiments in genetics indicated that reproductive cells were highly susceptible to damage from even small amounts of radiation. In 1946, the National Committee on Radiation Protection (NCRP),
a U.S. committee of radiation experts, replaced the term tolerance dose with maximum permissible dose, which better conveyed the principle that no quantity of radiation was certifiably safe. It defined the maximum permissible dose as that which in the light of present knowledge, is not expected to cause appreciable bodily injury to a person at any time during his lifetime. The NCRP emphasized that the permissible dose was one for which the probability of the occurrence of such injuries must be so low that the risk should be readily acceptable to the average individual.
Atomic energy programs and the population working with radiation sources were growing rapidly. In 1948, the NCRP reduced its recommended occupational exposure limits to 50 percent of the 1934 limits. Its international counterpart, the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), adopted the same maximum permissible dose. The NCRP and ICRP recommended a limit of 0.3 roentgens per 6-day work week, as measured by exposure of the most critical tissues in the blood-forming organs, the gonads, and the lens of the eye. Higher limits applied for less sensitive areas of the body. In addition to the levels established for exposure to x-rays or gamma rays, NCRP and ICRP also issued the maximum permissible concentrations in air and water for a list of radioactive isotopes that give off alpha or beta particles, known as internal emitters. Alpha and beta particles cannot penetrate vital human tissue from outside the body, but they can pose a serious health hazard if they enter the body through the consumption of contaminated food or water or the inhalation of contaminated air.
The allowable limits established by the NCRP and ICRP applied only to radiation workers. However, each group also issued guidelines for larger segments of the population. Because of the greater sensitivity of young persons to radiation, the NCRP recommended that the occupational maximum permissible dose be reduced by a factor of 10 for anyone under the age of 18.
ICRP went farther by proposing a limit of one-tenth of the occupational level for the general population. Neither organization had any legal authority or official standing, but the AEC used the NCRPs recommended occupational
16 limits in its own installations and in its regulations for licensees. The agencys radiation protection regulations, which became effective in 1957, followed the NCRPs recommendations for radiation workers. They set a permissible dose of one-tenth of the occupational level for members of the general population who potentially could be affected by licensee operations.
The Fallout from Fallout The fallout controversy moved radiation debates from the confines of scientific and medical journals to front-page news. Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons by the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain produced radioactive fallout that spread to populated areas far from the test sites. Opponents of weapons testing cleverly publicized radiation hazards to the very young through Operation Tooth, enlisting parents across the nation to send them their childrens baby teeth when they fell out. By detecting radioactive isotopes in the teeth, Operation Tooth raised awareness that low levels of radiation could persist for years in the environment and pose long-term genetic risk. Scientists disagreed sharply about the risk presented by fallout, and the debate received prominent news coverage. The public became aware that, unlike acute radiation doses, scientists did not know enough about low-level radiation.
The fallout controversy affected the AECs regulatory program in two important ways. First, it led to a tightening of the agencys radiation standards. Public concern compelled the NCRP and ICRP to lower their recommended permissible levels of exposure, providing a wider margin of safety, although both groups emphasized that no evidence existed to suggest that the previous levels had been dangerously high.
Occupational exposure limits were reduced to an average of 5 rem per year after the age of 18 and, as before, a limit of 10 percent of the occupational level (0.5 rem per year) was suggested for the general population. (The rem (roentgen equivalent man) was a unit of measure that had largely replaced the roentgen and more precisely A researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory removes plug from lead sheild containing radioactive materials. The man at his left holds Geiger counter to monitor radiation levels. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory.
17 Critics of atmospheric weapons testing raised public awareness that low levels of radiation could have long-term health effects on children.
These concerns spread from weapons testing to civilian uses of nuclear energy. Credit: SANE.
expressed the biological damage caused by an absorbed radiation dose. For x-rays, gamma rays, and beta particles, 1 rem equaled 1 roentgen. One roentgen of more dangerous alpha particles equals 20 rem. ) Radiation protection organizations added a new stipulation that, for genetic reasons, the average level for large population groups should not exceed one-thirtieth of the occupational limit, or 0.17 rem per year. The AEC adopted the new recommendations as a part of its regulations effective January 1, 1961.
The fallout debate further influenced the AECs regulatory program by arousing public anxieties about the health effects of low-level radiation. For example, citizens protested against the dumping of low-level radioactive wastes in ocean waters. For more than a decade, the AEC had authorized the dumping of such wastes under prescribed conditions, but it became controversial after the fallout issue sensitized public opinion to radiation hazards.
For those inclined to see a connection between weapons fallout and radioactivity from nuclear power, the AEC exacerbated their concerns with its 1957 report WASH-740, which provided the first estimate of a consequences of a worst-case reactor accident. WASH-740 made the alarming and, some argued, unrealistic claim that a hypothetical accident could kill 3,400 people and cause
$7 billion in damage. The AEC tried to emphasize that the probability of such an accident was exceedingly low, but it had no methodology or data on which to base a quantified probabilistic estimate. The report admitted, No one knows now or will ever know the exact magnitude of this low probability.
WASH-740 was a public relations nightmare for the AEC. AEC Chairman Dixy Lee Ray later called it an albatross around our necks.
WASH-740 became a touchstone for nuclear power critics a few years later, during the first widespread protests against proposals for nuclear power plants.
In 1963, citizen protested the construction of the Ravenswood plant in the heart of New York City and the Bodega Bay Nuclear Power Plant on the coast of California near the boundary of the San Andreas fault. Opponents of the Bodega
18 Bay facility made a direct connection to fallout by releasing hundreds of balloons from the proposed site. Floating over the rural California countryside, the balloons visually demonstrated how escaping radiation could contaminate the countryside. Public opposition played a vital role the termination of both projects.
Thus, a decade after the passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the prospects for rapid nuclear power development were mixed. Impressive strides had been made, but much technical and economic uncertainty remained. Public support for nuclear technology, initially strong, had become tenuous. Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, an unanticipated boom in the industry seemed to resolve some the uncertainties around nuclear power. It also raised a host of new safety questions.
Chapter Two:
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963-1975
21 Chapter Two:
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963-1975 During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the use of nuclear power to generate electricity was a novel and developing technology. Because relatively few plants were operating, under construction, or on order, the scope of the AECs regulatory functions such as reactor siting, licensing, and inspection was still limited. However, in the late 1960s, the nations utilities rapidly increased their orders for nuclear power stations, participating in what utility executive Philip Sporn described in 1967 as the great bandwagon market. At the same time, the size of new nuclear plants tripled. The sudden arrival of commercially competitive nuclear power placed unprecedented demands on the AECs regulatory staff, and the larger plants ordered raised new safety problems.
The Bandwagon Market Several new developments were making nuclear power more economically competitive. First, there was intense competition between the two leading vendors of nuclear plants, General Electric and Westinghouse. In 1963, General Electric made a daring move to increase its reactor sales. It won a contract with Jersey Central Power and Light Company to build the 515 megawatt electric (MWe) Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station near Toms River, New Jersey. For just $66 million, General Electric would oversee all plant design and construction, a turnkey contract. As if selling a new house, General Electric would simply hand Jersey Central the figurative keys to the finished plant. General Electric outbid Westinghouse and coal-fired vendors on the Oyster Creek contract. It expected to lose money on the contract but hoped the deal would stimulate the nuclear market.
The gamble worked. AEC Chairman Glenn T. Seaborg told President Lyndon B.
Johnson that Oyster Creek represented an economic breakthrough for nuclear electricity. Westinghouse followed General Electrics lead in offering turnkey contracts for nuclear plants, setting off fierce competition. Both companies lost
22 hundreds of millions of dollars before halting turnkey arrangements. One General Electric official commented, Its going to take a long time to restore to the treasury the demands we put on it to establish ourselves in the nuclear business.
Other important factors led to the bandwagon market. The spread of power-pooling arrangements among utilities eased fears of building excess capacity. A utility with extra or reserve power could sell that power to other companies through interconnections. Furthermore, it was expected that bigger plants would produce economies of scale and increase efficiency, overcoming nuclear powers key disadvantage namely, its heavy capital requirements.
Vendors offered designs that jumped from 200-300 MWe to 500 MWe and then to 800-1,000 MWe. This practice of design by extrapolation, where designs for small plants were simply scaled up for ever larger plants, had been used for fossil-fuel units since the early 1950s, and vendors naturally extended it to nuclear units.
Nuclear power also seemed to be the answer to air pollution problems. Coal plants were major contributors to the deterioration of air quality. As the environmental movement gained strength, nuclear power offered an alternative to paying the expenses of pollution abatement in coal-fired units.
The bandwagon market for nuclear power reached its peak during 1966 and 1967, exceeding, in the words of one General Electric official, even the most optimistic estimates. In 1965, nuclear vendors sold four nuclear plants, representing a total of 17 percent of ordered capacity. In 1966, orders jumped to 20 units, 36 percent of all orders. The following year, nuclear vendors sold 31 units that represented 49 percent of capacity. In 1968, orders dropped to 17, but its share remained high at 47 percent.
Utility companies preferred the largest plants. However, it became apparent in the late 1960s that design by extrapolation was no longer working well for either nuclear or coal facilities. Material fatigue and corrosion in large plants contributed to declining reliability. We hoped the new machines would run just like the old ones were familiar with, complained one utility executive about his huge coal-burning stations, [but]they sure as hell dont.
Regulatory Burdens of the Bandwagon Market The bandwagon market placed enormous burdens on the AECs small regulatory staff, causing licensing delays. Between 1965 and 1970, the size of the AECs regulatory staff increased by about 50 percent, while its licensing and inspection
23 caseload increased by about 600 percent. The AECs simple regulations and case-by-case review, industry officials complained, gave it too much leeway to question applicants.
A utility executive called the licensing process a modern day Spanish Inquisition carried out by AEC engineers, scientists, and consultants
[who] have no serious economic discipline. The AEC attempted to streamline the process with standardized general design criteria, technical specifications, and guidelines, but the time needed to review a construction permit application still grew from about 1 year in 1965 to over 18 months by 1970. One utility executive predicted that without reform, it can safely be asserted that the splendid promise of nuclear power will have had a very short life.
The trend toward ever larger reactors built closer to cities contributed to disagreement and delays. The AEC adopted an informal prohibition against metropolitan siting (such as the proposed Ravenswood plant near midtown Manhattan). It was receptive to suburban sites for facilities that would have compensating safety systems (called engineered safety features), but there was considerable debate about the effectiveness and reliability of these systems.
The AECs position on safety seemed simple enough. A design was acceptable if the reactor could not explode or leak. To avoid an explosion, a reactor needed considerable inherent safety, meaning that the physics of the reactor would naturally slow down any surge in power without operator intervention. (The USSRs Chernobyl reactor was an example of a reactor that did not have inherent safety. ) To prevent the leakage of radioactivity, a plant needed multiple static barriers, including fuel cladding, primary cooling piping, and, most of all, a stout containment building as a last line of defense in depth.
While inherent safety features received top billing in a plants defense-in-depth strategy, reactor designs also incorporated additional active safety systems to perform essential functions, such as a rapid plant shutdown. Emergency core The site of the proposed Ravenswood nuclear plant in New York City is at the top of this photo. The Empire State Building is at the lower left; the United Nations is along the East River. (AEC Docket 50-204.) Credit: NRC Archives.
24 cooling systems (ECCS) pumped in vital coolant to prevent fuel melting during a loss-of-coolant accident. They were supported by filters, vents, scrubbers, and air circulators that would control and retain radioactive gases and particles.
These active systems were important, but experts were wary of their potential for malfunction. Their power supplies, pumps, relays, breakers, and valves had to be dependable. A containment building with few moving parts seemed more reliable.
As the AECs regulatory philosophy solidified into doctrine in the early 1960s, it diverged from the industrys optimistic viewpoint. Many licensees believed the AECs application of the Three Ds of safety was conservative in the extreme, and, they expected that as operating experience grew, the AEC would relax requirements imposed out of an abundance of caution. One AEC regulator said he was often asked by industry experts when the day might come that containment buildings would no longer be required.
The Problem of Core Meltdown The AEC staff sought to gain as much data as possible on outstanding safety issues. The AEC had sponsored hundreds of small-scale experiments, but these provided little guidance on the greatest question of all: How likely was a loss-of-coolant accident that would produce a major release of radioactivity? It was plausible, if unlikely, that a large cooling water pipe could break suddenly. It was also plausible, if unlikely, that the plants ECCS would fail. If both happened, the continued production of decay heat in the reactor could cause the core to melt.
In smaller reactors, experts were confident that even under the worst conditions, if a blob of fuel melted through the reactor pressure vessel, the containment building would limit the release of radioactivity.
Larger reactors, however, would hold so much decay heat that they might breach the containment building and melt uncontrolled into the earth. This meltdown scenario was jokingly called the China syndrome, because the core might melt all the way to China. Other possible dangers of a core meltdown were a steam or chemical explosion. With containment no longer the last line of defense, only the ECCS could prevent the China syndrome.
The issue came to a head in 1965 during an ACRS review of construction permit applications for reactors at Indian Point, New York, and the Dresden facility in Illinois. At the prodding of the ACRS, in 1966 the AEC established a special task force to look into the problem of core meltdown. The committee, chaired by William K. Ergen, a reactor safety expert and former ACRS member from Oak
25 Ridge National Laboratory, submitted its findings to the AEC in October 1967.
The report offered assurances about the improbability of a core meltdown and the reliability of ECCS designs, but it also acknowledged that a loss-of-coolant accident could cause a breach of containment if the ECCS failed. As one ACRS member noted, the recognition that containment was no longer an inviolable barrier to the escape of radioactivity was a revolution in reactor regulation.
The Ergen committee concluded that the key to protecting the public was ECCS.
However, Alvin Weinberg, the director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, pointed out that this solution had its own problems. Active safety systems could be unreliable. The China syndrome would have profound repercussions, Weinberg wrote. With a fully functional containment, the consequence of even the worst accident was zero.... [Instead] we had to argue that, yes, a severe accident was possible, but the probability of it happening was so small that reactors must still be regarded as safe.
Otherwise put, reactor safety became probabilistic not deterministic. This meant ECCS had to be effective and reliable.
Experimental work on emergency cooling was very limited. Plans had been underway since the early 1960s to build an experimental reactor, known as the Loss-of-Fluid Test (LOFT) reactor, at the AECs reactor testing station in Idaho. The LOFT reactor was meant to provide data about the effects of a loss-of-coolant accident.
The project had been delayed by weak management, a change in design, and reduced funding. Despite opposition from the ACRS and the AECs regulatory staff, the AEC had diverted money from LOFT and the light-water reactor safety research program to fast breeder reactor development. The Joint Committee and AEC considered the breeder, as Chairman Glenn Seaborg described it, a priority national goal that could ensure an essentially unlimited energy supply, free from problems of fuel resources and atmospheric contamination.
In 1970, when the AEC finally conducted preparatory tests for the design of LOFT, the results suggested that ECCS might not work as designed. These tests Loss-of-Fluid Test (LOFT) reactor under construction at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory test area north of Scoville, in Butte County, Idaho, in 1969.
Credit: National Archives
26 were so-called semiscale tests on a tiny mockup core heated with electricity.
Researchers simulated a loss-of-coolant-accident and injection of emergency coolant. To their surprise, the high-pressure steam that escaped during the loss-of-coolant-accident blocked the injection of emergency coolant. About 90 percent of the emergency coolant flowed out of the same break that had caused the initial loss of coolant without ever reaching the core.
In many ways, the semiscale experiments were not accurate simulations of designs or conditions in actual power reactors. The design of the mockup was later proved to be flawed and to produce incorrect results. Nevertheless, the results were disquieting, and it took considerable time to redesign and rerun the experiment. As long at the initial results stood unrefuted, they cast doubt on ECCS effectiveness and the licensing of nuclear plants.
Harold Price, the AECs Director of Regulation, requested a task force to draft a white paper on the issue within a month. While the task force labored, the AEC did not release the semiscale results, withholding them even from the Joint Committee. Seaborg pleaded with the Office of Management and Budget for more funds for light-water reactor safety research. The AEC was already under pressure from utilities facing power shortages due to the slow pace of licensing.
At the same time, President Richard M. Nixon had given his unqualified support to the fast breeder reactor. The semiscale results could undermine political support for the breeder and give new life to the antinuclear movement.
To avoid opposition in licensing hearings, the AEC published interim acceptance criteria for ECCS, which established fuel performance requirements during a loss-of-coolant accident. In some cases, this would force utilities to reduce the peak operating temperatures and power output of their plants. Price told a press conference on June 19, 1971, that the AEC could not guarantee absolute safety, but he was confident that these criteria will assure that the emergency core cooling systems will perform adequately to protect the temperature of the core from getting out of hand.
The interim criteria failed to quell the controversy. News about the semiscale experiments triggered complaints about the AECs handling of the issue even from friendly observers. Nuclear critics, such as the new created Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), called for a licensing moratorium and a shutdown of operating plants. UCS had been established in 1969 by faculty and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to protest the Vietnam War and the misuse of technology including nuclear power. The group sharply questioned the adequacy of the interim criteria, charging that they were operationally vague and meaningless. Some scientists at the AECs national laboratories, without
27 endorsing the alarmist language used by UCS, shared some of its reservations.
The AEC decided to resolve the technical issues in public hearings. It insisted that its critics had exaggerated the severity of the ECCS problem. The regulatory staff did not regard the semiscale tests as indications that existing designs were fundamentally flawed, and it emphasized the conservative engineering judgment it applied in evaluating plant applications. At the hearings, however, several AEC and national laboratory experts disagreed with this sanguine assessment. Intervenors exposed these differences among experts and alleged that the AEC had muzzled its staff. Although the AEC eventually developed quite conservative permanent ECCS criteria, revelations that it might have silenced whistleblowers damaged its credibility. Rather than acknowledging the potential safety problems with ECCS and conducting a careful assessment, the AEC had treated the issue as a public relations and licensing problem. Its actions had given credence to the allegations that it cared more for promoting nuclear power than for protecting the public.
Thermal Pollution An article in Fortune magazine stated, Americans do not seem willing to let the utilities continue devouring ever increasing quantities of water, air, and land. And yet clearly they also are not willing to contemplate doing without all the electricity they want. These two wishes are incompatible. That is the dilemma faced by the utilities. With electricity consumption doubling every 10 years, utilities viewed nuclear power as the answer to their environmental dilemma. Environmentalists, however, were ambivalent. A leading environmental spokesman said in 1967, I think most conservationists may welcome the coming of nuclear plants, though we are sure they have their own parameters of difficulty.
The AEC actively promoted the idea that nuclear power provided the answer to both the environmental crisis and the energy crisis. Seaborg was especially outspoken on this point. He acknowledged that nuclear power could have some adverse effects on the environment, but in comparison to coal, he once declared, There can be no doubt that nuclear power comes out looking like Mr. Clean.
In the late 1960s, Seaborgs sales pitch was undermined by a major controversy over the effects of waste heat from nuclear plants, widely known as thermal pollution. Thermal pollution referred to the warming of the cooling water usually taken from rivers, lakes, or oceansused to condense the waste steam discharged from turbines after producing electricity in fossil fuel and nuclear
28 power plants. The cooling water was returned to its source water warmed by about 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
Thermal pollution was potentially harmful to many species of fish, particularly in smaller rivers and streams. It could also disrupt the ecological balance of a body of water, allowing plants to thrive that made the water look, taste, and smell unpleasant. Technical solutions to deal with thermal pollution were available, such as cooling towers and cooling ponds. However, utilities resisted them because they were costly and, on hot days, entailed a loss of generating capacity.
Although thermal pollution was a problem for both fossil fuel and nuclear plants, nuclear plants were less efficient and produced more thermal pollution.
Environmentalists, Congress, and State and Federal agencies urged the AEC to require its licensees to limit thermal pollution. The AEC insisted it lacked the statutory authority under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 to regulate hazards other than radiation. The U.S.
Department of Justice and Federal courts upheld the AECs view, but critics were not placated. Several members of Congress introduced legislation to grant the AEC authority over thermal pollution. Fearing that such legislation would place nuclear power at a competitive disadvantage, the AEC opposed these measures unless they were to be applied equally to the fossil fuel plants.
The AECs intransigence made its public relations problem worse. The most prominent attack appeared in a Sports Illustrated article in January 1969. It assailed the AEC failure to regulate against thermal pollution and attributed its inaction to a fear of the financial investment that power companies would have to maketo stop nuclear plants from frying fish or cooking waterways wholesale. The article was distorted and exaggerated, but it gave life to claims that nuclear power was not the solution to pollution.
Eventually, the controversy over thermal pollution died out. Congress passed legislation giving the AEC authority to regulate against thermal pollution, and utilities installed cooling towers and ponds rather than endure litigation and Researchers from Argonne National Laboratory take measurements of the thermal discharge plume from the Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Plant on Lake Michigan.
Credit National Archives.
29 public attack. By 1971, most nuclear plants being built on, or planned for, inland waterways included cooling systems. However, the issue of thermal pollution had helped turn environmentalist ambivalence toward nuclear power into vocal opposition.
The Radiation Debate A third controversy arose over the effects of low-level radiation from the routine operation of nuclear plants. Drawing on the recommendations of the NCRP, the AEC had established limits for public exposure to radiation from nuclear plants of 0.5 rem per year for individuals. To determine the allowable release of radioactive effluents from a plant, it used extremely conservative calculations based on the dose to a person standing outdoors at the boundary of the facility absorbing plant radiation 24 hours2.777778e-4 days <br />0.00667 hours <br />3.968254e-5 weeks <br />9.132e-6 months <br /> a day, 365 days a year. Licensees met the requirements easily. In 1968, for example, releases from most plants measured less than 3 percent of the permissible levels for liquid effluents and less than 1 percent for gaseous effluents. Nevertheless, critics assailed the AECs radiation standards as insufficiently rigorous given the uncertainties about the effects of low-level radiation. In 1969, environmentalists convinced the State of Minnesota to limit radioactive effluents to about 3 percent of AEC requirements.
The AECs radiation standards became even more contentious in the fall of 1969, when two prominent scientists, John W. Gofman and Arthur R. Tamplin, suggested that if everyone in the United States received the permissible population dose of radiation, it would cause 17,000 (later revised to 32,000) additional cases of cancer annually. Gofman and Tamplin worked at the AECs Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Their position as insiders gave their claims special credibility. They initially proposed that the AEC lower its limits by a factor of 10 and later urged that it require a zero release of radioactivity.
Gofman was especially harsh in his analysis. He insisted that the AEC is stating
[in its radiation protection regulations] that there is a risk and their hope that the benefits outweigh the number of deaths. He added, This is legalized murder, the only question is how many murders.
The AEC responded that Gofman and Tamplin had extrapolated the health effects from high doses to low-level exposures and that it was impossible for the entire nation to receive the doses it applied at plant boundaries. Most authorities in the field of radiation protection agreed with the AEC that the risks were far smaller than Gofman and Tamplin maintained. Nevertheless, to reassure the public, and undercut of its critics, in June 1971 the AEC issued
30 for public comment new design objectives that reduced the permissible levels of effluents by a factor of about 100. This action elicited protests from industry representatives and from radiation protection professionals, but it did not impress many critics who doubted that the AEC would enforce the new guidelines.
The National Environmental Policy Act and Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant Bad news came in fours for the AEC. In addition to the controversies over ECCS, thermal pollution, and radiation standards, the AEC suffered a humiliating legal defeat in its implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The law, signed by President Nixon on January 1, 1970, required Federal agencies to evaluate the environmental impact of their activities by writing an environmental impact statement (EIS). Federal agencies had broad discretion in their implementation of the measures. Environmentalists protested that the AEC took a narrow view of its NEPA responsibilities. In a regulation proposed in December 1970, the AEC included nonradiological issues but stated that it would rely on assessments by other Federal and State agencies rather than conducting its own. It also considered environmental issues in licensing board hearings only if a party to the proceeding raised it, and it postponed any review of NEPA issues in licensing cases until March 1971. There were several reasons that the AEC took this limited view of its responsibilities under NEPA. One was the conviction that the routine operation of nuclear plants posed no serious threat to the environment and, indeed, was beneficial compared to burning fossil fuels. Other legislation already covered the major hazards of nuclear power generation radiation releases and thermal discharges. AEC officials also worried that a robust implementation of NEPA would divert its limited human resources from plant licensing to nonradiological reviews, forcing a quantum leap in the length of the licensing process. Ultimately, the AEC sought to balance environmental concerns with the need for electrical power.
Environmentalists complained that the AEC had failed to fulfill the purposes of NEPA and took the agency to Federal court over its EIS for the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, then under construction on the Chesapeake Bay in rural Maryland. On July 23, 1971, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia handed down a ruling that was a crushing defeat for the AEC. The court sternly rebuked the agency: We believe that the Commissions crabbed interpretation of
31 NEPA makes a mockery of the Act. The Calvert Cliffs decision was, in the words of Nucleonics Week, a stunning body blow to the AEC and the nuclear industry.
The cumulative effect of the controversies over ECCS, thermal pollution, radiation standards, and NEPA eroded public confidence in the AEC and nuclear power. Antinuclear activists proved effective in exacerbating these doubts, providing a plethora of misinformation that garnered far more attention than did any subsequent attempts to correct it. The AEC also suffered from the general disillusionment with the government, established institutions, and science that had taken hold in the 1970s. One college student,after listening to a debate between Victor Bond, a radiation expert from Brookhaven National Laboratory, and a vocal AEC critic, summarized the situation: Dr. Bond sounds good, but we cant believe him. He works for the government.
By the summer of 1971, the AEC was an embattled agency. Seaborg, after serving as chairman for 10 years, resigned his post in July 1971, and President Nixon replaced him with James R. Schlesinger, Assistant Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Schlesinger and William O. Doub, who joined the Commission at the same time, came with direction to make the AEC more responsive to environmental concerns and to improve its tarnished public image.
In August, Schlesinger and Doub convinced their Commission colleagues against appealing the Calvert Cliffs ruling.
The AECs failure to appeal brought a storm of protests from utilities that feared long delays as the AEC revised the EIS for each plant going through the licensing process. Schlesinger did not back down. In an address to a meeting of industrial groups in Bal Harbour, Florida, on October 20, 1971, he told his audience that although the long-term outlook for nuclear power appeared bullish, the pace of development depended on two variables: first, the provision of a safe, reliable product; second, achievement of public confidence in that product. Schlesinger declared that the AECs policy of promoting and protecting the industry was obsolete for an industry rapidly approaching mature growth. You should not expect the AEC to fight the industrys political, social, and commercial battles.
He added that the agencys role was primarily to perform as a referee serving the public interest. Schlesingers speech marked an unprecedented break with the AECs promotional history.
Schlesingers efforts to mend fences between nuclear proponents and critics produced mixed results. The AECs acceptance of the Calvert Cliffs ruling and the Bal Harbour speech pleased environmentalists. Their guarded optimism about Schlesingers attitudes was perhaps best summarized by the title of an article about him in National Wildlife magazine: Theres a Bird Watcher Running
32 the Atomic Energy Commission. However, many of the same issues that had aroused concern before Schlesingers arrival continued to generate controversy and the chorus of calls for separation of the AECs promotional and regulatory divisions grew louder.
New Controversies and the End of the Atomic Energy Commission As the nuclear industry grew in the 1960s, the safe disposal of intensely radioactive waste materials became urgent. As early as 1957, leading experts had concluded that deep underground salt deposits were ideal for high-level waste repositories. In 1970, pressure from scientific authorities, Congress, and the press compelled the AEC to announce plans for a repository in an abandoned salt mine near Lyons, Kansas. In its haste, it aired its plans without thorough geologic and hydrologic investigations. The suitability of the site was soon challenged by the state geologist of Kansas and other scientists. A bitter dispute ensued between the AEC and members of Kansass congressional delegation and State officials. The dispute ended in a fiasco for the AEC when, in 1972, the opponents of the Lyons repository proved to have well founded concerns.
The myriad controversies surrounding the AEC frustrated Schlesingers hopes of increasing public confidence and of defusing the conflicts between opposing views. Perpetually on the defensive, the agency could not highlight its rigorous decisions on licensing and radiation safety. It came under increasing attack for its dual mandate. One critic said that it was like letting the fox guard the henhouse.
Attacks from environmentalists were not only threat to the existence of the AEC. Nixons ambitions for a major reorganization across several cabinet offices included plans to dismantle the agency. The president had, in fact, sent Schlesinger and Doub to the AEC with a mandate to ready it for its dissolution.
The White House proposed splitting off the regulatory staff and merging the AECs promotional offices into a huge department of natural resources. Although Nixons grand plan did not come to fruition, the AEC had so many liabilities that both its enemies and its friends supported breaking it up. Legislators floated multiple proposals favored by either nuclear and environmental interests. The Arab oil embargo and the energy crisis of 1973-1974 provided the catalyst for a compromise.
33 Prodded by Congressman Chet Holifield on the Joint Committee, Nixon asked Congress to create a new agency for energy research and an independent commission that could focus on, and presumably speed up, the licensing of nuclear plants. In October 1974, Congress divided the AEC into the U.S.
Energy Research and Development Administration and the NRC. The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, coupled with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, constituted the statutory basis for the NRC. The new agency inherited a mixed legacy from its predecessor, marked both by 20 years of conscientious regulation and by unresolved safety questions, substantial antinuclear activism, and growing public doubts about nuclear power.
Relieved of the AECs promotional responsibilities, the NRC had an exclusive mandate to ensure that civilian uses of nuclear energy were conducted safely.
The legislation preserved the AECs five-member commission structure and included several provisions to limit partisanship.
Commissioners could not be removed from office except for cause. Terms of office were staggered so that only one member was appointed in a single year. No more than three commissioners could represent one party. A legacy of the difficult relationship between Chairman Lewis Strauss and Congress, the NRCs chairmanship was a weak office; the chairman served as the agencys official spokesperson but was otherwise the equal of the other commissioners in conducing agency business. The legislation established an executive director of operationswith similarly limited authorityto lead the staff. It also established offices for nuclear reactor regulation, nuclear materials safety and safeguards, and regulatory research.
Critics panned the Energy Reorganization Act, dismissing it as a change in letterhead with no substance, because it did not change existing regulatory requirements, and the AEC regulatory staff was moved wholesale to the NRC.
However, the NRC was in fact profoundly different from the AEC. In expanding from several hundred staff members in the late 1960s to about 2,000 in 1975, it gained access to far greater technical expertise and took on substantial On October 11, 1974, President Gerald Ford signed the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974. At the end of the table is Dixy Lee Ray, the last Chairman of the AEC.
Credit NRC Archives.
34 authority to contract for confirmatory safety research. Quality was upgraded, as were expectations for transparency.
L. Manning Muntzing, the AECs last director of regulation expressed hope and worry for the new agency. He feared that the AEC had been overconfident and had overpromised on reactor safety. He even predicted there would be a significant but not fatal accident in the near future. But he was hopeful that the NRC could escape the stain of the dual mandate. There can be no mistaking the fact that the difficulties that the AEC once faced will not disappear simply because NRC was established, he told an audience:
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been freed from the albatross of apparent compromise that hindered the AEC.The creation of NRC provides an opportunity to carry out our responsibilities to protect the public health and safety free from any appearance of promotionalism. It is crucial to the resolution of our nationals energy difficulties that we accept this challenge and continue our policy of tough but fair regulation of nuclear energy.
What the NRC would make of this fresh start remained to be seen, but Congress had given it the mandate and the tools to be an independent, effective regulator.
Chapter Three:
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Three Mile Island
37 Chapter Three:
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Three Mile Island The NRC began operations in January 1975. It performed the same licensing and rulemaking functions as the AECs regulatory staff, but as it was an independent commission, its decisions were less susceptible to developmental priorities and Commission intervention.
This did not mean that the NRC acted without regard to industry concerns, but it did mean that the agencys statutory mandate was focused on safety.
The NRC deliberated over a number of pressing problems.
The need to protect nuclear materials had gained salience in the waning days of the AEC. Safeguards, a term which had once been applied to reactor safety, had come to mean the prevention of theft, loss, or diversion of nuclear fuel or other materials, or of the sabotage of nuclear plants. The wave of terrorist bombings, assassinations, hijackings, and murders that took place in the early 1970s, including the shocking murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, was raising new concerns that terrorists would try to build an atomic bomb.
Some nuclear experts issued much publicized warnings that making a bomb would not be terribly difficult for anyone who obtained weapons-grade material.
As a result, the AEC and the NRC substantially strengthened safeguards requirements domestically for the domestic transportation of nuclear materials The NRC Commission at the first swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol, January 23, 1975.
Left to right: Richard T. Kennedy, Edward A. Mason, Victor Gilinsky, Marcus A. Rowden, William Anders (Chairman), Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mrs.
Valerie Anders, and Supreme Court Justice Harry A.
Blackmun. Credit: NRC Archives.
38 and for nuclear plant security. In addition, the United States was the worlds leading exporter of nuclear fuel, and the NRC devoted considerable attention to safeguarding these exports.
Despite the prominence of safeguards problems, two reactor safety controversies commanded much of the NRCs attention. In March 1975, just 2 months after the agencys founding, a major fire broke out at the Tennessee Valley Authoritys Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Decatur, Alabama.
Maintenance workers were conducting repairs in a room containing trays of electrical cables used to operate the plants control room and safety systems.
The cables penetrated a wall between the room and the reactor building. To verify that the cable penetrations in the wall were properly sealed, a technician using a lighted candle to detect wisps of leaking air. The open flame ignited the insulation around the cables. The resulting fire raged for over 7 hours8.101852e-5 days <br />0.00194 hours <br />1.157407e-5 weeks <br />2.6635e-6 months <br /> and nearly disabled the safety equipment of one of the two affected units. The accident was a blow to the public image of nuclear power and focused new attention on the prevention of common-mode failures, in which a single mishap simultaneously incapacitates multiple redundant safety features.
The second source of controversy was the publication in October 1975 of the final version of the Reactor Safety Study that the AEC had commissioned in 1972. The study was the worlds first probabilistic risk assessment (PRA). It attempted to answer a question posed by Chauncey Starr, a leader in the nuclear industry, about reactor safety: How safe was safe enough? Starr thought that quantifying riskthe probability and consequences of a major accidentwould allow regulators to compare the risks of nuclear power to other societal risks. The prospect of answering its critics through risk quantification intrigued the AEC. However, developing a defensible methodology for doing so was a herculean task.
To direct the study, the AEC recruited Norman Rasmussen, a nuclear engineering professor at MIT. To carry out the project, The Rasmussen Reports risk estimates sparked intense controversy. This graph from its executive summary compares the risk of fatality from a reactor accident with the risks from natural events such as tornadoes and meteor strikes. Credit: NRC Archives.
39 Rasmussen needed about 60 AEC staff members and consultants at the cost of several million dollars. The Rasmussen report was hailed as a pioneering effort.
Its methodology, which included an innovative application of fault-tree analysis, is widely used today to estimate the probability and consequences of accidents in the nuclear power, aerospace, and chemical industries. Soon after its publication, however, the study came under heavy fire. Some authorities suggested that it failed to account for the many paths that could lead to major accidents. Others complained that the data did not support the studys executive summary, which stated that the risks from nuclear power were very small relative to those from fires, explosions, toxic chemical spills, dam failures, airplane crashes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes; in fact, they were so low, the executive summary suggested, that the risk from nuclear power was comparable to the risk of being struck by a meteorite. Critics argued that there was too much potential error in the studys estimates to support comparisons of nuclear accidents to such well-documented hazards.
Under pressure to answer these criticisms, the NRC formed a review committee under the direction of physicist Harold Lewis. The Lewis Committee praised the Rasmussen reports advanced methodology and consideration of a broad spectrum of possible accidents. It recommended greater use of PRA in regulation. However, it harshly criticized the calculational improvisations made by the Rasmussen team when there were limited data. Lewis stated that the report overstepped the state of the art and that, as critics had pointed out, its numerical estimates involved so much potential error that the executive summarys comparisons of nuclear power to other common hazards were inappropriate.
In response to the Lewis Committees finding, in January 1979, the Commission issued a statement withdrawing its endorsement of the Rasmussen reports executive summary. While it permitted the NRC staff to use PRA in regulatory decisions, it cautioned it to do so with the Lewis Committees criticisms in mind.
Press coverage treated the Commissions statement as a repudiation of the entire report. The NRCs flirtation with PRA seemed to be over.
40 The Three Mile Island Accident Just two months later, however, the Rasmussen reports analysis of severe nuclear accidents ceased to be hypothetical. On March 28, 1979, at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Station (TMI), Unit 2, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history took place. A series of mechanical failures, faulty control room indicators, and poor accident training had left TMIs operators ill prepared to diagnose and respond appropriately to plant conditions. They mistakenly turned off cooling pumps, which partially uncovered the reactor core.
About half of the fuel melted.
TMI was not brought down by a large break loss-of-coolant-accidentthe design basis accident that had long obsessed the AEC and the NRCbut by a more prosaic situation:
maintenance. Workers inadvertently caused a trip of the feedwater system. It was a routine mishap, but there was nothing routine about the way the plant and operators responded. As the reactor automatically shut down, a pressure relief valve was stuck open. The control room instrument panel misled the operators into thinking the valve was closed, and steam and water escaped the reactor undetected. The operators were mystified when the plant continued to lose pressure no matter what they did. The ECCS began to work according to design, but plant instruments convinced the operators that they were overfilling the reactor with water. They reduced ECCS flow to a trickle. By the time experts realized the source of the problem, the reactor had suffered irreparable damage.
Public fear snowballed as experts initially offered conflicting information about the level of danger, which greatly damaged the credibility of the nuclear industry and the NRC. The greatest source of concern was the formation of a hydrogen bubble in the reactor pressure vessel due to chemical reactions from the damaged fuel. Joseph M. Hendrie, Chairman of the NRC and a noted expert in reactor safety, worried the bubble might become explosive if enough free oxygen formed within it. It seemed plausible that a burn or explosion could rupture the Three Mile Island, looking southeast.The accident occurred in Unit 2, (reactor at the right of the photograph) near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Credit: NRC Archives.
41 pressure vessel, breach containment, and cause a massive release of radiation to the environment.
Hendrie immediately instructed the NRC staff to explore the danger posed by the bubble. News of the bubble prompted thousands to evacuate, joining those who had already left in response to an evacuation advisory to pregnant women and preschool-aged children. Over a 5-day period, about 144,000 people evacuated the area with remarkable calmness and efficiency.
While the NRC investigated the bubble problem, Governor Richard Thornburgh called a late-night press conference. Harold R. Denton, the NRCs chief staff official at the site, explained that the bubble did not pose an immediate threat. Dentons assurances curbed the sense of alarm among the local population. The following day, after a highly publicized tour of the plant by President Jimmy Carter, the NRC determined that oxygen would not form in the vessel in amounts that could cause ignition. Its initial warnings had scared the public for nothing.
This conclusion ended the acute phase of the TMI crisis. However, serious questions remained about the safety of nuclear power and theNRCs accident response.
In some ways, the TMI accident produced reassuring information about reactor safety. Despite the substantial core melting that had occurred, containment was not breached. Less than 20 curies of the 66 million curies of iodine-131 in the reactor escaped. Careful epidemiological studies of local populations conducted 20 years after the accident revealed no increase in cancer rates.
The NRCs Harold Denton (left) provides information on the situation at TMI-2 to President Jimmy Carter (Center) during his visit to the plant site. Also pictured Rosslyn Carter (right) and Richard Thornburgh (center left).Credit: Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.
Victor Stello, (center) NRC Director of Operating Reactors, speaks about the situation at TMI-2 at press conference.
Also in picture NRC staff members Harold Denton, Director, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation (left) and Joseph Fouchard, Director, Office of Public Affairs. Credit: Defense Civil Preparedness Agency.
42 However, the good news about radiation releases was overshadowed by the revelations that the AEC/NRC and the industry had been so preoccupied with the design basis accidenta large-break loss-of-coolant accidentthat they had overlooked how seemingly minor hardware malfunctions and poor control-room design could prove calamitous. Moreover, had information been shared about a virtually identical malfunction at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio, TMIs operators would have been aware that the pressurizer relief valve tended to stick open.
Perhaps the most distressing revelation of TMI was that an accident so severe could occur at all. The AEC/NRC and the industry had previously treated such an event as nearly incredible. Nuclear critics who had argued for years that no facility as complex as a nuclear plant could be made foolproof gained credibility.
Public support for nuclear power plunged. One survey found that for the first time, a majority of respondents opposed building more nuclear plants, though they did not want to abandon existing nuclear plants.
The NRC Response to the Accident at Three Mile Island The NRC responded to TMI by upgrading its safety requirements. The new requirements placed much greater emphasis on human factors, with improved operator training, testing, and licensing. In cooperation with industry groups, the NRC promoted the increased use of reactor simulators and the redesign of control rooms and instrumentation to improve the man-machine interface between operators and the reactor. The NRC also expanded its resident inspector program, placing at least two of its inspectors at each plant site.
Following TMI, the NRC and the industry launched research into problems that had previously received limited attention, including the possible effects of small failures like the ones at TMI that could lead to major consequences. The agency sponsored research into how small breaks and transients could threaten plant safety. It also began evaluating operational data from licensees to identify accident precursors.
The NRC undertook other initiatives to reduce the likelihood of an accident and cope if it did happen. It reviewed the adequacy of radiation protection procedures at operating plants, and it expanded research programs on problems highlighted by TMI, including fuel damage, fission-product release, and hydrogen generation and control. In light of the confusion over the evacuation after TMI,
43 the NRC upgraded emergency preparedness and planning.
The NRCs confused response to the accident led to calls in some quarters for the Commission to be disbanded and replaced by the decisive leadership of a single administrator. Others called for strengthening the offices of the Chairman and the Executive Director of Operations. In March 1980, the White House released its Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1980. Carter agreed with postaccident reports that the NRC had failed to exert unified leadership because of longstanding historical practice and conflicting and ambiguous legislative provisions that gave nearly equal authority to the five commissioners in running the agency.
The NRCs collective management practices constituted a continuing nuclear safety hazard. Carters alternative was a strong chairman commission. The Commission was to focus on policy, rulemaking, and adjudication. The chairman became responsible for agency management and emergency response. If a question arose over the dividing line between policy and management, the Commission as a whole remained the ultimate authority. The reorganization plan also strengthened the role of the Executive Director of Operations granting him powers comparable to a chief operating officer. He was to report directly to the chairman and execute delegated functions.
PRA and Safety Goals While TMI destroyed a reactor, it saved PRA. For all its flaws, the Rasmussen report had presciently identified many of the smaller mishaps that could cascade into a major accidenthuman factors, control room design, and small-break loss-of-coolant accidents. A post-TMI assessment excoriated the NRC for its inattention to these hazards and recommended that it rely in a major way upon quantitative risk analyses and by emphasizing those accident sequences that contribute significantly to risk. An NRC report noted that suddenly the potential value of PRA as a regulatory tooland the insights of the [Rasmussen report] itselfbecame apparent to the reactor-safety community.
Members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, shown here at a meeting held on April 4, 1979. Left to right:
John Ahearne, Richard Kennedy, Joseph Hendrie, Victor Gilinsky, and Peter Bradford. Credit: NRC Archives.
44 With a revived interest in PRA, the NRC explored ways to blend quantitative thinking with its qualitative Three Ds of safety. In 1980, it began developing safety goalsa numerical expression of plant safety that indicated that a facility was safe enough to protect the public in the event of an accident. The seeming objectivity and simplicity of a regulatory system based on quantified safety goals held broad appeal. The idea was that the NRC would establish a safety goal, such as requiring that a nuclear power plant have no more than one chance in a million of suffering a major accident. A licensee would simply need to demonstrate that level of safety with a PRA. Ideally, safety goals would clarify a system of regulation heretofore dominated by opaque engineering judgment and qualitative terms like adequate protection and defense in depth. In reality, however, the uncertainty involved in risk estimates made the use of PRA in regulation a challenge.
Drafting clear, descriptive qualitative goals was relatively easy. The first goal was that the risk to residents near a power plant should be such that individuals bear no significant additional risk to life and health. A second goal was that risk should be comparable to or less than the risks of generating electricity by viable competing technologies.
Quantitative goals were harder to formulate. PRA methodology had improved since the Rasmussen report, but risk estimates could still include large error bands. In 1986, the Commission approved a safety goal policy statement that acknowledged the sizable uncertainties and gaps in the database. Its quantitative goalsrenamed objectiveswere considered aspirational and were subject to revision as further improvements [were] made in probabilistic risk assessment. The Commission stated that the individual risk of a prompt fatality within 1 mile of a plant boundary should not exceed 0.1 percent of the prompt fatality risk from all other types of accidents. Within 50 miles of the plant, fatality risk from cancer could not exceed 0.1 percent of all cancer risks.
The safety goals made PRA a permanent regulatory fixture, but in acknowledging the limitations of PRA, the Commission made it clear that safety goals were supplemental to the Three Ds. Quantitative objectives had to be consistent with the traditional defense-in-depth approach and the accident mitigation philosophy requiring reliable performance of containment systems; it could not serve as the sole basis for licensing decisions. Nevertheless, the role of safety goals and PRA grew. As one NRC official said, Both PRA and safety goals are intertwined in a way that neither one can be used without the other. PRA technology with no goal in mind never tells you how to be satisfied. Safety goals without PRA would leave you blind to when you had achieved them.
45 Chernobyl Even as the NRC implemented post-TMI reforms, the worldwide nuclear power industry was rocked by the worst accident in its history. On April 26, 1986, Unit 4 of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl in the USSR underwent a violent explosion that destroyed the reactor and blew its top off, spewing massive amounts of radioactivity into the environment. The accident occurred during a test in which operators lost control of the reactivity in the reactor.
The Chernobyl design lacked essential safety elements common in Western design reactors, such as a containment building.
Operators were unaware that, in certain configurations, it could explode. Several dozen workers at the site died of acute radiation poisoning, and a radioactive plume spread far into other parts of the USSR and Europe. Although the radiation did not pose a threat to the United States, one measure of its intensity was that the levels of iodine-131 detected around Three Mile Island were three times higher after Chernobyl than during the TMI accident.
Supporters of nuclear power in the West criticized the USSRs poor safety culture and argued that a Chernobyl-type accident was not possible at a light-water reactors. Nuclear critics countered that Chernobyl was a prime example of the hazards of nuclear power. A representative of the UCS remarked, The accident at Chernobyl makes it clear. Nuclear power is inherently dangerous. A popular slogan that quickly appeared on the placards of European environmentalists was Chernobyl Is Everywhere. A poll conducted in May 1986 found that 78 percent of respondents opposed the construction of more nuclear plants in the United States. Utilities had not ordered any new plants since 1978, and the number of cancellations for planned units was growing. Were in trouble, conceded a spokesman for the Atomic Industrial Forum, Inc. If the calls I have received from people in the industry are a good indication, they are all very worried.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant in May 1986, a few weeks after the disaster. Photo courtesy of the IAEA photobank and Credit:
Ukrainian Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.
46 Licensing of New Plants and Emergency Planning The Chernobyl accident was a new concern, but the NRC pressed forward with new plant licensing. In the aftermath of the TMI accident, the NRC had suspended licensing of plants in the pipeline. This licensing pause for fuel loading and low-power testing ended in February 1980. In August 1980, the NRC issued the first post-TMI operating license (to North Anna Power Station, Unit 2, in Virginia). In the following 9 years, it granted full-power licenses to over 40 other reactors, most of which had received construction permits in the mid-1970s. In 1985, it authorized the undamaged TMI, Unit 1, which had been shut down for refueling at the time of the Unit 2 accident, to resume operation.
Although most licensing actions aroused little opposition, two cases precipitated bitter, protracted controversy: the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire and the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, New York.
The key issue in both cases was emergency planning. The lack of effective preparation during the TMI accident had produced confusion and uncertainty among decision-makers and members of the public. After the accident, the NRC, prodded by Congress, adopted a new rule. It required each licensee to work with police, fire, and civil defense authorities to develop a plan for evacuating the population within a 10-mile-radius emergency planning zone. The NRC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency would then test and approve the plan.
Some states recognized that they could try to prevent plant operation by refusing to participate in planning. That was precisely what New York and Massachusetts did at Shoreham and Seabrook. In New York, Governor Mario M. Cuomo and other State officials claimed that it would be impossible to evacuate Long Island if Shoreham suffered a major accident. Although emergency plans did not require the evacuation of all of Long Island, New York refused to cooperate in their development. The NRC granted Shoreham a low-power operating license, but the licensee eventually agreed not to operate the plant at all, in return for concessions from the State.
Opponents of a full-power license for Seabrook express their views at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, 1990. Credit: NRC Archives.
47 At Seabrook, the same conflict produced a different result. The plant is located in New Hampshire, but the 10-mile emergency planning zone extended across the state line into Massachusetts. While New Hampshire officials worked on emergency planning, Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis, largely on account of Chernobyl, refused to cooperate. The State of Massachusetts argued that the crowded beaches near Seabrook could not be evacuated safely. To break the deadlock, in 1988 the NRC adopted a realism rule in 1988 grounded on the premise that in an actual emergency, State and local governments would make every effort to protect public health and safety. On that basis, the NRC issued Seabrook an operating license. The battle between Federal and State authority in licensing nuclear plants was finally settled.
The lengthy licensing process exemplified by Shoreham and Seabrook (which had received their construction permit in 1973 and 1977, respectively) raised interest in simplifying and streamlining the regulatory practices. By the late 1980s, the nuclear power had begun to look more appealing to observers, including some environmentalists, because of growing concern about the consequences of burning fossil fuel, especially acid rain and global warming.
Moreover, nuclear vendors were advancing new passive safety features that greatly reduced the chances of severe accidents.
The NRC therefore supplemented its traditional two-step licensing process with a one-step system. Under a new regulation10 CFR Part 52, Licenses, Certifications, and Approvals for Nuclear Power Plants the NRC could issue a single combined construction permit and operating license. The new regulation also enabled the NRC to certify standard plant designs and issue early site permits. (The latter certified site suitability without reference to a specific plant design.)
However, 10 CFR Part 52 raised an important question: What level of detail would the NRC require in applications for advanced plants in resolving its concerns about their safety? The agency had never required construction permit proposals to contain the detailed technical information expected in operating license applications. Reconciling differing views among the commissioners, the NRC staff, and the industry, the agency reached a decision on what constituted an essentially complete design. It established a graded approach under which the level of detail required for a given structure, system, or component was determined by its relationship to plant safety.
48 Oversight of Operating Reactors The principal deficiencies in commercial reactor safety today are not hardware problems, they are management problems, concluded an NRC-sponsored evaluation of the TMI accident. The report castigated the NRC for having failed to take timely account of the actual operation of existing plants.
Attributing this failure to the Commissions fractured leadership style, the report recommended that the NRC be disbanded as a commission and reconstituted as a single-administrator agency.
The Commission was not disbanded, but the reports scathing conclusions struck a nerve. The NRCs oversight of operating reactors had been limited, deliberately so, based on the twin beliefs that a licensees ownership of a plant instilled a sense of ownership for safety and that a regulatory body was ill equipped to judge corporate management practices. Until TMI, the NRCs inspectors had served more to audit compliance with the rules than to assess management competence. Under pressure to become more rigorous, the NRCs inspection and enforcement regime undertook more of everything: more oversight, more inspections, more fines, and more plant shutdowns ordered.
Paradoxically, the post-TMI accident reports also scolded the NRC for excessive regulation. The NRC was left to resolve the paradox: How could it insert itself deeply and (when necessary) punitively into its licensees day-to-day operations without over-regulating and threatening the industrys viability? More oversight was sure to spark harsher enforcement and licensee conflict, and it did. Between 1978 and 1987 the number of fines the NRC levied on its licensees jumped more than eightfold.
The paradox was deepened by the wide variability in licensee performance.
By a number of plant indicators, the industry as a whole improved its safety record in the 1980s, but at particular plants, poor management and equipment maintenance caused repeated plant shutdowns and potential safety events. Well publicized lapses in safety culture forced the NRC to deliver severe penalties. At the Peach Bottom plant in Pennsylvania, dozens of plant operators were cited for inattentiveness (sleeping) while on duty. A Time magazine headline, Wake Me If Its a Meltdown, offered humorous commentary on a serious safety lapse. The NRC ordered a shutdown of Units 2 and 3 that lasted over 2 years. Peach Bottom was not alone. The Tennessee Valley Authoritys three units at Browns Ferry in Alabama remained offline for years. By 1989, the NRC-industry relationship was
49 so poor that executive director Victor Stello admitted to an industry audience that the United States had the worlds most adversarial relationship between regulators and industry We do not trust you, you do not trust us.
While TMI forced greater NRC oversight, quality assurance had already been a nagging concern in plant construction and operation. In 1974, a regulatory staff member in the AEC told a nuclear industry meeting, Considering the extent that AEC has gone in order to stress the importance of quality assurance, we find the continuing deficient programs to be quite disappointing. He suggested that utilities too often merely met the minimum requirements for quality assurance.
To improve existing practices, the AEC introduced a trial program of resident inspectors at two plant sites. Their assignment was to provide regular onsite verification that utilities were complying with regulations, information not reliably be obtained through the infrequent and comparatively superficial inspections performed during visits from regional offices. In 1977, the NRC determined that the resident inspector concept was workable and expanded the program to more facilities. After TMI, the NRC placed two resident inspectors at every site, and it instituted a new oversight and assessment process.
As the number of inspectors and inspections grew, the number of hours devoted to inspection procedures and monitoring of licensing performance increased; by the early 1980s it had doubled. Harried resident inspectors struggled to complete their tasks on schedule. The NRC looked to alternative performance assessment tools and began to make greater use of risk assessment and trend analysis. Through risk assessment, the agency could prioritize safety-relevant inspection activities while reducing regulatory burden.
In 1987, the NRC staff announced a shift to performance-based inspections.
The staff would directly observe plant activities in order to enhance safety and reliability, not just to confirm licensee conformance with regulations and procedures. Implementation, however, proved difficult. A 1994 industry report testified to the industrys view that inspectors citations were still inconsistent, arbitrary, and not risk informed. In 1995, the NRCs inspector general concluded that resident inspectors lacked a clear understanding of how to carry out the performance-based inspections.
The NRC did learn from its closer examination of licensees that maintenance was a problem. A 1985 NRC report found that more than 35 percent of the abnormal occurrences over the previous 10 years had been due to maintenance deficiencies. Many arose from human error, such as failing to follow procedures,
50 installing equipment incorrectly, or using the wrong parts. The need for improved maintenance was underscored when, in 1985, Ohios Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station lost all main and auxiliary feedwater because the systems had not been properly tested or maintained.
The nuclear industry was well aware of its shortcomings in maintenance programs and took steps to make improvements. The NRC applauded those efforts but concluded that the licensees still had a long way to go in the maintenance area. Therefore, in June 1988, the Commission directed the NRC staff to draft a maintenance rule as a matter of highest priority. In June 1991, despite industry objections, the Commission approved the rule.
The new rule was simple: Licensees had to establish a maintenance program, assess its performance regularly, and use the assessment results to improve the program. Although the nuclear industry considered the rule an unnecessary intrusion on management discretion, successful implementation of the rule quickly converted them to supporters. The NRC showed great flexibility in implementing the rule and encouraging the use of advanced risk assessment tools. It allowed the industry to develop its own implementing guidance document and to use expert panels combining PRA insights with expert judgment and defense-in-depth considerations. Licensees deployed new PRA tools that revealed potential risk in maintenance activities and allowed them to manage it. The rule was the first example of risk-informed regulation, a term that would not be coined for several years.
The maintenance rule pointed the way to a new risk-informed regulatory framework that was both safe and efficient. In 1996, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), an industry trade association, offered up a vision for creating a new paradigm and regulatory culture in our industry. Citing the success of the maintenance rule and the development of utility PRAs, the NEI suggested that the NRCs deterministic approach to regulations, which it considered inefficient, could be replaced with a quantitative probabilistic approach. The maintenance rule, the NEI asserted, had allowed licensees to halve the time they took to complete a refueling outage. By the year 2000, industry capacity factors jumped from about 65 percent to nearly 90 percent.
The two-for-one benefit of efficiency and safety made the maintenance rule a rare success. It pleased everyone. The rule allowed the NRC to fulfill its safety responsibilities with minimal intrusion on management, while licensees bottom lines benefited from improved plant capacity factors. Critic David Lochbaum, the director of the UCS Nuclear Safety Project, called it the best thing the NRC has done during my 40-year career in the nuclear power industry.
51 Radiation Standards While the NRC confronted new issues in the 1980s, old issues such as radiation protection standards re-emerged. Although in the 1970s the AEC had issued design objectives reducing the permissible levels of radioactive effluents from nuclear plants, the basic limits for occupational and population exposure had remained unchanged since 1961 (an average of 5 rem per year for radiation workers and 0.5 rem per year for the general population). Based on new recommendations from NCRP and ICRP, the NRC tightened its regulations in several areas. Most prominently, it reduced allowable population exposure from 0.5 rem to 0.1 rem per year.
Despite new scientific information, the health effects of low-level radiation remained uncertain. Some studies were reassuring; for example, a major survey conducted by the National Cancer Institute found no increased risk of cancer in 107 U.S. counties located near 62 nuclear power plants. However, a cluster of cancer cases was found near the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts, as was a high incidence of leukemia in children around the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Great Britain.
None of the studies on radiation were definitive. The issue remained a source of public anxiety, as evidenced by the public reaction to the NRCs proposed policy on certain radiation levels it called below regulatory concern (BRC). In June 1990, the NRC published a policy statement outlining its plans to exempt small quantities of low-level radioactive materials from regulatory controls. The agency proposed that if radioactive materials did not expose individuals to more than 1 millirem per year or a population group to more than 1,000 person-rem per year, they could be eligible for an exemption. The BRC policy would apply to consumer products, landfills, and other sources of very low levels of radiation.
The NRC explained that the BRC policy would enable it to devote more resources to issues of greater significance to public health and safety.
The NRCs announcement was greeted with a firestorm of protest from the public, Congress, the news media, and antinuclear activists. The NRC was accused of defaulting on its responsibility for public health and safety and of proposing to allow the nuclear industry to discard dangerous radioactive waste in public trash dumps. One antinuclear group alleged that it was a trade-off of peoples lives in favor of the financial interests of the nuclear industry. At NRC meetings angry citizens called for the commissioners to resign or be indicted on criminal charges. Eventually, the Commission deferred any action on the
52 BRC issue, believing it would be impossible to sponsor a calm and reasoned discussion on the subject.
The uproar over the BRC policy demonstrated the profound shift in the regulatory environment since the passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
A public that had welcomed the growth of nuclear power in the 1950s had become skeptical of the technology and its experts. The length and cost of the licensing process had grown commensurately. The Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts, granted an operating license in 1960, had a capacity of 175 MWe and cost about $39 million. Seabrook by comparison, produced 1,150 MWe and cost over $6 billion. The licensing of Yankee Rowe, arousing not a murmur of protest, took just 4 years from construction permit application to operating license approval. The licensing of Seabrook, completed in 1990s, endured 17 years of legal proceedings and angry demonstrations. As the 1990s began, the direction of the nuclear industry and the NRC was fraught and uncertain.
Chapter Four:
New Issues, New Approaches in the 1990s
55 Chapter Four:
New Issues, New Approaches in the 1990s In the 1980s, the bulk of the NRCs activities shifted from the licensing of new plants to overseeing operating plants, resolving the proper relationship between the regulator and licensee, and addressing issues related to plant aging, such as license renewal and decommissioning. Not surprisingly, these issues persisted into the 1990s and raised divisive questions with no ready answers.
Decommissioning and License Renewal In the late 1980s, the NRC took up plant decommissioning, the final step in a plants life cycle. Between 1947 and 1975, the AEC had decommissioned a total of 50 nuclear plants, including five small experimental power reactors. This experience gave the NRC confidence that regulating decommissioning would not be difficult. However, in the 1980s, an investigation by the U.S. General Accounting Office, congressional hearings, and a petition from environmental organizations forced the NRC to reconsider the question. In 1984, the staff reported to the Commission that existing regulations covered decommissioning in only a limited, vague, or inappropriate way and [were] not fully adequate.
As a result, the NRC drafted a rule that required licensees to specify how they planned to fund the cleanup of a site to radiation levels safe enough to permit the use of the land for other purposes. After soliciting public comments and making modest revisions, the NRC published a final rule on decommissioning in 1988.
The decommissioning rule was much more comprehensive than earlier NRC regulations, but an unanticipated question arose: What should be done about funding for reactors that had been shut down prematurely, without operating long enough to accumulate adequate decommissioning funds? The closing of three plants, including Shoreham, well before their operating licenses expired showed that this was a real possibility. Notably, the decommissioning of the Yankee Rowe plant proved much more costly than projected. The NRC also wrestled with determining the level of residual radiation that was acceptable
56 at decommissioned sites. This issue generated disputes not only with nuclear critics, but also with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
While some utilities closed reactors long before the expiration of their 40-year operating licenses, others wanted to extend the lives of their plants by many decades. The 40-year licensing period for nuclear plants was a rather arbitrary compromise written into the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 that originated not from technical information or operating experience but from the amortization period for fossil fuel plants. In the late 1970s, industry groups closely examined the issue of plant life extension. The Electric Power Research Institute concluded that the reconditioning of old plants offered potentially large benefits related to financial considerations, technical assessments, environmental issues, and projections of power availability. The industry also worried that the NRC was not prepared to address the question of license renewal promptly and knowledgeably.
In 1985, Chairman Nunzio J. Palladino directed the NRC to undertake an analysis of license renewal. The agency sponsored research on the safety effects of plant aging, but many technical questions remained. License renewal also raised complex legal and policy issues. The NRC staff cited the central regulatory question presented by plant life extension presented: What is an adequate licensing basis for renewing the operating license of a nuclear power plant?
Eventually, the NRC decided that licenses could be renewed for a maximum of 20 years and that existing regulatory requirements provided adequate protection for renewed licenses. Licensees had to demonstrate that the current licensing basis accounted for age-related safety issues. In 1991, the Commission approved a regulation on the technical requirements for license renewal. After considering ways to evaluate the environmental consequences of license renewal, the NRC elected to develop a generic environmental impact statement that covered effects common to most nuclear plants. In April 1998, Baltimore Gas and Electric Company became the first utility to apply for license renewal for its Calvert Cliffs plant on the Chesapeake Bay. Duke Energy Corporation followed suit in July 1998 for the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina.
57 Risk Assessment and Nuclear Safety As the NRC considered its policies on license renewal, the nuclear industry worried that the costs and uncertainties of the regulatory process would prove too burdensome. Industry protest about regulatory burden was nothing new, but the deregulation of the electric power industry that began in the early 1990s squeezed the profits of nuclear operators. NRC regulations seemed excessive and costly for a struggling industry. The industry decried the agencys numerical ratings of plant performance and its placement of certain plants on a watch list of marginal performers as arbitrary and inconsistent. Poorly rated licensees were seeing their stock values plunge.
The nuclear industry sought to document its dissatisfaction with NRC oversight.
A 1994 report prepared for the NEI by the Towers Perrin consulting company concluded that the NRCs inspection and enforcement practices represented a serious threat to Americas nuclear energy resource by distracting plant management with trivial violations, undermining public trust in nuclear power, and pricing nuclear power out of the competitive energy marketplace. The study found that the NRCs regulatory approach was negative and punitive.
The report called for a shift to performance-based assessments, with regulatory carrots and sticks for good and poor performers.
By the time of the Towers Perrin report, the NRC had begun to evaluate ways to factor risk assessment and performance indicators into the regulatory process.
As noted previously, nuclear industry representatives were pressing the NRC to replace its prescriptive regulations, which specified a rigid solutions to safety issues, with performance-based and risk-informed regulations. Licensees wanted greater leeway to accomplish regulatory goals and cut costs without sacrificing safety. NRC Chairman Ivan Selin (1992-1995) agreed, declaring, We feel that the NRC has been a factor in this [inefficient regulation] and that perhaps its time for us to step up our search for places where we may inadvertently cause more costs than justified by health and safety. In 1991, the Commission instructed the NRC staff to develop approaches to regulations that focused more on a result to be obtained, rather than prescribing to the licensee how the objective is to be obtained.
Despite the approval of the safety goal policy statement, the industry was concerned that much of the NRC staff remained wedded to deterministic analysis and defense in depth. This approach had worked well in protecting public safety; for example, defense in depth was critical in preventing sizable releases of radiation at TMI. However, defense in depth was not effective in
58 prioritizing for attention the most risk-significant hazards or in judging the risk benefits of sometimes expensive safety upgrades. Proponents argued that PRA could better deal with such issues.
In the 1980s, the NRC had made significant improvements to the PRA methodology, but many uncertainties remained about how to apply PRA to regulation. For example, an NRC tabulation of data on the probability of core melting indicated that PRA risk estimates could be either higher or lower than the true result by an order of magnitude. A 1985 report from the U.S. General Accounting Office report took note of the substantial limitations of PRA results.
It praised the NRCs decision to limit PRA applicability to environmental impact statements, prioritizing safety issues, and determining the benefit of proposed regulations.
By the 1990s, the state of the art of PRA had advanced. In January 1991, the NRC completed NUREG-1150, Severe Accident Risks: An Assessment for Five U.S. Nuclear Power Plants, a major PRA study that it hailed as a significant turning point in the use of risk-based concepts. In 1995, the Commission unanimously adopted a PRA policy statement that encouraged the broadening of PRA applications to allow a focus on the riskiest plant hazards and to ease unnecessary burdens on licensees. Indicative of PRAs increased acceptance, the NRC adopted the principle of risk-informed, performance-based regulation.
Nevertheless, PRA still played a supporting role to the Three Ds and expert judgment. The continuing influence of deterministic analysis was highlighted in 1997 when the Commission voted to require a containment spray system in a new Westinghouse plant design even though PRAs indicated that the design was adequate without it.
The Millstone Controversy Although risk-informed regulation offered many potential benefits to the NRC and the industry, it did not necessarily encourage public confidence in nuclear power or in the NRC. This fact was amply demonstrated when a series of problems arose at the Millstone Power Station in Connecticut. The safety issues at Millstone were not so serious that risk analysis was likely to identify them as high-priority matters. Commissioner Nils J. Diaz commented in 1997 that of the many issues to be resolved at Millstone, only a handful appear to have been safety significant. Nevertheless, the failures at Millstone led to a barrage of criticism.
The uproar over Millstone began in the early 1990s when several plant employees claimed that they were had been harassed, intimidated, or dismissed from their
59 jobs by Northeast Utilities for calling attention to violations of NRC regulations.
In 1993 and again in 1994, the NRC fined Northeast Utilities for procedural violations that the agency viewed as serious management lapses. The utility pledged to improve its performance and to resolve issues raised by [its]
employees.
Another issue reported by company employees triggered new concerns. In this case, the whistleblowers objected to the companys practice of placing Unit 1s entire nuclear core into the spent fuel pool during refueling operations. NRC regulations specified that in older plants such as Millstone, Unit 1, only one-third of the spent fuel rods could be moved into the pool. However, Unit 1 had performed full-core offloading for years as an emergency procedure, with the NRCs knowledge. After its employees questioned the practice, Northeast Utilities applied for a license amendment to permit full-core offloading.
The NRC approved it in November 1995. However, the agency also concluded that the utility had harassed employees and assessed a fine against it of $100,000, the maximum amount allowed by law. The NRCs action in this case did not satisfy the dissidents at Millstone, who insisted that the agency was neither prompt nor firm with the licensee on safety issues or in protecting them. The NRC investigated the concerns raised by these whistleblowers and determined that they were not of major significance and had been corrected.
Nevertheless, the agency tightened its whistleblower-protection policies.
The utility and the NRC were the subjects of extensive and unflattering coverage in local and national media. In March 1996, Time magazine ran a cover story on the whistleblowers who had caught the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at a dangerous game. The article suggested that an accident in a spent fuel pool posed the hazard of releasing massive amounts of radiation and rendering hundreds of square miles uninhabitable. It charged that the NRC may be more concerned with propping up an embattled, economically strained industry than with ensuring public safety. NRC Chairman Shirley Jackson conceded that the Time article demonstrated that not all aspects of nuclear regulation or nuclear operations in certain places are as they should be, but she strongly denied that the Millstone situation borders on an impending TMI or Chernobyl type disaster.
The Millstone controversy earned the NRC unflattering publicity in the national press, including a cover story in Time magazine.
60 Amid the growing criticism, the NRC conducted its own reviews to identify and correct errors brought to light by the Millstone experience. An internal task force reported in September 1996 that the safety significance of Millstones refueling practices was low. Nevertheless, it recommended a series of procedural, informational, and management improvements designed to ensure that licensees complied with NRC regulations.
The NRC sought to minimize recurring exemptions from its regulations, such as those that occurred for the refueling practices at Millstone. Exemptions were intended to apply to special circumstances in which certain requirements could be waived without compromising public safety. The agency also studied a frequently used provision in its regulations that allowed licensees to make changes in their plants without NRC permission. In 1999, the Commission revised the rule on when NRC consent was necessary within a risk-informed framework. Meanwhile, the probe into Millstones management expanded. In May 1996, the NRCs inspector general faulted the agency for failing to impose prompt corrective action. Subsequent NRC and utility investigations turned up hundreds of performance and procedural deficiencies. The NRC announced it would not allow Millstones three units to restart without formal permission.
The utility made management changes, took steps to address its problems, and permanently closed Unit 1. The Commission authorized the restart of Unit 2 (in 1999) and Unit 3 (in 1998). Millstone threw into sharp relief the general difficulties that the NRC had encountered with plants that did not perform well or correct their deficiencies effectively. The Commission devoted a great deal of energy to encouraging or forcing other licensees to improve operational performance.
In 1997, the number of nuclear power plants on the NRCs watch list shot up from six to 14.
A Near-Death Experience In suffering for the sins of Millstone, the nuclear industry had enough. After the Republican Revolution of 1994, it turned to a Congress friendly to its predicament: it was supportive of business, skeptical of bureaucrats, and instinctively averse to regulation. The industry found an ally, Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, whom it armed with a study that estimated 700 NRC staff members could be cut without impact to safety. The reduction in force was to be applied like the tenth plague of Passover in singling out its victims, which included 500 engineers and inspectors heavily involved in oversight. In raising
61 the possibility of such cuts, Domenici said he wanted to get the NRCs attention. It worked.
Chairman Jackson assured him that the NRC would change it policies, particularly those on licensee oversight. The budget cuts were scaled back.
In June, the Commission directed an end to adversarial oversight. Enforcement, they told the staff, should not be the driving force of a new assessment program. The NRC worked with the industry to develop the Reactor Oversight Process, which combined a probabilistic approach with defense in depth expressed through cornerstones of safety. Plant performance was graded through a more transparent and objective color-coded scheme that measured increments of increasing risk from performance indicators, and enforcement was calibrated to the safety significance of an infraction. Except for issues found to be in the lowest category of safety significancea green findingNRC specialists were to assess the risk of licensee infractions. Those assessed as being of higher risk would require more NRC oversight resources, public involvement, and utility planning.
The NRCs near death experience was both a turning point in risk-informed regulation and a stark reminder that there were limits to a commissions independence. At an agencywide meeting, one staffer observed to Jackson that the NRC had been relatively resistant to political pressure and expressed resentment that we are being threatened by someone who has the power of the purse over us. Jackson responded, We are creatures of Congress, and we have a responsibility to be responsive.Congress has provided us with a platform to accelerate our movement in a direction we know we must go, a direction we ourselves already had decided we needed to go.
This cartoon by Bill Whitehead reflects the opinion popular in the nuclear industry that the NRC was a heavy-handed regulator that often focused on unimportant safety issues. Credit: Cartoon Stock.
62 Regulating Nuclear Materials Although reactor safety issues captured the lions share of public notice, the NRC also devoted substantial resources to a variety of complex matters related to nuclear materials safety and safeguards. The protection of nuclear materials from theft and diversion remained a major agency concern. In cooperation, and sometimes in conflict, with other government agencies, the NRC evaluated the safety problems involved in building and operating repositories for high-and low-level radioactive waste. Despite Federal legislation that attempted to provide the means for establishing permanent waste sites and the efforts of government officials, scientists, engineers, and other professionals, the disposal of radioactive wastes remained a source of intense public concern and bitter political controversy. The NRC also considered its role in regulating certain medical uses of radioactive materials. Although it exercised only limited responsibilities in the field of radiation medicine, it sought to ensure that patients received the proper doses of radiation from procedures under its regulatory authority. The agencys rules elicited protests from medical practitioners and organizations who complained about the intrusion of regulatory overkill into physician-patient relationships.
The issues surrounding reactor oversight, the regulation of nuclear materials, the problems at Millstone, and the use of risk assessment in regulatory decision-making underscored the prevailing patterns in the history of nuclear regulation. The nuclear industry and materials licensees often asserted that regulatory requirements were too burdensome, inflexible, and strict. Nuclear critics countered that regulatory requirements were too lax, sympathetic to industry concerns, and inattentive to public safety. The NRC, and the AEC before it, attempted to find the proper midpoint between inadequate and excessive regulation, but this task was difficult and usually elicited rebukes from both sides.
The NRC sought to separate valid criticisms from those that were exaggerated or ill formed, but this process received little praise for its efforts. The need to ensure the safe operation of nuclear power plants without imposing undue burdens meant that regulation would remain complex and controversial. The bane of the regulator, a senior agency official remarked in 1998, is to feel unloved.
Chapter Five:
Regulation in a New Century
65 Chapter Five:
Regulation in a New Century On January 19, 2001, when the NRC marked its 25th anniversary it was facing many of the same issues and controversies that had been prominent in the first-quarter century of its history. Then, the new century brought sudden developments that took the agency in unexpected directions.
The Impact of the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 The first shock was the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon building near Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. The air assaults by suicide squads raised the specter that nuclear plants were vulnerable to a range of terrorist attacks, including a direct hit from a high-speed airplane loaded with fuel.
As soon as the NRC learned of the attacks, it told its licensees to move to their highest level of security readiness.
They augmented security forces on site, increased patrols, and restricted plant access. The NRC pointed out that its security requirements were already rigorous. In September 2002, Chairman Richard A. Meserve commented, I am aware of no other industry that has had to satisfy the tough security requirements that the NRC has had in place for a quarter of a century.
In February 2002, the NRC ordered a series of security measures, many of which formalized steps taken immediately after the terrorist attacks. For security reasons, the NRC offered few details After 9/11, the NRC ordered licensees to tighten access controls and expand security-force capability. It also created the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response to serve as the agencys focal point for security programs. Pictured is a well armed security officer inside a guard tower.
Credit: NRC Archives.
66 about the enhanced requirements. Broadly, it instructed licensees to obtain portable equipment to help operators cope with the effects of fires and explosions. It also ordered greater security-force capability, tightened plant access, additional physical barriers, performance of vehicle inspections farther from reactors, and improved coordination with military and law enforcement agencies.
The NRC decided that each plant would carry out and evaluate force on force exercisesdrills to assess a licensees ability to defend against a commando-style attackevery 3 years instead of every 8 years. In April 2002, the Commission created the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response as the focal point for the NRCs security programs. In April 2003 and March 2006, the NRC issued upgraded requirements for the design-basis threat that plant owners had to be prepared to meet. Licensees had to guard against the largest reasonable threat against which a regulated private guard force should be expected to defend under existing law.
Some members of Congress considered the NRC and industry response as inadequate. They introduced legislation to establish a Federal guard force under NRC authority. The NRC objected that this would be a costly, unwieldy solution that would not benefit security and would compromise the agencys ability to promote reactor safety. In 2003, Daniel Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, David Lochbaum of UCS, and Edwin Lyman of the Nuclear Control Institute accused the NRC of keeping a dirty little secretthat it required nuclear plant owners to maintain only a minimal security capability. They asserted that the defensive posture envisioned by the design-basis threat would leave security forces ill equipped to fight off a well-armed band of commandos. The trio maintained that the simulated attacks that the NRC used to test a plants readiness, called Operational Safeguards Response Evaluation (OSRE), showed severe weaknesses. At nearly half the nuclear plants where security has been OSRE-tested, they wrote, mock attackers have been able to enter quickly and simulate the destruction of enough safety equipment to cause a meltdown.
The NRC strongly disagreed. Commissioner Edward McGaffigan, Jr., was particularly outspoken in responding to such indictments. He denied suggestions that nuclear plants were soft targets and emphasized that they were hard targets by any conceivable definition. He accused critics of distorting the results of the OSRE drills. These were not pass-fail exams. They were meant to identify weaknesses that needed to be corrected. He pointed out that although the mock assault teams had almost perfect knowledge of the plants defenses and perfect knowledge of the plants layout and the equipment they need to attack to try to bring about core damage, they succeeded in reaching their
67 targets in only nine of the 59 exercises carried out between April 2000 and August 2001. In addition, the successes that they achieved revealed flaws that were promptly fixed.
Plant security remained a topic of controversy and reevaluation. For example, in September 2003, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that despite the actions taken after the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks, the NRC needed to improve the collection and dissemination of information, tighten inspection and access procedures, and plan more realistic exercises. In November 2004, the NRC began to carry out drills that reflected improvements made after the 9/11 attacks, including the new design basis threat and more realistic scenarios.
The NRC also considered the effects of an airplane hitting a reactor building or spent fuel pool. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the NRC acknowledged that nuclear plant builders did not specifically contemplate attacks by aircraft such as Boeing 757s and 767s, and nuclear plants were not designed to withstand such crashes. The only operating plant designed to guard against the impact of a large airplane was TMI, located 3 miles from Harrisburg International Airport. It was designed to withstand a plane of about 200,000 pounds accidentally hitting the plant at a speed of 230 miles per hour. The planes that terrorists hijacked on September 11, 2001, were heavier and hit their targets at speeds of 350 to 537 miles per hour. Although the NRC pointed out that containment buildings were extremely rugged structures, it could not predict with certainty the consequences of such an attack.
In June 2002, the NEI announced the results of a study conducted by the Electric Power Research Institute. We think its extremely unlikely that the aircraft would be able to penetrate the reactor, an NEI official declared. We feel very, very confident about the containment structure. The report analyzed the effects of a plane hitting the reactor building at various angles at about 350 miles per hour.
It did not consider the impact of a plane traveling at a greater speed because the probability that a pilot could strike the target at a high speed and at low altitude was virtually nil.
Nuclear critics were not convinced. Lyman questioned the methodology of the NEI study and contended that an airplane piloted by a terrorist could indeed crash through containment with catastrophic consequences. The NRC, based on the research of national laboratories and its own staff, arrived at conclusions that were supportive of, but more equivocal than, those of the NEI. In September 2004, the agency reported that if an airplane struck a nuclear plant, it could cause radiation releases. However, the NRC found it unlikely that a crash would lead to a large release of radioactive materials and emphasized that plant operators would have sufficient time to take mitigating actions.
68 Nuclear critics argued that even if the containment structure was strong enough to withstand the impact of an airplane, spent fuel pools are much more vulnerable. These pools, which hold highly radioactive fuel rods after their removal from the core, are housed in separate buildings that are less robust than the containment structures that protect reactors. The fuel rods are stored under at least 20 feet of water, which is enough of a barrier to prevent radiation exposure for persons standing above the pools. The walls of the pools are built with steel-reinforced concrete that is 4 to 6 feet thick. In 2003, a group of eight respected nuclear critics published an article predicting an airplane or an anti-tank missile attack could drain the cooling water from a spent fuel pool, ignite a large fire, and cause consequences significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. The article was often referred to as the Alvarez report after the first-listed author, Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies.
The NRC staff carefully reviewed the Alvarez study. It concluded that the report suffered from excessive conservatisms and failed to make its case for the need for costly measures to improve the security of spent fuel storage. Alvarez and his coauthors had drawn heavily from earlier studies conducted or sponsored by the NRC, and the agency commented that most of these studies are not applicable to terrorist attacks. It stated that research performed since the 9/11 attacks showed that the hazards cited in the Alvarez report were overstated and misleading. Existing methods of storing spent fuel were sufficient to adequately protect the public. Alvarez and his colleagues complained that the NRC had criticized their findings but had refused to make public the new classified studies on which it relied. They accused the NRC of hiding its analysis behind a curtain of secrecy.
Congress responded to the standoff by requesting a study by the National Academy of Sciences. A group of 15 scientists conducted the investigation.
Their findings, announced in April 2005, were that a successful terrorist attack would be difficult to execute but would be possible under some conditions.
The panel argued that there were no requirements in place to defend against the kinds of larger scale, premeditated, skillful attacks that were carried out on September 11, 2001. The NRC announced that it respectfully disagreed. It also suggested that even if a spent fuel pool were drained, a fire hose or two could provide enough water to cool the fuel rods. The differences of opinion between the National Academy and the NRC were not easily resolved. The NRC could not legally share sensitive, although unclassified, information about nuclear plant security.
69 This issue led to sharp exchanges with the National Academy, which complained that guidelines for making safeguards information available were vague.
The New York Times found it disturbing that the Commission, in the name of national security, denied the academy the information needed to assess the ef fectiveness of security improvements instituted since 9/11. It called the dispute a sorry episode. Despite the acrimony of the debate, the NRC carried out one of the National Academys major recommendations by instructing licensees to reposition fuel rods in spent fuel pools in a way that would reduce the buildup of heat and decrease the chances of a disastrous fire.
Davis-Besses Hole in the Head At the same time that the NRC was evaluating security requirements at nuclear power sites, it was responding to the most serious safety issue that had arisen since the TMI accident. In February 2002, an inspection of the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant revealed significant degradation of the pressure vessels headthe 6.5 inch thick carbon-steel lid on top of the reactor vessel. Corrosion had created a large cavity the size of a pineapple in the vessel head. Only a thin layer of stainless-steel cladding about three-eighths of an inch thick on the inside of the head remained as the last barrier to a loss-of-coolant accident.
The discovery of the corrosion of the reactor vessel head raised a number of troubling questions. The critical issue was why the utility and the NRC had failed to identify the problem sooner. Investigations by First Energy and the NRC revealed that the company had paid insufficient attention to signs of corrosion and had made erroneous assumptions, based on incomplete information, about the need for careful inspection of the head. The utility admitted that there was a focus on production, established by management, combined with taking minimum actions to meet regulatory requirements, that resulted in the acceptance of degraded conditions. Lew Myers, Chief Operating Officer of First Energy, told the NRC that he was humbled and in fact embarrassed.
The NRC established a Lessons Learned Task Force to examine the agencys role in the deficiencies at Davis-Besse. The task force concluded that staff shortages and the attention commanded by other troubled plants in the NRCs Region III office had distracted its inspectors from Davis-Besse, which was regarded as a good performer. The number of inspection hours at Davis-Besse was consistently below average for the region, and job openings for resident inspectors at the facility went unfilled for lengthy periods. The task force criticized the inspectors for not recognizing the severity of the corrosion problem, reporting it to superiors, or following established procedures for dealing with it.
70 The hole in the head issue received considerable local and national press coverage. The problem of corrosion at Davis-Besse soon became linked to the NRCs industrywide inquiry into a generic problem of potential cracking in control rod drive mechanism nozzles in the vessel head. On August 3, 2001, the NRC had instructed owners of reactors like Davis-Besses to check the integrity of the drive mechanism nozzles in their plants by December 31, 2001. The agency acted in response to the discovery of circumferential cracking at two pressurized-water reactors, a defect that could over time cause a serious accident. The inspections would have to be performed when plants were shut down but before the end of 2001.
The NRC specified that the date could be moved back if the staff judged on a case-by-case basis that the risks were acceptably small. First Energy petitioned the NRC to postpone the Davis-Besse inspection until a scheduled outage on March 31, 2002. After several communications with First Energy, including a licensee risk assessment, the NRC staff determined in a divided vote that the utility could run the plant until February 16, 2002, without triggering a significant safety concern.
Had the NRC erred in its use of risk assessment to determine that the plant could operate beyond the December 31, 2001, deadline? In December 2002, the NRCs inspector general sent a report on Davis-Besse to the Commission.
He had undertaken the study in response to charges from UCS that the agency The reactor pressure vessel at the Davis-Besse shows a buildup of boric acid deposits from leaking nozzles (not shown). The utility later discovered the acid had corroded part of the pressure vessel head, triggering a 2-year shutdown to repair the damage. Photo taken during the refueling outage at Davis-Besse in 2000. Credit: NRC Archives.
This cleaned-away view of the eroded Davis-Besse vessel head shows thin inner liner of stainless steel that prevented a loss-of-coolant accident. The darker metal is the 6.5-inch vessel head composed of carbon steel.
Credit: NRC Archives.
71 had failed to adequately regulate the plant. The inspector general strongly criticized the NRCs poor documentation of its decision-making process and its consideration of risk information. The report accused the NRC of having considered the financial impact to the licensee of an unscheduled plant shutdown.
In an unusually unvarnished response, the NRC commissioners told the inspector general that although they agreed with some aspects of the report, they regarded the most serious criticisms as unjustified, unfair, and misleading. They were especially incensed by the suggestion that they had placed the financial well-being of First Energy above public health and safety. They pointed out that the NRC had permitted the short extension beyond the original deadline only after careful consideration by the staff, and they faulted him for not anticipating that the report would be misconstrued to suggest staff acceptance of the unexpected head corrosion at the Davis-Besse plant. They complained that the staff did not know about the head corrosion at the time of its decision and, quite frankly, it is Monday-morning quarterbacking to question the decision on
[circumferential] cracking in the false light of subsequent knowledge.
The inspector generals report provoked a barrage of attacks on the NRC, at least some of which were based on the erroneous premise that the agency had authorized Davis-Besse to continue operation even though it knew about the corrosion of the reactor head. The Toledo Blade reported that the NRC had shown reckless complacency by coming down on the side of corporate profits in a way that led to a near calamity at the plant. The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) denounced NRC Chairman Meserve and his equally narrow-minded colleagues for badmouthing the inspector generals report and charged that they had failed to put safety at the top of their agenda.
The controversy over Davis-Besse continued even after First Energy completed the repairs on the vessel head and the NRC allowed it to resume operation in March 2004. The central question concerned the possible consequences had the stainless steel cladding on the inside surface of the head failed. Critics of the NRC and First Energy claimed that the plant had been on the verge of a catastrophic accident. Paul Gunter of the Nuclear Resource and Information Service accused the NRC of obscuring just how close we were to losing Toledo.
The NRC readily conceded that a break in the cladding could have led to a loss-of-coolant accident and that the ignorance of the corrosion had constituted an enormous failure on the part of the agency and the utility. However, it denied that fracture of the cladding would have inevitably have led to a massive release of radiation from the plant. The agency emphasized that the other barriers
72 (including the containment building) that are in place would have, in all likelihood, have prevented the escape of radiation. NRC Chairman Nils Diaz pointed out that a variety of safety systems was available and that even if the stainless steel liner had been breached, the layers of safety would have protected Ohioans.
Davis-Besse did compel the NRC to revisit its posture of deference to the nuclear industry on safety culture. While everyone agreed that a positive safety culture was essential to safe operation, no one had found an objective way to quantify it. The NRC tended to defer to the nuclear industrys Institute of Nuclear Power Operations to promote excellence within the industry. There had been a significant reduction in safety significant events since TMI. Nevertheless, the weaknesses in Davis-Besses safety culture indicated that the NRCs resident inspectors needed more ways to provide qualitative input to licensees. The NRC therefore added opportunities for resident inspectors to identify potential weaknesses in a licensees safety culture and require a licensee self-assessment.
In 2011, the NRC approved a safety culture policy statement that identified some of the common elements of a positive safety culture.
A Nuclear Renaissance?
Even as the NRC was dealing with new challenges to reactor safety from terrorist attacks and from the lapses at Davis-Besse, the nuclear power industry was showing its first signs of revival after a slump of more than two decades. The comprehensive post-TMI reforms in operator training, plant management, control room design, and equipment had significantly improved the safety and reliability of nuclear power. Generating costs fell as the capacity factora measure of the percentage of time a plant can produce powerincreased from 50 to 60 percent in the 1970s to 90 percent in the 21st century. A series of safety indicators improved, including the number of reactor scrams (the sudden shutdown of a nuclear reactor), the number of safety system failures, and collective radiation exposure for plant workers. Yet, because of the high capital costs of nuclear power plant construction relative to other sources of power, in the late 1990s it appeared doubtful that any new reactors would be built. The industry is doing better now, Matthew Wald wrote in The New York Times in March 1999, but ironically extinction is in sight.
Prospects brightened considerably in the 21st century. During the 1990s, energy consumption in the United States rose by about 23 percent while production expanded by less than 3 percent. In May 2001, President George W.
Bushs administration estimated that the nation would need at least 1,300 and
73 perhaps 1,900 new power plants over the next two decades. Fossil fuel plants no longer seemed like a sure bet. A growing percentage of the countrys oil came from politically unreliable nations and domestic refining capacity had declined substantially. Coal was plentiful but dirty. Natural gas had been the fuel source of choice during the 1990s, but there were acute concerns about the adequacy of supplies and cost. In that context, nuclear power seemed worthy of consideration. NRC Chairman Meserve commented,We have even seen the first stirring of interest in the possibility of [nuclear plant] construction in the United Statesa thought that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.
The advantages of nuclear power became even more apparent as public concern over global warming grew. As far back as 1899, scientists had theorized that increasing quantities of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could lead to climate change. In 1965, a report to the Presidents Science Advisory Committee suggested that increasing levels of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, which it called the invisible pollutant, could have a significant effect on climate.
Demands to stabilize concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising electricity demand gave nuclear power new life.
In 2000, a group of analysts from various fields of expertise argued in Science magazine that nuclear power can play a significant role in mitigating climate change. Their position received strong support from an interdisciplinary study conducted at MIT in 2003. The report, entitled The Future of Nuclear Power, pointed out that over the next 50 years, unless patterns change dramatically, energy production and use will contribute to global warming through large-scale gas emissionshundreds of billions of tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide. It concluded.[The] nuclear option should be retained precisely because it is an important carbon-free source of power. It urged that steps be taken to expand knowledge of safety issues throughout the nuclear fuel cycle, to improve international safeguards, and to resolve the problem of waste disposal.
The study also called for financial incentives to encourage the construction of nuclear plants and other carbon-free sources of energy.
The capital costs of building a nuclear plant were widely viewed as the major deterrent to industry growth. Despite the need for more energy, the fear of global warming, and growing public support for nuclear power, the Financial Times reported in 2005 that investing the billions of dollars needed to construct new reactors remains an enormous gamble. That same year, President Bush signed an energy bill to ease the financial burdens on new nuclear plants with loan guarantees and other subsidies. The revival of the nuclear option proceeded steadily but not without considerable uncertainty. In 2006, National Geographic
74 ran an article entitled Its Scary. Its Expensive. It Could Save the Earth. It began by asking the question, Nukes Again? Its answer: Maybe.
At the NRC, the future seemed bright. Congress appropriated billions to help guide new construction applications through the NRCs new combined licensing process under 10 CFR Part 52. By 2010, it was possible to believe that a nuclear industry comprising both old and new reactors might flourish. The NRC received 18 applications for 28 new reactors, and the agency was busy processing a large backlog of license renewal applications. As the industrys economic outlook improved, the lessons from Davis-Besse, the maintenance rule, the Reactor Oversight Process, safety goals, and other risk-informed initiatives now were connected to the larger purpose of keeping the old nuclear fleet alive until the anticipated renaissance of new nuclear power could begin. At the NRCs annual Regulatory Information Conference in 2011, Commissioner William Ostendorff told the assemblage of regulators and industry participants, I envision that nuclear has a clear, important role in our future.
Fukushima The Tohoku earthquake of March 11, 2011, registered 9.0 on the Richter scale, the fourth strongest earthquake in history.
In the Japan Trench, off the coast of the island nation, a quake of such magnitude had been considered an incredible event. Japans already strict building codes, upgraded after the 1995 Kobe quake, worked as intended. High-rise buildings around the island swayed, but for a temblor that easily exceeded safety margins, damage was limited. On the coast north of Tokyo, there were 14 nuclear power plants clustered at five stations. Each reactor in operation shut down, started its diesel generators, and began cooling down. Even with an earthquake that exceeded their design basis, the plants were safe.
The NRC team tours the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant wearing respirators and full protective clothing. Credit:
NRC Archives.
75 The tsunami defenses at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, however, proved inadequate to the wave that arrived about 50 minutes after the quake. Flooding disabled all diesel generators at the four oldest units, as well as electrical switchgear and cooling pumps, resulting in common cause failure of multiple redundant safety systems. Heroic efforts by Dai-ichi station workers to bring in emergency mobile diesel generators, pumps, and cooling water also failed.
Within a few hours, the water level in the Unit 1 reactor vessel dropped below the top of the reactor fuel. The core melted releasing dangerous hydrogen gas.
Twenty-four hours after the tsunami, Unit 1s reactor building exploded; Unit 3s followed two days later. The reactor cores at Units 1-3 melted down.
If Fukushima could be distilled into one lesson, it was that operators need training and readily available resources to cope with severe accidents that disable installed safety systems. This was an insight the NRC first gained after the 9/11 attacks, which highlighted the potential threat to plant safety from unimagined sources. After the attacks, the NRC ordered licensees to have equipment readily available to respond to explosions and fires. Subsequent NRC research found that such strategies could be crucial during severe accidents, since core meltdowns and containment failures evolved more slowly than in previous studies had indicated: Personnel had more time than previously believed to impede an accidents progression and carry out an orderly evacuation.
After Fukushima, the NRC staff built on its post-9/11 regulations. Licensees expanded coping strategies to protect the reactor core, containment integrity, and spent fuel pools, particularly during a station blackout such as Fukushima experienced. The nuclear industry organized a mitigation strategy called FLEX to ensure that there were multiple sources of power and cooling that could be brought to a reactor in trouble. In 2019, the NRC consolidated the orders it issued after Fukushima into a regulation to mitigate beyond-design basis events.
Post-accident assessments also argued in favor of increased use of risk insights for external events. An International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report issued in 2015 concluded that the Japanese regulatory system and the Tokyo Electric Power Company would have benefited from external-hazard PRAs that met IAEA standards for thoroughly analyzing common-cause The NRCs Near-Term Task Force Review of Insights from Fukushima Dai-ichi Accident dated July 12, 2011.Credit: NRC Archives.
76 failures and the vulnerability of diesel generators and electrical equipment to fires and floods. The IAEA and other lessons learned assessments conducted in the United States agreed that nuclear regulation needed to rely on more risk insights to supplement the traditional Three Ds of safety. Consequently, PRAs grew in scope and sophistication and were required more often by many international regulators.
The End of the Renaissance Fukushima was just the most obvious of three major setbacks for the nuclear industry in 2011. By the end of the year, the bright economic outlook for new nuclear plants had deteriorated. The fracking boom for natural gas and oil led to a plunge in energy prices. Natural gas plants enjoyed a competitive edge, priced at just one-fifth of nuclear powers overnight construction cost. The NRC, having previously received applications for 28 new reactors, saw just two units in GeorgiaVogtle 3 and 4reach commercial operation. The low price of fossil fuels even brought down operating reactors, especially less competitive single units. In 2011, the owner of the Kewaunee nuclear power plant in Wisconsin obtained a 20 license renewal. A year later, it could not find a buyer. Between 2012 and 2023, 15 units shut down permanently. Its very difficult to take a 50-year-view as a merchant [plant], said one industry official.
As the nuclear industry retreated, interest in advancing risk-informed regulatory initiatives declined. An ambitious effort to revise regulations dealing with large break loss-of-coolant accidents and ECCS criteria was discontinued. Other regulations in areas such as fire protection and safety components struggled to gain acceptance, as licensees doubted that they would offer substantial efficien cy improvements. By 2020, however, more licensees were taking advantage of the new regulations.
Another setback was Congresss 2011 vote to end funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository located in Nye County, Nevada.
Yucca Mountain had been touted as the nations solution to high-level waste disposal since 1987, when Congress had directed the Department of Energy to evaluate only the Yucca Mountain site for its suitability as a waste repository. In 2002, President George W. Bush signed legislation authorizing the Department of Energy to move forward in establishing a repository at Yucca, but a storm of political opposition, particularly from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), killed the project. Efforts to revive Yucca Mountain during the Trump administration fizzled.
77 And the Beginning of Another?
As the economic case for large light-water reactors withered, the nuclear industry turned to innovative designssmall modular and advanced reactors that did not carry the sticker shock of their predecessors. Small modular reactors use light-water or a nonwater coolant and usually have a capacity of less than 300 megawattsless than a third of the capacity of a traditional light-water reactor. Their modules can be factory-assembled and easily transported to a power plant site. Advanced reactors use non-light-water coolant and an array of passive safety features and fuel designs. They are designed to reduce or eliminate the need for defense-in-depth features, such as containment buildings and large exclusion zones.
Recent domestic and international events have highlighted some advantages of nuclear power in addressing global warming, providing grid stability, and providing strategic insurance against international disturbances to global energy supplies. These trends have led to bipartisan congressional support for research and development funds for new reactor designs, accident tolerant fuel, and commercialization assistance, including licensing support.
In 2019, Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which, among other things, directed the NRC to develop by the end of 2027 a new licensing infrastructure for advanced reactors that incorporated risk-informed, performance-based techniques. The NRC responded by drafting 10 CFR Part 53, which provides a risk-informed, technology-inclusive approach to reactor licensing. Currently under development, the new regulation aims to retain the NRCs reasonable assurance of adequate protection standard of safety while giving credit to advanced reactor features that reduce or eliminate the risk of certain postulated accident scenarios.
78 Conclusion The future of nuclear power is uncertain, but history indicates that the work of a nuclear safety regulator will never be done. More than 50 years ago, Chauncey Starr had suggested that nuclear power critics could be silenced by a quantification of the accident risk posed by nuclear power. Instead, risk assessment added both benefits and complexity to regulatory judgments that continued to require an ongoing dialogue with the public on safety. Public trust depends on the complex balancing act regulators must maintain between qualitative concepts of safety and quantitative assessments of what constitutes adequate protection.
At an NRC conference held in 2016, Chairman Stephen Burns summed up this viewpoint, Part and parcel of everything we do is an assessment of risk. Burns arrived at the NRC in 1978, just before the TMI accident. He rose in the ranks from a staff attorney to become general counsel before joining the Commission. Burns came to see risk assessment as not just as a safety assessment tool but as a key part of the NRCs public processes. Nuclear power generates a considerable level of risk aversion, of fear, even paranoia, he said, stemming from a lack of trust in the NRC and the nuclear industry. The regulatory craft, he believed, required the building of public trust by constantly reassessing how safe is safe enough. Today, safe enough is understood to be not a final destination but a continuous search for safety.
NUREG/BR-0175, Rev.3 July 2024 WWW.NRC.GOV STAY CONNECTED