NUREG/BR-0175, A Short History of Nuclear Regulation, 1946–2009
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1029/ML102980443.pdf
text
A Short History
of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–2009
by J. Samuel Walker and Thomas R. Wellock
History Staff
Office of the Secretary
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
October 2010
i
Preface
“History,” automobile maker Henry Ford once said, “is more or
less…bunk.” Philosopher George Santayana was more charitable
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 in order for us to make
sense from the present. Today’s events are a direct outgrowth of
yesterday’s events, and 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 short history of nuclear regulation provides a brief overview
of the most significant events in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory
Commission’s past. Space limitations prevent discussion
of all the important occurrences, and even the subjects that are
included cannot be covered in full detail. 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 (University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA, 1984). The second chapter is largely based on J. Samuel
Walker, Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing
Environment, 1963–1971 (University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA, 1992). The third chapter is adopted in significant part
from J. Samuel Walker, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in
Historical Perspective (University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA, 2004). The findings and conclusions on events that occurred
after 1979 should be regarded as preliminary and tentative; they
are not based on extensive research in primary sources. However,
we hope that this overview will help explain how the past
has shaped the present and will illuminate the considerations
that have influenced regulatory decisions and procedures over
the years. We also hope that this outline will suggest that history
should be viewed as something more valuable than mere “bunk.”
iii
Contents
Chapter 1 The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 2 The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975. . . . 25
Chapter 3 The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
and Three Mile Island. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Chapter 4 New Issues, New Approaches. . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Chapter 5 A Terrorist Attack and a Nuclear Revival . . . . 83
1
Chapter One
The Formative
Years of
Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962
1
Chapter 1
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.” Within a short time 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. Senate’s 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 man’s horizons as well as force
him back into the cave.” 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.” Observing that
ideas for the civilian uses of atomic energy ranged “from the
practical to the fantastic,” it cited a few examples: (1) atomic-
powered airplanes, rockets, and automobiles, (2) large
electrical generating stations, (3) small “home power plants”
to provide heat and electricity to individual homes, and (4)
tiny atomic generators wired to clothing to keep a person
cool in summer and warm in winter.
Developing nuclear energy for civilian purposes, as even the
most enthusiastic proponents recognized, would take many
years. The Government’s first priority was to maintain strict
control over atomic technology and to investigate its military
applications. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which
was passed as tensions with the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (U.S.S.R.) were developing into the cold war,
acknowledged, in passing, the potential peaceful benefits of
atomic power. However, it emphasized the military aspects
of nuclear energy and underscored the need for secrecy
and the continued production of weapons. The 1946 law
did not allow for private, commercial application of atomic
2
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
energy; instead, it created a virtual Government monopoly
of the technology. To manage the Nation’s atomic energy
programs, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 established the
five-member U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
By 1954, the same Cold War calculations that had earlier
curtailed the commercial uses of atomic energy led Federal
officials to reverse course. The initial impetus for peaceful
atomic development came mostly from considerations
other than meeting America’s energy demands. In the early
1950s, projections of future energy requirements predicted
that atomic power would eventually play an important
role in the Nation’s energy supplies, but these projections
did not suggest an immediate need for the construction of
atomic power reactors. The prevailing sense of urgency, at
least among Government leaders, reflected instead the fear
of falling behind other nations in fostering peaceful atomic
progress. The strides that Great Britain was making in the
field seemed disturbing enough, but the possibility that the
U.S.S.R. might surpass the United States in civilian power
development was even more ominous. AEC Commissioner
Thomas E. Murray described a “nuclear power race” in a
1953 speech and warned that the “stakes are high.” He added,
“Once we become fully conscious of the possibility that
power hungry countries will gravitate toward the U.S.S.R.
if it wins the nuclear power race…it will be quite clear that
this power race is no Everest-climbing, kudos-providing
contest.” Like Murray, many Government officials emphasized
that surrendering America’s lead in expanding the
peaceful applications of atomic energy would deal a severe
blow to its international prestige and world
scientific dominance.
The eagerness to push for rapid civilian nuclear development
was intensified by an impulse to show that atomic
technology could serve both constructive and destructive
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Chapter 1
purposes. The assertions made shortly after World War II
that atomic energy could provide spectacular advances that
would raise living standards throughout the world remained
unproven and largely untested. As the nuclear arms race
took on more terrifying proportions with the development of
thermonuclear bombs, the desire to demonstrate the benefits
of atomic energy became more acute. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, spurred by the detonation of the U.S.S.R.’s
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.” Many other
high Government officials echoed Eisenhower’s appeal for
peaceful nuclear progress and his affirmation of the potential
blessings of civilian atomic energy.
By 1954, a broad political consensus viewed the development
of nuclear energy for civilian purposes as a vital goal.
In that year, Congress passed a new Atomic Energy Act that
resulted partly from perceptions of a long-range need for
new energy sources but mostly from the immediate commitment
to maintain America’s world leadership in nuclear
technology, enhance its international prestige, and demonstrate
the benefits of peaceful atomic energy. Those considerations
infused the atomic power program with a sense
of urgency. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended,
permitted for the first time the broad use of atomic energy
for peaceful applications. It redefined the atomic energy program
by ending the Government’s 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 Atomic Energy Act of 1954 also instructed the AEC
to prepare regulations that would protect public health and
4
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
safety from radiation hazards. Thus, it assigned the agency
three major functions: (1) to continue its weapons program,
(2) to promote the commercial uses of nuclear power, and
(3) to protect against the hazards of those peaceful applications.
Those functions were in many ways inseparable and
proved to be incompatible when they were carried out by a
single agency. The competing responsibilities and the precedence
that the AEC gave to its military and promotional
duties gradually damaged its credibility on regulatory issues
and undermined public confidence in its safety programs.
The Atomic Energy Commission and the
Development of Commercial Nuclear Power
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 gave the AEC wide discretion
on how to proceed in establishing its promotional
and regulatory policies. Despite the general agreement on
ultimate objectives, the means by which these objectives
should be accomplished soon created sharp philosophical
differences between the AEC and its congressional oversight
committee, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. The
AEC favored a partnership between Government and industry
in which private firms would play an integral role in
demonstrating and expanding the use of atomic power. “The
Commission’s program,” AEC Chairman Lewis L. Strauss
explained, “is directed toward encouraging development of
the uses of atomic energy in the framework of the American
free enterprise system.” He added that it was the AEC’s conviction
“that competitive economic nuclear power…would
be most quickly achieved by construction and operation of
fullscale plants by industry itself.” To accomplish its objectives,
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, to subsidize additional research undertaken
by industry through fixed-sum contracts, and to waive for
7 years the fuel-use charges for the loan of fissionable mate5
Chapter 1
rials that the Government would continue to own. For their
part, private utilities and vendors would supply the capital
for the construction of nuclear plants and pay operating
expenses other than fuel charges. The purpose of the demonstration
program was to stimulate private participation and
investment in exploring the technical and economic feasibility
of different reactor designs. At that time, no single
reactor type had clearly emerged as the most promising of
the several that had been proposed.
The AEC also sought to meet industry demands for technical
information. For several years, some utility executives
had shown a keen interest in investigating the use of nuclear
fission for generating electricity. However, commercial applications
of atomic energy had been thwarted by the severe
limitations placed on access to information as dictated by
the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. In 1953, when the Joint
Committee conducted public hearings on peaceful atomic
development, spokesmen for private firms emphasized that
industrial progress was possible only if the restrictions on
obtaining data were eased. By opening nuclear technology
to commercial applications, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954
largely satisfied those complaints. From the utility companies’
perspective, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 offered
companies an opportunity to participate in nuclear development
and gain experience in a technology that promised to
help meet long-term energy demands. 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 AEC’s initiatives received
a mixed response. The enthusiasm of the private utility
industry for nuclear power development was tempered by
several considerations. Although experiments with AECowned
reactors had established the technical feasibility of
6
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
using nuclear fission to produce electricity, many scientific
and engineering questions remained unanswered. Further,
the financial inducements that the AEC offered through its
power demonstration reactor program did not eliminate the
risks to a company’s balance sheets. The capital and operating
costs of atomic power were certain to be much higher
than those for fossil fuel plants. Across the industry, the
prospects of realizing short-term profits from nuclear power
were unlikely. An American Management Association symposium
in 1957 concluded, “The atomic industry has not
been—and is not likely to be for a decade—attractive as far
as quick profits are concerned.” When Lewis Strauss made
his oft-quoted statement in 1954 that nuclear power could
provide electricity “too cheap to meter,” he was indulging in
a flight of fancy. His remark did not represent the views of
the AEC or the fledging nuclear industry that knew that the
heavy investments required were a major impediment to the
growth of nuclear power.
In addition to technical and financial considerations, recognition
of the hazards of the technology intensified industry’s
reservations about nuclear power. Based on experience
with Government test reactors and the prevailing faith in
the ability of scientists and engineers to solve technological
problems, the AEC and industry leaders regarded the
chances of a disastrous atomic accident as remote. However,
they did not dismiss the possibility entirely. Francis K. Mc-
Cune, 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.”
Mindful of both the costs and the risks of atomic power,
the electric utility industry responded to the Atomic Energy
Act of 1954 and the AEC’s demonstration program with
restraint. Although many utilities were interested in exploring
the potential of nuclear power, few were willing to press
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Chapter 1
ahead rapidly in the face of existing uncertainties. The AEC
was gratified and rather surprised that by August 1955, five
power companies—either as individual utilities or as consortiums—
had 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 AEC’s power demonstration program.
The Joint Committee was less impressed with the response
of private industry to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and
the AEC’s incentives. The Democratic majority of the
committee favored a larger Government role in accelerating
nuclear development, which conflicted with the AEC’s
commitment to encourage maximum private participation.
The issue became a major source of contention between the
AEC and the Joint Committee, thus adding a philosophical
dispute to the already strained political differences resulting
from 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.” Supporters of the bill contended
that the United States was falling behind Great Britain
and the U.S.S.R. in the quest for practical and economical
nuclear power. Opponents of the measure denied that the
United States had surrendered its lead in atomic technology
and insisted that private industry was best able to expedite
further development. 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 in Congress, but the views
that it embodied and the Joint Committee’s impatience for
rapid development of atomic power placed a great deal of
8
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
pressure on the AEC to show that its reactor programs were
producing results.
The Atomic Energy Commission’s
Regulatory Program
The AEC’s determination to push nuclear development
through a partnership with private industry had a major
impact on the agency’s regulatory policies. The AEC’s
fundamental objective in drafting regulations was to ensure
that public health and safety were protected without imposing
overly burdensome requirements that would impede
industrial growth. In 1955, Commissioner Willard F. Libby
articulated an opinion common among AEC officials when
he remarked, “Our great hazard is that this great benefit to
mankind will be killed aborning by unnecessary regulation.”
Other proponents of nuclear development shared
this view. They realized that safety was indispensable to
progress; an accident could destroy the industry or at least
set it back many years. At the same time, they worried that
regulations that were too restrictive or inflexible would
discourage private participation and investment in
nuclear technology.
The inherent difficulty that the AEC faced in distinguishing
between essential and excessive regulations was compounded
by technical uncertainties and by limited operating
experience with power reactors. The safety record of the
AEC’s own experimental reactors engendered confidence
that safety problems could be resolved and the possibility of
accidents could be kept to “an acceptable calculated risk.”
However, experience at that time offered little definitive
guidance on some important technical and safety questions,
such as the effect of radiation on the properties of reactor
materials; the durability of steel and other metals under
stress in a reactor; the ways in which water reacted with uranium,
thorium, aluminum, and other elements in a reactor;
9
Chapter 1
and the measures needed to minimize radiation exposure in
the event of a large accident.
The AEC’s regulatory staff, which was created soon after
the passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, confronted
the task of writing regulations and devising licensing procedures
rigorous enough to ensure safety but flexible enough
to allow for new findings and rapid changes in atomic
technology. Within a short period of time, the staff drafted
rules and definitions on radiation protection standards, the
distribution and safeguarding of fissionable materials, and
the qualifications of reactor operators. It also established
procedures for licensing privately owned reactors. The
Atomic Energy Act of 1954 outlined a two-step procedure
for granting licenses. The AEC would issue a construction
permit if it found the safety analysis submitted by a utility
for a proposed reactor to be acceptable. After the utility
completed the construction and the AEC determined that
the plant fully met safety requirements, the applicant would
receive a license to load fuel and begin operation.
Because of the uncertainties in technical knowledge and
the AEC’s goal of encouraging different reactor designs,
the agency had to judge license applications on a case-bycase
basis. The early state of the technology precluded the
possibility of formulating universal standards for all aspects
of reactor engineering. 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. The proposal received further
scrutiny from a panel of outside experts, the Advisory Committee
on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS), which comprised
part-time consultants who were recognized authorities on
various aspects of reactor technology. ARCS conducted its
own independent review of the application, and its recommendations
and those of the staff went to the AEC Commissioners,
who then made the final decision on whether or not
10
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
to approve a construction permit or operating license. (Later,
the Commission delegated the consideration of regulatory
staff and ACRS judgments to panels drawn from the Atomic
Safety and Licensing Board while retaining final jurisdiction
in licensing cases if it chose to review a panel ruling.)
The AEC did not require a prospective power reactor owner
to submit finalized technical data on the safety of a facility
to receive a construction permit. The agency was willing to
grant a conditional permit as long as the application provided
“reasonable assurance” that the projected plant could be
constructed and operated at the proposed site “without undue
risk to the health and safety of the public.” This two-step
licensing system enabled the AEC to authorize the construction
of nuclear plants while allowing it enough time to investigate
outstanding safety questions and to prescribe modifications
to initial plans. Agency officials recognized that the
wisdom of permitting construction to proceed without first
resolving all potential safety problems was disputable, but
they saw no alternatives in light of the existing state of the
technology and the commitment to the rapid development of
atomic power. They were confident that regulatory requirements
were adequate to guard against the hazards of nuclear
generating systems. However, the AEC acknowledged that
it could not eliminate all risks. 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
It soon became apparent that the AEC’s judgment on safety
issues could be influenced by its ambition to promote the
private development of nuclear power. The Commission’s
actions in granting a construction permit for a commercial
11
Chapter 1
fast breeder reactor, despite the reservations of ACRS, ignited
an acrimonious controversy with the Joint Committee
and raised questions about the AEC’s regulatory program.
In January 1956, the Power Reactor Development Company
(PRDC), a consortium of utilities led by Detroit Edison
Company, applied for a permit to build a fast breeder reactor
in Lagoona Beach, MI, located on Lake Erie within 30 miles
of both Detroit, MI, and Toledo, OH. 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 program.
The fast breeder reactor that PRDC planned was far more
advanced in its technological complexity than the light-water
models were. Scientists and engineers had greater experience
and familiarity with the light-water models proposed in
earlier applications. After review of PRDC’s application and
discussions with company representatives, ACRS concluded
in an internal report to the Commission that “there is insufficient
information available at this time to give assurance
PRDC reactor under
construction, 1958.
12
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
that the PRDC reactor can be operated at this site without
public hazard.” ACRS also expressed uncertainty that its
questions about the reactor’s safety could be resolved within
PRDC’s proposed schedule for obtaining an operating
license. ACRS urged that the AEC expand its experimental
programs with fast breeder reactors to seek more complete
data on the issues raised in the PRDC application.
The public dispute over the PRDC case was triggered by
statements from Chairman Strauss and Commissioner
Murray in congressional budget hearings. After the AEC requested
a supplemental appropriation for the civilian power
program, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Clarence
Cannon subjected the Commissioners to sharp criticism
when they testified in June 1956 on the need for the expenditures.
Cannon, a strong public power advocate, badgered
Strauss about private industry’s lack of progress in atomic
development and suggested that PRDC had no “intention of
building this reactor at any time in the determinable future.”
Strauss, who was anxious to show that industry was making
good headway, replied, “They [PRDC] have already spent
eight 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.”
Inadvertently, he had revealed that he planned to attend the
groundbreaking ceremony for a reactor whose construction
permit was still being evaluated by the AEC.
During hearings the following day, Commissioner Murray,
in an effort to demonstrate the need for research and
development funds, disclosed the conclusions of ACRS
on the PRDC application. Murray was so uneasy about the
safety implications of the ACRS report that he met with
Joint Committee Chairman Anderson to outline its contents.
Members of the Joint Committee were angered and
disturbed by Strauss’ and Murray’s revelations, not only because
of safety concerns but also because of the AEC’s fail13
Chapter 1
ure to inform them officially about the ACRS reservations.
The AEC was obliged by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954
to keep the Joint Committee “fully and currently informed”
about its activities, and Joint Committee members believed
that, in the case of the ACRS report, the agency had failed
to carry out its charge. The Joint Committee immediately requested
a copy of the ACRS document. The AEC was reluctant
to agree and, after long deliberation, offered to deliver 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 was even less
accommodating with the State of Michigan. When Governor
G. Mennen Williams, who had learned of the ACRS report
from Senator Anderson, asked the AEC for a copy, it refused
on the grounds that “it would be inappropriate to disclose
the contents of internal documents.”
Meanwhile, the AEC’s regulatory staff was completing its
review of PRDC’s application. The staff took a more optimistic
view of the safety of the proposed reactor than ACRS
had. Because the company had agreed to perform tests to
answer the questions raised by 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 majority’s reasoning during the
discussion of the application. “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
14
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
program. If we didn’t think that the chances were very good
that all these questions would be resolved, we would not
issue the permit.”
The AEC’s decision elicited angry protests from the Joint
Committee. Congressman Holifield, citing Strauss’s earlier
announcement of his plans to attend the groundbreaking
ceremonies for the plant, 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.”
The Joint Committee soon acted to prevent a recurrence of
the AEC’s conduct in the PRDC case. Anderson ordered
the Joint Committee staff to prepare a study of the AEC’s
licensing procedures and regulatory organization and to consider,
as part of the study, whether separate agencies should
carry out regulatory and promotional responsibilities. The
staff concluded that the creation of separate agencies was
inadvisable at the time, principally because of the difficulty
of recruiting qualified personnel for purely regulatory functions.
It did, however, suggest other reforms in the AEC’s
regulatory structure and procedures. Anderson implemented
his staff’s proposals by introducing legislation to establish
ACRS as a statutory body, direct that its reports on licensing
cases be made public, and require public hearings on all
reactor applications. The AEC opposed all three measures
but muted its objections because Anderson presented them
as amendments to a bill to provide indemnity insurance for
reactor owners, which the agency strongly favored.
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.
Because they recognized that the chances of a severe reactor
15
Chapter 1
accident could not be reduced to zero, even the most enthusiastic
industry proponents of atomic power 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. However, in the
event of a serious accident, that amount of coverage seemed
insufficient to pay claims for deaths, injuries, and property
damage in areas surrounding the malfunctioning plant.
Therefore, industry executives sought a Government
program to provide additional insurance protection. Consolidated
Edison, Inc., Board of Directors Chairman H.R.
Searing declared that although his company would proceed
with the construction of Indian Point plant located near
New York City, it would not load fuel and begin operation
unless the insurance question were resolved. General
Electric’s Francis K. McCune went even further by telling
the Joint Committee in 1957 that if Congress did not enact
indemnity legislation, his company would stop work on
Commonwealth Edison Company’s Dresden Nuclear Power
Station, then under construction. He suggested that without
a Government insurance plan, the market for civilian atomic
energy would collapse and vendors would withdraw from
the field.
Spurred by the industry’s concerns, both the AEC and the
Joint Committee considered methods that the Government
could use to provide additional liability insurance for reactor
owners. Their efforts culminated in legislation introduced
by Senator Anderson and Congressman Melvin Price that
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
16
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
the $500 million figure because he wanted to avoid giving
industry a “blank check.” The bill stipulated that Congress
could authorize additional payments if necessary and also
required reactor owners to contribute funds to the insurance
pool as their plants were licensed. 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 final form, the measure also included
Anderson’s reforms to the AEC’s licensing procedures.
Although the agency disliked Anderson’s amendments, it
accepted them to avoid jeopardizing or retarding approval
of the indemnity bill. In effect, the Price-Anderson Act was
a regulatory measure because it provided insurance protection
to victims of a nuclear accident, but it was largely
promotional in motivation. Industry, the AEC, and the Joint
Committee believed that it would remove a serious obstacle
to private atomic development.
The Growth of Nuclear Power
The PRDC case and the Price-Anderson Act clearly illustrated
the AEC’s emphasis on developmental rather than
regulatory efforts. The precedence that the AEC gave to promoting
the growth of nuclear power resulted from a number
of considerations. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 made the
encouragement of the widespread use of atomic energy for
peaceful purposes a national goal, but private industry was
often hesitant to assume the costs and risks of development.
Therefore, the AEC sought to persuade or induce private
interests to invest in nuclear power. This endeavor seemed
particularly urgent because of the intense pressure the Joint
Committee placed on the agency to speed progress and its
persistent threat to require the AEC to construct prototype
plants if private firms failed to act promptly. One important
way in which the AEC pursued its objective of private
development was to write regulations designed to protect
public safety without being overly burdensome to industry.
17
Chapter 1
Safety questions were largely a matter of judgment rather
than something concrete or quantifiable, and AEC officials
found it easier to assume that such issues had been or
would be satisfactorily resolved than to assume that reactors
would be built. For example, when the Commission issued
a construction permit for the PRDC fast breeder reactor,
its vision of an advanced technology plant that showed the
effectiveness of its power demonstration reactor program
outweighed the reservations of ACRS. Although the AEC
was aware of the implications that safety questions posed
for the development of the technology, it was confident that
nuclear science, in due time, would provide the answers to
outstanding issues. In short, the desire for tangible signs
of progress was more compelling than first resolving more
ethereal safety issues.
The AEC’s emphasis on stimulating atomic development
did not mean that it was inattentive to safety issues. The
regulations that the staff drafted shortly after passage of the
Atomic Energy Act of 1954 reflected careful consideration
of the best scientific information and judgment available at
the time. The AEC recognized and publicly acknowledged
the possibility of accidents in such a new and rapidly changing
technology; it never offered absolute assurances that
accidents would not occur. Nevertheless, it believed that
compliance with its regulations would minimize the chances
of a serious accident. The agency did not view its developmental
efforts as more important than regulatory policies,
but it clearly viewed the encouragement of industrial growth
as more immediate need.
By 1962, the AEC’s 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 the short time since
atomic technology had been opened to private enterprise, six
“sizeable” power reactors had begun operation, and two of
18
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
those reactors had been built without Government subsidies.
Despite industry’s lingering concerns about the costs of
nuclear power relative to fossil fuels, the AEC’s promotional
and regulatory programs had fostered the initial growth of
commercial nuclear power. The agency predicted that by
the year 2000 nuclear plants might provide up to 50 percent
of the Nation’s electrical generating capacity. Despite the
AEC’s claims, the future of the nuclear industry remained
precarious. The 14 reactors in operation or under construction
were still far from being commercially competitive or
technologically proven, and interest in further development
among utilities was uncertain. Both the AEC and Joint Committee
were acutely aware of, and deeply disturbed about,
those uncertainties.
Radiation Protection
To make matters worse from the perspective of nuclear proponents,
there were signs of increasing public opposition to,
or at least concern about, nuclear power hazards. In the early
days of nuclear power development, public attitudes toward
the technology were highly favorable, as the few opinion
polls on the subject revealed. Press coverage of nuclear
power was also overwhelmingly positive. For example,
an article in National Geographic in 1958 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, the public
became more alert to, and anxious about, the hazards of
radiation, stemming largely from a major controversy over
radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing. One result
was that the public became increasingly troubled about the
risks of exposure to radioactivity from any source, including
nuclear power.
Before World War II, the dangers of radiation were primarily
a matter of interest and concern to a relatively small
group of scientists and physicians. Within a short period of
19
Chapter 1
time after the discovery of x rays and natural radioactivity in
the 1890s, scientific investigators concluded that exposure
to radiation could cause serious health problems, ranging
from loss of hair and skin irritations to sterility and cancer.
Ignorance of the hazards of x rays and radium and the use
of them for frivolous purposes led to tragic consequences
for people who received large doses of radiation from these
sources. As experience with, and experimental data on, the
effects of radiation gradually accumulated, professionals
developed guidelines to protect x-ray technicians and other
radiation workers from excessive exposure.
In 1934, a recently formed American committee representing
professional societies and x-ray equipment manufacturers
recommended for the first time a quantitative “tolerance
dose” of radiation of 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 took similar action.
Neither body regarded its recommended tolerance dose as
definitive because empirical evidence remained fragmented
and inconclusive. However, they were confident that available
information made their proposals reasonable and provided
an adequate margin of safety for the relatively small
number of individuals exposed to radiation in their jobs.
The bombing of Hiroshima signaled the dawn of the atomic
age and made radiation safety a vastly more complex task
for two reasons. First, nuclear fission created many radioactive
isotopes that did not previously exist in nature. Professionals
in the field of radiation protection had to evaluate
the hazards of these new little-known radioactive substances
instead of considering only x rays and radium. Second, the
20
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
problem of radiation safety extended to significantly larger
segments of the population who could be exposed to radiation
resulting from the development of new applications
of atomic energy. Radiation protection broadened from a
medical issue of limited proportions to a public health issue
of, potentially at least, major dimensions.
As a result of these drastically altered circumstances, scientific
authorities reassessed their recommendations on radiation
protection. They modified their philosophy pertaining to
radiological safety by abandoning the previous concept of a
“tolerance dose,” which assumed that exposure to radiation
below the specified limits was generally harmless. Experiments
in genetics indicated that reproductive cells were
highly susceptible to damage from even small amounts of
radiation. By the early 1940s, most scientists had rejected
the idea that exposure to radiation below a certain threshold
was inconsequential, at least with respect to genetic effects.
In 1946, the National Committee on Radiation Protection
(NCRP), a U.S committee of radiation experts, took action
that reflected the consensus of opinion by replacing the
terminology of “tolerance dose” with “maximum permissible
dose,” which it thought better conveyed the principle
that no quantity of radiation was certifiably safe. It defined
the “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.” While
acknowledging the possibility that an individual could suffer
harmful effects from radiation in amounts below the allowable
limits, NCRP emphasized that the permissible dose was
based on the belief that “the probability of the occurrence of
such injuries must be so low that the risk should be readily
acceptable to the average individual.”
Because of the growth of atomic energy programs and the
substantial increase in the number of individuals working
with radiation sources, NCRP had decided by 1948 to
21
Chapter 1
reduce its recommended occupational exposure limits to 50
percent of the 1934 level. The International Commission on
Radiological Protection (ICRP), NCRP’s international counterpart,
adopted the same maximum permissible dose after
World War II. The new maximum permissible whole-body
dose that NCRP and ICRP recommended was 0.3 roentgens
per 6day work week, which was measured by exposure of
the “most critical” tissue 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 both NCRP and ICRP
applied only to radiation workers. However, because of the
genetic effects of radiation and the possibility that other
people could be exposed in an accident or an emergency,
each group also issued guidelines for larger segments of the
population. Because of the greater sensitivity of young persons
to radiation, NCRP recommended that the occupational
maximum permissible dose be reduced by a factor of 10 for
anyone under the age of 18. ICRP went further 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 because their recommendations
reflected the findings and opinions of leading experts in the
field of radiation protection, they had significant influence
on Government agencies concerned with radiological safety.
The AEC used NCRP’s occupational limits in its own installations
and, after passage of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, in
its regulations for licensees. The agency’s radiation protec22
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
tion regulations, which were first issued for public comment
in 1955 and became effective in 1957, followed NCRP’s
recommendations for radiation workers and 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 Controversy
In the immediate postwar period, deliberations over the risks
of radiation and permissible exposure levels were confined
mostly to scientific circles. As a result of the fallout controversy,
concern about radiation moved from the rarified
realms of scientific and medical discourse to front page
news. Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons by the United
States, the U.S.S.R., and Great Britain produced radioactive
fallout that spread to populated areas far from the sites of
the explosions. The fallout debate made radiation hazards a
bitterly contested political issue. Scientists disagreed sharply
about how serious a risk fallout presented to the general
Researcher at
Brookhaven
National Laboratory
removes plug from
lead sheild containing
radioactive
materials. Man at
his left holds Geiger
counter to monitor
radiation levels.
23
Chapter 1
population, and this issue became a prominent subject in
news reports, magazine stories, political campaigns, congressional
hearings, and scientific studies. This issue not
only focused public attention on the potential health hazards
of relatively small amounts of radiation (as opposed to acute
exposure) but also revealed that scientists did not know a
great deal about the effects of low-level radiation.
The fallout controversy affected the AEC’s regulatory program
in two important ways. First, it led to a tightening of
the agency’s radiation standards. In response to increasing
public concern and the findings of scientific groups, NCRP
and ICRP both lowered their recommended permissible
levels of exposure. Their actions provided a larger margin
of safety, but they emphasized that no evidence existed to
suggest that the previous levels had been dangerously high.
They reduced their limits for occupational exposure to an
average of 5 rem per year after the age of 18 while continuing
to suggest that general population exposure levels be
restricted to 10 percent of the occupational levels (0.5 rem
per year) for individuals. The rem was a unit of measure
that had largely replaced the roentgen and that indicated the
biological effect of radiation exposure more precisely. For
x rays and gamma rays, 1 rem equaled 1 roentgen. 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 promptly adopted the
new recommendations as a part of its regulations; it issued
them for public comment in 1959 and made them effective
on January 1, 1961.
The fallout debate further influenced the AEC’s regulatory
program by arousing public anxieties about the health
effects of low-level radiation. For example, the level of
anxiety among members of the public was evident in citizen
protests against the dumping of low-level radioactive wastes
24
The Formative Years of Nuclear Regulation,
1946–1962,
in ocean waters. For more than a decade, the AEC had
authorized the dumping of such wastes under prescribed
conditions, but it became a subject of controversy only
after the fallout issue sensitized public opinion to radiation
hazards. In a similar manner, the first widespread objections
to the construction of proposed nuclear power plants arose
in the wake of the fallout debate. Citizen protests against
the construction of the Ravenswood plant in the heart of
New York City in 1963 and the Bodega Bay Nuclear Power
Plant on the coast of California near the boundary of the San
Andreas fault in 1963–1964 played a vital role in aborting
both projects.
At the end of the first decade following the passage of the
Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the prospects for rapid nuclear
power development were mixed. Impressive strides had certainly
been made, but many uncertainties remained. Public
support for this technology was apparently strong, but this
support could not be taken for granted as the protests against
the Ravenswood and Bodega Bay plants had shown. However,
beginning in the mid-1960s, a variety of considerations
fueled an unanticipated boom in the nuclear power industry
that resolved some of the unknowns about nuclear technology
while at the same time raising a host of new questions
for the AEC’s regulatory staff.
The Nuclear
Power Debate,
1963–1975
Chapter Two
25
Chapter 2
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 AEC’s
regulatory functions such as reactor siting, licensing, and inspection
was still limited. However, during the later 1960s,
the Nation’s utilities rapidly increased their orders for nuclear
power stations, participating in what Philip Sporn, past
president of the American Electric Power Service Corporation,
described in 1967 as the “great bandwagon market.”
At the same time, the size of nuclear plants that were under
construction also expanded dramatically. The sudden arrival
of commercially competitive nuclear power placed unprecedented
demands on the AEC’s regulatory staff and raised
new safety problems that reactor experts had not previously
considered. The surge in reactor orders and the growth in the
size of individual plants also spurred new concerns about
the environmental impact of nuclear power and intensified
public uneasiness about the safety of the technology.
The Bandwagon Market
The bandwagon market was an outgrowth of several
developments that enhanced the appeal of nuclear power
to utilities in the mid- to late 1960s. One example was the
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 and to convince utilities that nuclear power was a
safe, reliable, and cost-competitive alternative to fossil fuel.
It offered a “turnkey” contract to Jersey Central Power and
Light Company to build the 515megawatt electric (MWe)
Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station near Toms River,
NJ. For a fixed cost of $66 million, General Electric agreed
to supply the entire plant to the utility. (The term “turnkey”
suggested that the utility would merely have to turn a key
to start operating the facility.) The company successfully
26
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
outbid not only Westinghouse but also manufacturers of
coal-fired units. General Electric expected to lose money
on the Oyster Creek contract but hoped that the plant would
help to stimulate the market for nuclear power.
The Oyster Creek contract opened the “turnkey era” of
commercial nuclear power and came to symbolize the
competitive debut of the technology. AEC Chairman Glenn
T. Seaborg told President Lyndon B. Johnson that it represented
an “economic breakthrough” for nuclear electricity.
Westinghouse followed General Electric’s lead in offering
turnkey contracts for nuclear plants, setting off a fierce corporate
battle. Turnkey plants were a financial blow for both
companies; their losses ran into the hundreds of millions of
dollars before they finally stopped offering turnkey arrangements.
One General Electric official commented, “It’s going
to take a long time to restore to the treasury the demands
we put on it to establish ourselves in the nuclear business.”
However, the turnkey contracts fulfilled General Electric’s
hopes of stirring interest among, and orders from, utilities.
These contracts played a major role in triggering the bandwagon
market.
Other important considerations at the time convinced a
growing number of utilities to buy nuclear plants. One such
consideration was the spread of power-pooling arrangements
among utilities, which encouraged the construction
of larger generating stations by easing fears of excess
capacity and overexpansion. A utility with extra or reserve
power could sell that power to other companies through
interconnections. The desirability and feasibility of using
larger individual plants worked to the benefit of nuclear
vendors. They emphasized that bigger plants would produce
economies of scale that would cut capital costs per unit of
power and improve efficiency. This philosophy helped to
overcome a major disadvantage of nuclear power relative
to fossil fuel—the heavy capital requirements for building
27
Chapter 2
atomic plants. During the late 1960s, designs for nuclear
facilities significantly increased from 500 MWe to 800 MWe
to 1,000 MWe even though operating experience was still
limited to units in the 200MWe range or less. The practice
of “design by extrapolation” had been employed for fossil
fuel units since the early 1950s. Before the mid-1960s, this
approach appeared to work well, and vendors naturally
extended it to nuclear units.
In addition to turnkey contracts, system interconnections,
and an increase in unit size, a growing national concern
about air pollution in the 1960s made nuclear power more
attractive to utilities. Coal plants were major contributors to
the deterioration of air quality and were obvious targets for
cleanup efforts. As the campaign to improve the environment
gained strength, the electric utility industry became
more mindful of the cost of pollution control in fossil fuel
plants. They increasingly viewed nuclear power as a good
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, the year before the reactor boom gathered momentum,
nuclear vendors sold four nuclear plants with a total
of 17 percent of the capacity that utilities purchased that
year. In 1966, by contrast, utilities bought 20 nuclear units
that made up 36 percent of the electrical capacity committed.
The following year, nuclear vendors sold 31 units that
represented 49 percent of the capacity ordered. In 1968, the
number of reactor orders dropped to 17, but the percentage
of the capacity filled with nuclear plants remained high at
47 percent.
The bandwagon market orders were large facilities that
far exceeded the size of current operating reactors. Be28
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
tween 1963 (when the 515-MWe Oyster Creek reactor was
ordered) and 1969 (when Oyster Creek began operation),
the AEC issued 38 construction permits for units that were
larger than Oyster Creek. Of those plants, 28 were in the
800- to 1,100-MWe range. The degree of extrapolation from
small plants to mammoth ones was a matter of concern even
to some strong nuclear advocates. By the late 1960s, it was
apparent that design by extrapolation was not as successful
as anticipated earlier for either nuclear or coal facilities.
“We hoped the new machines would run just like the old
ones we’re familiar with,” complained one utility executive
about his huge coal-burning stations. However, he added
that “they sure as hell don’t.”
Burdens of the Bandwagon Market
The rapid increase in the number of reactor applications
and in the size of proposed plants placed enormous burdens
on the AEC’s regulatory staff. The flood of applications
inevitably caused licensing delays because the AEC lacked
enough qualified professionals. Between 1965 and 1970, the
size of the regulatory staff increased by about 50 percent,
but its licensing and inspection caseload increased by about
600 percent. The average time required to process a construction
permit application stretched from about 1 year in
1965 to over 18 months by 1970. The growing backlog drew
bitter complaints from utilities applying to build plants and
from nuclear vendors. One utility executive predicted that
if delays became commonplace, “it can safely be asserted
that the splendid promise of nuclear power will have had a
very short life.” Another even more critical 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 its licensing procedures but
found it impossible to reduce its review time or to satisfy the
demands of the industry.
29
Chapter 2
The licensing process became longer not only because of
the number of applications that the AEC had to evaluate
but also because of the complexity of the proposals that it
received. The growth in the size of reactors and the practice
of design by extrapolation raised many complex safety issues
that could not be easily resolved. The exercise of careful
judgment in assessing reactor applications was always critical,
but it became even more so as utilities campaigned to
build plants closer to populated regions. Although the AEC
adopted an informal prohibition against “metropolitan siting”
in urban locations (such as the proposed Ravenswood plant
in downtown New York), it was more receptive to “suburban
siting” fairly close to urban populations. This type of siting
reduced the emphasis on one traditional means of protecting
the public from the consequences of a nuclear accident—
“remote siting.” It placed greater dependence on another
general method used to shield the public from the effects of
an accident—engineered safeguards (a term that was later
superseded by “engineered safety features”) that were built
into the plant. Even as the relative importance of engineered
safeguards increased in the 1960s, questions arose about
their reliability in preventing a massive release of radioactivity
to the environment in the event of a severe accident.
The engineered safeguards in nuclear plants differed in
design and operation, but they all performed two key functions:
(1) to prevent the overheating and potential melting of
the reactor core (which held the nuclear fuel) and (2) to prevent
radioactive substances from escaping from the plant if
the core was damaged. A number of systems were placed in
reactors to remove heat and reduce excessive pressure if an
accident occurred. For example, these systems included core
sprays and pressure suppression pools; “safety injection”
systems that would shoot large volumes of water into the
reactor vessel; and combinations of filters, vents, scrubbers,
and air circulators that would collect and retain radioactive
gases and particles released during an accident. The final
30
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
line of defense if the engineered safeguards failed was the
containment building, a large, often dome-shaped structure
that surrounded the reactor and the associated steam-producing
equipment and safety systems.
Reactor experts were confident that the engineered safety
features built into a plant and the containment structure
would protect the public from the effects of an accident in
almost any situation. However, they were troubled by the
possibility that a chain of events could conceivably take
place that would bypass or override the safety systems and,
in the worst case, breach containment. “No one is in a position
to demonstrate that a reactor accident with consequent
escape of fission products to the environment will never
happen,” Clifford K. Beck, the AEC’s Deputy Director of
Regulation, told the Joint Committee in 1967. “No one really
expects such an accident, but no one is in a position to
say with full certainty that it will not occur.”
The AEC strived to reduce the likelihood of an accident to
a minimum. It based its decisions on the safety of reactor
designs and plant applications on operating experience,
engineering judgment, and experiments with test reactors.
Experience with the first commercial reactors had been
encouraging; it had provided a great deal of information
that was useful in understanding reactor science. However,
this experience was of limited application to the newer
and larger reactors that utilities were building by the late
1960s. The rapid growth in reactor size placed a premium
on the careful use of engineering judgment. To decrease
the chances of a major accident that could threaten public
health, the AEC required multiple backup equipment and redundancies
in safety designs. It also employed conservative
assumptions—that is, to assume the worst probable conditions
for any postulated accident—about the ways in which
an accident might damage or incapacitate safety systems in
its evaluation of reactor proposals.
31
Chapter 2
The Problem of Core Meltdown
The regulatory staff sought to gain as much experimental
data as possible to enrich its knowledge and inform its
collective engineering judgment. This was especially vital
in light of the many unanswered questions about reactor
behavior. The AEC had sponsored hundreds of small-scale
experiments since the early 1950s that had yielded key
information about a variety of reactor safety problems.
However, these experiments provided little guidance on
the issue of greatest concern to the AEC and the ACRS
by the late 1960s—a core meltdown caused by a loss-ofcoolant
accident. Reactor experts had long recognized that
a core meltdown was a plausible, if unlikely, occurrence.
For example, a massive loss of coolant could occur if a
large pipe that fed cooling water to the core broke. If the
plant’s emergency cooling systems also failed, the buildup
of “decay heat,” which resulted from continuing radioactive
decay after the reactor shut down, could cause the core
to melt. In older and smaller reactors, the experts were
confident that even under the worst conditions—an accident
in which the loss of coolant melted the core and it, in turn,
melted through the pressure vessel that held the core—the
containment structure would prevent a massive release of
radioactivity to the environment. However, as proposed
plants increased significantly in size, they began to worry
that a core meltdown could lead to a breach of containment.
This condition became their primary focus partly because of
the greater decay heat that the larger plants would produce
and partly because nuclear vendors did not increase the size
of their containment buildings in corresponding proportions
to the size of their reactors.
The greatest source of concern about a loss-of-coolant accident
in large reactors was that the molten fuel would melt
through not only the pressure vessel but also through the
thick layer of concrete at the foundation of the containment
32
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
building. The intensely radioactive fuel would then continue
on its downward path into the ground. This scenario became
known as the “China syndrome,” because the melted core
would presumably head through the Earth toward China.
Other possible dangers of a core meltdown were that the
molten fuel would breach containment either by reacting
with water to cause a steam explosion or by releasing elements
that could then combine to cause a chemical explosion.
The precise effects of a large core meltdown were
uncertain, but it was clear that the effects of radioactivity
spewing into the atmosphere could be disastrous. ACRS and
the regulatory staff regarded the chances of such an accident
as low; they believed that it would occur only if the emergency
core cooling system (ECCS), made up of redundant
equipment that would rapidly feed water into the core, failed
to function properly. However, they acknowledged the possibility
that the ECCS might not work as designed. Without
containment as a fail-safe final line of defense against any
conceivable accident, they sought other means to provide
safeguards against the China syndrome.
LOFT reactor under
construction, 1969.
33
Chapter 2
At the prodding of ACRS, which first sounded the alarm
about the China syndrome, the AEC established a special
task force to look into the problem of core meltdown in
1966. The committee, chaired by William K. Ergen, a reactor
safety expert and former ACRS member from Oak 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 to perform. Therefore, containment could no longer
be regarded as an inviolable barrier to the escape of radioactivity.
This finding represented a milestone in the evolution
of reactor regulation. In effect, it imposed a modified
approach to reactor safety.
Previously, the AEC had viewed the containment building
as the final independent line of defense against the release of
radiation; even if a serious accident took place, the damage
that it caused would be restricted to the plant. However,
once it became apparent that under some circumstances, the
containment building might not hold, the key to protecting
the public from a large release of radiation was to prevent
accidents severe enough to threaten containment; the prevention
of these types of accidents depended heavily on a
properly designed and functioning ECCS.
The problem facing the AEC’s regulatory staff was that
experimental work and experience with emergency cooling
was very limited. Finding a way to test and to provide
empirical support for the reliability of emergency cooling
became the central concern of the AEC’s safety research
program. Plans had been underway since the early 1960s to
build an experimental reactor, known as the Loss-of-Fluid
Tests (LOFT) reactor, at the AEC’s reactor testing station in
Idaho. Its purpose was to provide data about the effects of
a loss-of-coolant accident. For a variety of reasons, includ34
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
ing weak management of the test program, a change in
design, and reduced funding, progress on the LOFT reactor
and the preliminary tests that were essential for its success
were chronically delayed. Despite the complaints of ACRS
and the regulatory staff, the AEC diverted money from the
LOFT project and other safety research projects on existing
light-water reactor designs to other projects related to the
development of fast breeder reactors. A proven fast breeder
reactor was an urgent objective for the AEC and the Joint
Committee; Seaborg described it as “a priority national
goal” that could ensure “an essentially unlimited energy
supply, free from problems of fuel resources and atmospheric
contamination.”
To the consternation of the AEC, experiments run at the
Idaho test site in late 1970 and early 1971 suggested that the
ECCS in light-water reactors might not work as designed.
As a part of the preliminary experiments that were used to
design the LOFT reactor, researchers ran a series of “semiscale”
tests on a core that was only 9 inches long (compared
to a length of 144 inches in a power reactor). The experiments
were run by heating a simulated core electrically to
allow the cooling water to escape and then injecting emergency
coolant. To the surprise of the investigators, the high
steam pressure that was created in the vessel by the loss of
coolant blocked the flow of water from the ECCS. Without
ever reaching the core, about 90 percent of the emergency
coolant flowed out of the same break that had caused the
loss of coolant in the first place.
In many ways, the semiscale experiments were not accurate
simulations of designs or conditions in actual power reactors.
The size, scale, and design of the experiments and the
channels that directed the flow of coolant in the test model
were markedly different from those in an actual reactor.
Nevertheless, the results of the tests were disquieting. They
introduced a new element of uncertainty into assessing the
35
Chapter 2
performance of ECCSs. The outcome of the tests had not
been anticipated and called into question the analytical
methods used to predict the events that would occur in a
loss-of-coolant accident. These results were hardly conclusive,
but their implications for the effectiveness of ECCSs
were troubling.
The semiscale tests caught the AEC unprepared, and the
AEC was uncertain about how to respond. Harold Price, the
Director of Regulation, directed a special task force that he
had recently formed to focus on the ECCS question and to
draft a “white paper” within a month. Seaborg, for the first
time, called the Office of Management and Budget to plead
for more funds for safety research on light-water reactors.
While waiting for the task force to finish its work, the AEC
tried to keep information about the semiscale tests from getting
into the public domain, even to the extent of withholding
information about the tests from the Joint Committee.
The results of the tests came at a very awkward time for the
AEC. It was under renewed pressure from utilities facing
power shortages and from the Joint Committee to streamline
the licensing process and eliminate excessive delays. At the
same time, Seaborg was successfully appealing to President
Richard M. Nixon for support of the fast breeder reactor,
and controversy over the semiscale tests and reactor safety
could undermine congressional backing for the fast breeder
reactor program. By spring 1971, nuclear critics were
expressing opposition to the licensing of several proposed
reactors, and news of the semiscale experiments seemed
likely to support their efforts.
For those reasons, the AEC sought to resolve the ECCS
issue as promptly and quietly as possible. It wanted to settle
the uncertainties about safety without arousing a public
debate that could slow the bandwagon market. Even before
the task force that Price had established completed its study
of the ECCS problem, the Commission decided to publish
36
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
“interim acceptance criteria” for ECCSs that licensees
would have to meet. It imposed a series of requirements that
it believed would ensure that the ECCS in a plant would
prevent a core meltdown after a loss-of-coolant accident.
The AEC did not prescribe methods necessary for meeting
the interim criteria, but, in effect, it mandated that manufacturers
and utilities set an upper limit on the amount of heat
generated by reactors. In some cases, this would force utilities
to reduce the peak operating temperatures (and hence,
the power) of their plants. Price told a press conference on
June 19, 1971, that although the AEC thought that it was
impossible “to guarantee absolute safety,” 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 ECCS criteria failed to achieve the AEC’s
objectives. News about the semiscale experiments triggered
complaints about the AEC’s handling of the issue
even from friendly observers. It also prompted calls from
nuclear critics for a licensing moratorium and a shutdown
of the 11 plants then operating. Criticism expressed by the
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an organization that
was established in 1969 to protest the misuse of technology
and that had recently turned its attention to nuclear power,
received wide publicity. UCS took a considerably less
optimistic view of ECCS reliability than that of the AEC.
It sharply questioned the adequacy of the interim criteria,
charging, among other things, that they were “operationally
vague and meaningless.” Scientists at the AEC’s national
laboratories, without endorsing the alarmist language that
UCS used, shared some of the same reservations. As a result
of the uncertainties about ECCSs and the interim criteria,
the AEC decided to hold public hearings that it hoped would
help resolve the technical issues. It wanted to prevent the
ECCS question from becoming a major impediment to the
licensing of individual plants.
37
Chapter 2
The AEC insisted that its critics had exaggerated the severity
of the ECCS problem. The regulatory staff viewed the
results of the failed semiscale tests as serious and took them
into account when establishing the interim criteria. The regulatory
staff also believed that the technical issues that the
experiments raised would be resolved within a short period
of time. It did not regard the tests as indications that existing
designs were fundamentally flawed, and it emphasized the
conservative engineering judgment it applied in evaluating
plant applications. However, the ECCS controversy damaged
the AEC’s credibility and played into the hands of
its critics. Instead of frankly acknowledging the potential
significance of the ECCS problem and taking time to fully
evaluate the technical uncertainties, the AEC acted hastily
to prevent the issue from undermining public confidence
in reactor safety or causing licensing delays. Its actions
gave credence to the allegations of its critics that it was so
determined to promote nuclear power and develop the fast
breeder reactor that it was inattentive to safety concerns.
Thermal Pollution
By the time the ECCS issue hit the headlines, other questions
about the environmental effects of nuclear power had
eroded public support for the technology. The problem of industrial
pollution and the deteriorating quality of the natural
environment became increasingly urgent as a public policy
issue during the 1960s. The increasing public and political
concern about environmental protection, which occurred at
a time when the demand for electricity was doubling every
10 years or more, placed utilities in a quandary. 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.”
38
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
Utilities increasingly viewed nuclear power as the answer
to that dilemma. Environmental concerns were a major
incentive for the growth of the great bandwagon market, and
nuclear power promised a means for meeting the demand
for power without causing air pollution. Environmentalists
recognized the benefits of nuclear power compared to fossil
fuel, but they were more equivocal in their attitudes toward
the technology than industry representatives were. Their
ambivalence was perhaps best summarized by a statement
from a leading environmental spokesman in 1967: “I think
most conservationists may welcome the coming of nuclear
plants, though we are sure they have their own parameters
of difficulty.”
Officials of 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. Although he acknowledged that nuclear power
could have some adverse impacts on the environment, he
insisted that its effects were much less harmful than those
of fossil fuel. In comparison with coal, he once declared,
Researchers from
Argonne National
Laboratory take
measurements of the
thermal discharge
plume from the Big
Rock Point Nuclear
Power Plant on Lake
39
Chapter 2
“There can be no doubt that nuclear power comes out looking
like Mr. Clean.”
In the late 1960s, a major controversy over the effects of
waste heat from nuclear plants on water quality, widely
known as “thermal pollution,” undermined the view of
nuclear power as beneficial to the environment relative to
conventional fuels. Thermal pollution resulted from cooling
the steam that drove the turbines to produce electricity in
both fossil fuel and nuclear plants. The steam was condensed
by the circulation of large amounts of water, and the
cooling water was heated during the process, usually by 10
to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, before being returned to the body
of water from which it came. This problem was not unique
to nuclear plants, but it was more acute in them largely because
fossil fuel plants used steam heat more efficiently than
nuclear plants did. The problem of thermal pollution created
more anxiety than during the 1960s because of the growing
number of plants, the larger size of those plants, and the
increasing inclination of utilities to order nuclear units.
Thermal pollution caused concern because it was potentially
harmful to many species of fish. It could also disrupt the
ecological balance in rivers and streams, allowing plants
to thrive that made water look, taste, and smell unpleasant.
Technical solutions to deal with thermal pollution were
available, but they required extra costs in the construction
and operation of steam-electric plants. For example, cooling
towers of different designs or cooling ponds would greatly
alleviate the release of waste heat to the source body of water.
However, utilities resisted adding cooling apparatuses to
the plants that they planned to build because of the expense
and an appreciable loss of generating capacity.
Advocates in the news media for stronger Federal action to
protect the environment, Congress, and State and Federal
agencies urged the AEC to require its licensees to guard
40
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
against the effects of thermal pollution. The AEC refused on
the grounds that it lacked the statutory authority to impose
regulations on hazards other than radiation. It argued that
the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 restricted its regulatory
jurisdiction to radiological dangers, a view that the U.S.
Department of Justice and Federal courts upheld. This argument
did not placate the AEC’s critics, who accused it of
ignoring a serious problem that nuclear plants exacerbated.
Several members of Congress introduced legislation to grant
the AEC authority over thermal pollution, but the agency
opposed those measures unless fossil fuel plants were
required to meet the same conditions. The AEC feared that
nuclear power would be placed at a competitive disadvantage
if plant owners had to provide cooling equipment that
was not required for fossil-fuel-burning facilities.
The AEC came under increasing criticism for its position.
The most prominent attack appeared in a Sports Illustrated
article in January 1969. It assailed the AEC for failing to
regulate against thermal pollution and attributed its inaction
to a fear of the “financial investment that power companies
would have to make…to stop nuclear plants from frying
fish or cooking waterways wholesale.” The article was a
distorted and exaggerated presentation, but it contributed
to a growing perception that instead of being a solution to
the dilemma of producing electricity without causing serious
environmental damage, nuclear power was a part of
the problem.
Eventually, the controversy over thermal pollution died
out. One reason was that Congress passed legislation that
gave the AEC authority to regulate against thermal pollution
and that applied to most fossil fuel plants as well.
A more important reason was that utilities increasingly
took action to curb the consequences of discharging waste
heat. Although they initially resisted the calls for cooling
equipment, they soon found that the costs of responding to
41
Chapter 2
litigation, enduring postponements in the construction or
operation of new plants, or suffering a loss of public esteem
were less tolerable than those of building cooling towers
or ponds. By 1971, most nuclear plants being built on, or
planned for, inland waterways (where the problem was most
acute) included cooling systems. However, the legacy of the
thermal pollution debate lingered on. This concern undermined
confidence in the AEC and awakened public doubts
about the environmental impact of nuclear power. The
thermal pollution debate played a vital role in transforming
the initial ambivalence that environmentalists had demonstrated
toward the technology into strong and vocal opposition.
As a result of the thermal pollution issue, the AEC and
the nuclear industry frequently found themselves included
among the ranks of enemies of the environment.
The Radiation Debate
The thermal pollution question was the first, but
not the only, debate over the effects of nuclear power that
aroused widespread public concern in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. A major controversy that arose over the effects
of low-level radiation from the routine operation of nuclear
plants also fed fears about the expanding use of the technology.
Drawing on the recommendations of 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 assumed that a person stood outdoors at the
boundary of the facility 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 generally 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. The conservative
assumptions of the AEC and the performance of operating
plants did not prevent criticism of the AEC’s radiation
standards. A number of observers suggested that the AEC’s
42
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
regulations were insufficiently rigorous and should be
substantially revised because of the uncertainties about the
effects of low-level radiation. This suggestion first emerged
as a widely publicized issue when the State of Minnesota,
responding to questions raised by environmentalists,
stipulated in May 1969 that a plant under construction must
restrict its radioactive effluents to a level of about 3 percent
of that allowed by the AEC.
The adequacy of the AEC’s 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 Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, which was funded by the AEC;
their position as insiders therefore 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 and Tamplin not only argued that the existing
standards of the AEC and other radiation protection organizations
were inadequate but also challenged the prevailing
consensus that the benefits of nuclear power were worth
the risks. 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 denied Gofman’s and Tamplin’s assertions on
the grounds that they had extrapolated from high doses to
estimate the hazards of low-level exposure and that it was
impossible for the entire Nation to receive the levels of radiation
that applied at plant boundaries. Most authorities in
43
Chapter 2
the field of radiation protection agreed with the AEC that the
risks of effluents from nuclear power were far smaller than
those maintained by Gofman and Tamplin. Nevertheless, in
an effort to provide an extra measure of protection, reassure
the public, and undercut the appeal of its critics, the AEC
issued for public comment in June 1971 new “design objectives”
for nuclear plants that would, in effect, reduce 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 expressed doubt that the AEC would
enforce the new guidelines. The controversy focused public
attention, once again, on the effects of low-level radiation,
but it did little to clarify a complex and ambiguous issue.
The National Environmental Policy Act and
Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant
In addition to the objections that its positions on thermal
pollution and radiation standards stirred, the AEC provoked
sharp criticism for its response to the National Environmental
Policy Act (NEPA). The law, passed by Congress
in December 1969 and signed by President Nixon on
January 1, 1970, required Federal agencies to consider the
environmental impact of their activities. The measure was
in many ways vague and confusing, and it gave Federal
agencies broad discretion in deciding how to carry out this
mandate. The AEC acted promptly to comply with NEPA,
but its procedures for doing so brought protests from
environmentalists. The agency took a narrow view of its
responsibilities under NEPA. In a proposed regulation that
the agency issued in December 1970, it included, for the
first time, nonradiological issues in its regulatory jurisdiction.
However, the AEC also stipulated that it intended to
rely on the environmental assessments of other Federal and
State agencies (rather than conducting its own), it agreed to
consider environmental issues in licensing board hearings
44
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
only if a party to the proceeding raised these issues, and it
postponed any review of NEPA issues in licensing cases
until March 1971.
The AEC declined to take an expansive view of its responsibilities
under NEPA for several reasons. One was the
conviction that the routine operation of nuclear plants was
not a serious threat to the environment and, indeed, was
beneficial compared to burning fossil fuels. Other legislation
covered the major products of nuclear power generation
that affected the environment, radiation releases and thermal
discharges. Furthermore, implementation of NEPA might
divert the AEC’s limited human resources from tasks that
were more central to its mission. The regulatory staff was
“all but overwhelmed” by the flood of reactor applications
and did not relish the idea of having to spend large amounts
of time on environmental reviews. Most importantly, the
AEC feared that weighing environmental issues other than
radiation and thermal releases would cause unwarranted
delays in licensing plants. The time required for evaluating
applications was already increasing, and the AEC worried
that NEPA could force a “quantum leap” in the length of the
process. It sought to strike a balance between environmental
concerns and the need for electrical power in framing
its regulations.
Environmentalists complained that the AEC had failed to
fulfill the purposes of NEPA and took the agency to Federal
court over the application of the AEC’s regulations to
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 in its
most widely quoted statement: “We believe that the Commission’s
crabbed interpretation of NEPA makes a mockery
of the Act.” The Calvert Cliffs decision was, in the words of
45
Chapter 2
Nucleonics Week, a “stunning body blow” to the AEC and
the nuclear industry.
The Calvert Cliffs decision was another in a series of
setbacks for the AEC and nuclear power. It was apparent
by the summer of 1971 that public distrust of the AEC was
growing and support for nuclear power was declining. The
cumulative effect of controversies over ECCS, thermal pollution,
radiation standards, NEPA, and other issues eroded
public confidence in the AEC’s commitment to safety and
raised doubts about the benefits of nuclear power. Antinuclear
activists capitalized on growing uneasiness about the
health and environmental effects of the technology. Some of
the critics were well informed and responsible in their arguments,
but others were one sided and inaccurate. Attempts
by nuclear proponents to correct a plethora of misleading
and exaggerated stories, advertisements, speeches, and other
presentations inevitably failed to win as much attention or
produce the same effect. To make matters worse for the
AEC, it suffered from the general disillusionment with the
Government, established institutions, and science that prevailed
by the late 1960s, largely as a result of the Vietnam
war. One college student summarized the situation after
listening to a debate between Victor Bond, a radiation expert
from Brookhaven National Laboratory, and a vocal AEC
critic: “Dr. Bond sounds good, but we can’t believe him. He
works for the government.”
By the summer of 1971, the AEC was an embattled agency,
largely, though not exclusively, because of regulatory issues.
Seaborg, after serving as chairman for 10 years, resigned his
post in July 1971, and President Nixon appointed James R.
Schlesinger, Assistant Director of the Office of Management
and Budget, to take his place. Schlesinger was determined to
make the AEC more responsive to environmental concerns
and to improve its tarnished public image. As an important
first step in those efforts, he and William O. Doub, who took
46
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
a seat on the Commission at the same time that Schlesinger
assumed the chairmanship, concluded that the AEC should
not appeal the Calvert Cliffs ruling, and, after considering
the alternatives, their colleagues agreed. The AEC announced
its decision on August 26, 1971.
The AEC’s response to the Calvert Cliffs decision brought
a storm of protests from utilities that feared long delays
in the licensing of plants that were nearly ready for operation.
Schlesinger explained the AEC’s new position in a
speech he delivered to a meeting of industrial groups in Bal
Harbour, FL, 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 AEC’s policy of promoting
and protecting the industry had been justified to help nuclear
power get started, but because the industry was “rapidly
approaching mature growth,” the AEC must redefine its
responsibilities. “You should not expect the AEC,” he
announced, “to fight the industry’s political, social, and
commercial battles.” He added that the agency’s role was
“primarily to perform as a referee serving the public interest.”
The message that Schlesinger’s speech conveyed was
unprecedented; it proclaimed a sharp break with the AEC’s
history and a new direction in the agency’s approach to its
regulatory duties.
Schlesinger’s efforts to narrow the divisions between
nuclear proponents and critics and to recover the AEC’s
regulatory credibility produced, at best, mixed results. Many
environmentalists were pleased with the AEC’s acceptance
of the Calvert Cliffs ruling and with Schlesinger’s Bal Harbour
speech. Their guarded optimism about Schlesinger’s
attitudes was perhaps best summarized by the title of an
article about him in National Wildlife magazine: “There’s
47
Chapter 2
a Bird Watcher Running the Atomic Energy Commission.”
However, major differences between the AEC and environmentalists
remained; many of the same issues that had
aroused concern before Schlesinger’s arrival continued to
generate controversy.
New Controversies and the End of the Atomic
Energy Commission
The reliability of ECCSs was an issue that continued to
generate controversy. In light of the objections to the interim
acceptance criteria for ECCSs that the AEC had published in
June 1971, the agency decided to hold a rulemaking hearing
on the issue that would apply to all licensing cases. It hoped
that this would avoid repeating the same procedures and deliberating
over the same questions in case-by-case hearings
and that generic hearings would provide a means to resolve
issues common to all plants. The ECCS hearings got underway
in early 1972 and amounted to 135 days over a period
of one-and-a-half years. When the hearings ended, the
transcripts of the proceedings filled more than 22,000 pages.
The ECCS hearings led to a final rule that made some small
but important revisions in the interim criteria. They also produced
acrimonious testimony and front-page headlines that
often reflected unfavorably on the AEC’s safety programs,
revealed divisions among its own experts about the value of
the interim criteria, and further damaged its credibility.
Another issue that undermined confidence in the AEC in the
early 1970s was its approach to high-level radioactive waste
disposal. The growth of the nuclear power industry made
the safe disposal of intensely radioactive waste materials an
increasingly urgent matter. The AEC had investigated the
means of dealing with reactor wastes for years, but it had
not found a solution to the problem. As early as 1957, a scientific
consensus had concluded that deep underground salt
deposits were the best repositories for long-lived and highly
48
The Nuclear Power Debate, 1963–1975
radioactive wastes. In 1970, in response to increasing expressions
of concern about the lack of a policy for high-level
waste disposal from scientific authorities, members of Congress,
and the press, the AEC announced plans to develop
a permanent repository for nuclear waste in an abandoned
salt mine near Lyons, KS. It aired its plans without conducting
thorough geologic and hydrologic investigations, and
the suitability of the site was soon challenged by the State
geologist of Kansas and other scientists. The uncertainties
about the site generated a bitter dispute between the AEC on
one side and members of Congress and State officials from
Kansas on the other. The dispute ended in 1972 in great
embarrassment for the AEC when the concerns of those who
opposed the Lyons, KS, location proved to be well founded.
In addition to debates over the potential failure of ECCSs
and high-level waste disposal, questions concerning reactor
design and safety, quality assurance (QA), the probability
of a major reactor accident, and other issues fueled the
controversy over nuclear power. The number of contested
hearings for plant licenses steadily grew. The ongoing controversy
frustrated Schlesinger’s hopes of increasing public
confidence in the AEC and of defusing the conflicts between
opposing views. By highlighting the issues on which the
AEC’s performance was suspect, the agency also obscured
the requirements that its regulatory staff imposed over the
protests and against the wishes of the nuclear industry, the
high standards that it demanded in the design and construction
of nuclear plants, and the conservative assumptions that
it applied in evaluating plant applications and formulating
radiation protection regulations.
As the nuclear power debate continued, the AEC came
under increasing attacks for its dual responsibilities for developing
and regulating the technology. This issue became
a major argument that nuclear critics cited in their indictments
of the AEC. One critic said that it was “like letting
49
Chapter 2
the fox guard the henhouse.” The possibility of creating
separate agencies to promote and to regulate the civilian
uses of nuclear energy had arisen within a short time after
passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. However, in the
early stages of nuclear development, this possibility had
seemed premature and unwarranted. The idea of creating
separate agencies gained greater support as both industry
concerns and antinuclear sentiment grew, and it took on
greater urgency after the Arab oil embargo and the energy
crisis of 1973–1974. One of President Nixon’s responses to
the energy crisis was to ask Congress to create a new agency
that could focus on, and presumably speed up, the licensing
of nuclear plants. After much debate, Congress divided the
AEC into the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration
and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC) in legislation that it passed in 1974. 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.
The U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory
Commission and
Three Mile Island
Chapter Three
51
Chapter 3
The NRC began its operations as a separate agency in January
1975. In many ways, it carried on the legacy inherited
from the AEC. It performed the same licensing and rulemaking
functions that the regulatory staff had discharged for
two decades. It also assumed some new administrative and
regulatory duties. The NRC, unlike the AEC’s regulatory
staff, was the final arbiter of regulatory issues; its judgment
on safety questions was less susceptible to being overridden
by developmental priorities. This did not mean that the NRC
acted without regard to industry concerns or that its officials
always agreed on policy matters, but it did mean that the
agency’s statutory mandate was clearly focused on ensuring
the safety of nuclear power.
The NRC devoted a great deal of attention during its first
few months to organizational tasks at the same time that
it carried out its regulatory responsibilities. It deliberated
over a number of pressing problems that it inherited from
the AEC or that arose shortly after its establishment. One
issue that received particular attention was the safeguarding
of nuclear materials. The term “safeguards” applied to
the prevention of theft, loss, or diversion of nuclear fuel
or other materials or the sabotage of nuclear plants. This
question took on greatly increased importance and visibility
in the early 1970s because of growing apprehension about
the activities and intentions of terrorist groups. There was a
wave of terrorist bombings, assassinations, hijackings, and
murders at that time, perhaps the most shocking of which
was the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.
The increase in such attacks around the world raised new
concerns that terrorists would be able to build an atomic
bomb, which was underscored by the well-publicized warnings
of some nuclear experts that making a bomb was not
terribly difficult for anyone who obtained the necessary
materials. As a result, the AEC, and, after its abolition, the
NRC, substantially strengthened regulatory requirements for
52
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
Three Mile Island
the transportation of nuclear materials and for nuclear plant
security. The NRC also devoted considerable attention to the
export of nuclear materials to foreign countries. The United
States was by far the leading supplier of nuclear fuel and
other materials for the production of nuclear power abroad,
and the NRC exercised important responsibilities for ensuring
that nuclear exports did not encourage the proliferation
of nuclear weapons or make them available to terrorists.
Despite the prominence of safeguards problems, the central
issue for the NRC at the time of its creation remained reactor
safety. Two events occurred in the early months of the
NRC’s existence that commanded the particular attention of
the agency and the public. The first event was a major fire
at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Browns Ferry Nuclear
Plant near Decatur, AL, in March 1975. In the process of
looking for air leaks in an area containing trays of electrical
cables that operated the plant’s control room and safety
systems, a technician set off a fire. He used a lighted candle
to conduct the search, and the open flame ignited the insulation
around the cables. The 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 the recently established NRC. It focused
new attention on preventing fires that threaten plant safety
and on the possibility of “common-mode failures” in which
a single breakdown could initiate a chain of events that
incapacitated even the redundant safety features.
The second source of unusually extensive discussion and
considerable controversy shortly after the NRC began
operations was the publication of the final version of the
“Reactor Safety Study” that the AEC had commissioned in
1972. The purpose of the study was to estimate the probability
of a severe reactor accident—an issue that the AEC had
never found a satisfactory means of addressing. To direct the
study, the AEC had recruited Norman C. Rasmussen, a pro53
Chapter 3
fessor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT). Rasmussen, assisted by AEC staff
members, applied new methodologies and sophisticated
“fault-tree analyses” to project the likelihood of a serious
nuclear accident. The final Rasmussen report, released in
October 1975, concluded that risks from nuclear power were
very small in comparison to other risks from, for example,
fires, explosions, toxic chemical spills, dam failures, airplane
crashes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes.
Although the Rasmussen report was hailed as a pioneering
effort that enlightened a complex subject, it also drew criticism
from both inside and outside the NRC. Some authorities
suggested that the study failed to account for the many
paths that could lead to major accidents. Others complained
that the data in the report did not support its executive
summary’s conclusions about the relative risks of nuclear
power. After considering the arguments on both sides of the
issue, the Commission issued a policy statement in January
1979 that withdrew its full endorsement of the study’s
executive summary.
The Three Mile Island Accident
Within a short time, the discussion of severe nuclear accidents
ceased to be strictly a matter of theoretical projections.
On March 28, 1979, an accident at the Three Mile
Island Nuclear Station (TMI), Unit 2, near Harrisburg, PA,
made the issue starkly and alarmingly real. As a result of a
series of mechanical failures and human errors, the accident
(researchers later determined) uncovered the reactor’s core
and melted about half of it. The immediate cause of the accident
was a pressure relief valve that stuck open and allowed
large volumes of reactor coolant to escape from the core.
The control room instrument panel did not provide a clear
picture of what was happening in the reactor, and, partly
as a result, the plant’s operators failed to pick up the signs
of a loss-of-coolant accident. Although the ECCSs began
54
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
Three Mile Island
to work according to design, the operating crew decided
to reduce the flow from them to a trickle. By the time that
experts realized that the plant had undergone a loss-of-coolant
accident and flooded the core, the reactor had suffered
irreparable damage.
The credibility of the nuclear industry and the NRC fared almost
as badly. Uncertainty about the causes of the problem,
confusion about how to deal with it, conflicting information
from Government and industry experts, and contradictory
appraisals about the level of danger in the days following
the accident fed public fears and fostered a deepening perception
of a technology that was out of control. The greatest
source of concern was a hydrogen bubble that formed in
the pressure vessel, the large container that held the reactor
core. At first, experts feared that the bubble could inhibit efforts
to cool the core and bring it to a safe-shutdown condition.
However, another issue soon arose. Joseph M. Hendrie,
Chairman of the NRC, began to worry that over time the
bubble might become flammable or even explosive. In a
Three Mile Island,
looking southeast.
The accident occurred
in the reactor at the
right of the photograph.
55
Chapter 3
worst case scenario, a burn or explosion could rupture the
pressure vessel and increase by indeterminate but uncomfortable
proportions the chances of a breach of containment
and a massive release of radiation to the environment.
Hendrie immediately instructed the NRC staff to explore
the possibility that the bubble could reach a flammable or
explosive condition. News of the bubble created a great deal
of apprehension among the population who lived near the
plant, and thousands of people evacuated their homes as
headlines warned that a “hydrogen explosion” could occur.
They joined those who had left the area the previous day in
response to a voluntary advisory evacuation for pregnant
women and preschool-aged children that Governor Richard
Thornburgh had issued. He had acted in consultation with
the NRC in response to the existing uncertainties about
the level of danger from the accident. Over a 5-day period,
about 144,000 people evacuated the area with remarkable
calmness and responsibility.
While the NRC investigated the bubble problem, Thornburgh
called a late-night press conference. Harold R. Denton,
the NRC’s chief staff official at the site, explained that the
bubble could conceivably be a hazard in a matter of days but
that it did not pose an immediate threat. Denton’s assurances
curbed the sense of alarm among the local population that
the plant might suddenly explode. The following day, after
a highly publicized tour of the plant by President Jimmy
Carter, the NRC determined that a lack of oxygen in the pressure
vessel prevented the bubble from reaching a flammable
or explosive state. This conclusion, along with the gradual
reduction in the size of the bubble, ended the acute phase of
the TMI crisis. However, many serious questions about the
safety of nuclear power remained to be addressed.
In some ways, the TMI accident produced reassuring, or at
least encouraging, information for reactor experts about the
56
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
Three Mile Island
design and operation of the safety systems in a large nuclear
plant. Despite the substantial degree of core melting that occurred,
containment was not breached. From all indications,
the amount of radioactivity released into the environment as
a result of the accident was very low. For example, less than
20 curies of the 66 million curies of iodine131 in the reactor
at the time of the accident escaped from the plant. Careful
epidemiological studies of the population in the region surrounding
the plant revealed no increase in the incidence of
cancer over a period of two decades that could be attributed
to the accident.
The favorable findings about the effects of the accident
were overshadowed by a series of unsettling disclosures of
problems that demanded immediate correction. The TMI accident
focused attention on possible causes of accidents that
the AEC/NRC and the nuclear industry had not considered
extensively. Their working assumption had been that the
most likely cause of a loss-of-coolant accident was a break
in a large pipe that fed coolant to the core. However, the
destruction of the core at TMI had not resulted from a large
pipe break but instead from a relatively minor mechanical
failure that operator errors had drastically compounded.
Perhaps the most distressing revelation of TMI was that
an accident so severe could occur at all. Neither the AEC/
NRC nor the industry had ever claimed that a major reactor
accident was impossible despite the multiple and redundant
safety features that are built into nuclear plants. However,
they had regarded it as highly unlikely, to the point of being
nearly incredible. The TMI accident demonstrated graphically
that serious consequences could arise from unanticipated
events. This enhanced the credibility of nuclear critics
who had argued for years that no facility as complex as a
nuclear plant could be made foolproof. Public opinion polls
taken after the TMI accident showed a significant erosion
in support for nuclear power. One survey found that for the
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Chapter 3
first time, the number of respondents who opposed building
more nuclear units exceeded those who favored new plants.
However, the polls indicated that the public did not want to
abandon nuclear power or close existing plants.
The NRC Response to the Accident at
Three Mile Island
The NRC responded to TMI by reexamining the adequacy
of its safety requirements and by imposing new regulations
to correct deficiencies. It placed much greater emphasis on
“human factors” in plant performance in an effort to avoid
a repeat of the operator errors that had exacerbated the accident.
The agency developed more stringent requirements
for operator training, testing, and licensing. In cooperation
with industry groups, it promoted the increased use of reactor
simulators and the careful assessment of control rooms
and instrumentation. In addition, the agency expanded its
resident inspector program to station at least two of its
inspectors at each plant site.
The NRC devoted greater attention to other problems that
had received limited consideration before the TMI accident.
These problems included the possible effects of small
failures that could lead to major consequences, such as those
that happened at TMI. The agency sponsored a series of
studies on the ways in which “small breaks and transients”
could threaten plant safety. A second area of NRC focus was
the evaluation of operational data from licensees. It established
a new office to systematically review information
from, and the performance of, operating plants. This action
reflected the belated recognition that malfunctions similar to
those at TMI had occurred at other plants, but the information
had never been assimilated or disseminated.
The NRC undertook other initiatives as a result of TMI. It
decided to review radiation protection procedures at operating
plants to assess their adequacy and to look for ways to
58
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
Three Mile Island
improve existing regulations. It expanded research programs
on problems that TMI had highlighted, including fuel damage,
fission-product release, and hydrogen generation and
control. In light of the confusion and uncertainty over the
evacuation of the areas surrounding TMI during the accident,
the NRC also sought to upgrade emergency preparedness
and planning. Those and other steps that it undertook in
the wake of the accident were intended to reduce the likelihood
of a major accident and, in the event that one occurred,
to enhance the ability of the NRC, the utility, and the public
to cope with it.
While the NRC was still deliberating over and revising its
requirements in the aftermath of TMI, another event shook
the industry and further undercut public support for nuclear
power. This time, the NRC was a distant though interested
observer rather than a direct participant. On April 26, 1986,
Unit 4 of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl in the
U.S.S.R. underwent a violent explosion that destroyed the
reactor and blew the top off it, spewing massive amounts of
radioactivity into the environment. The accident occurred
during a test in which operators had turned off the plant’s
safety systems and then lost control of the reactivity in the
reactor. Without emergency cooling or a containment building
to stop or at least slow the escape of radiation, the areas
around the plant quickly became seriously contaminated,
and a radioactive plume spread far into other parts of the
U.S.S.R. and Europe. Although the radiation did not pose
a threat to the United States, one measure of its intensity in
the U.S.S.R. was that the levels of iodine-131 around TMI
were three times as high after the Chernobyl accident than
they had been after the TMI accident.
The design of the Chernobyl reactor was entirely different
than that of U.S. plants, and the series of operator blunders
that led to the accident defied belief. Supporters of nuclear
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Chapter 3
power emphasized that a Chernobyl-type accident could
not occur in commercial plants in the United States (or
other nations that used U.S. designs) and that U.S. reactors
featured safety systems and containment to prevent the
release of radioactivity. However, nuclear critics pointed to
Chernobyl as the prime example of the hazards of nuclear
power. A representative of 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.” The Chernobyl tragedy was a major setback
for nuclear proponents in their hope to win public support
for the technology and to spur orders for new reactors.
For example, 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. “We’re 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.”
Licensing of New Plants and
Emergency Planning
The Chernobyl accident added a new source of concern to
longstanding controversies over the licensing of several
reactors in the United States. In the aftermath of the TMI
accident, the NRC had suspended the granting of operating
licenses for plants that were 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 full-power operating license (to North Anna Power
Station, Unit 2, in Virginia) since the TMI accident. In the
following 9 years, it granted full-power licenses to over 40
other reactors, most of which had received construction per60
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
Three Mile Island
mits in the mid1970s. In 1985, it authorized the undamaged
TMI, Unit 1, which had been shut down for refueling at the
time of the accident at TMI, Unit 2, to resume operation.
Although many of the licensing actions aroused little opposition,
others triggered major controversies. The two licensing
cases that precipitated what were perhaps the most bitter,
protracted, and widely publicized debates were Seabrook
Nuclear Power Plant in New Hampshire and Shoreham
Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, NY. The key, although
hardly the sole, issue in both cases was emergency planning.
The TMI accident had vividly demonstrated the deficiencies
in existing procedures for coping with an offsite nuclear
emergency. The lack of effective preparation had produced
confusion and uncertainty among decisionmakers and among
members of the public faced with the prospect of exposure
to radiation releases from the plant. After the accident, the
NRC, prodded by Congress to improve emergency planning,
adopted a new rule on emergency planning. It required each
nuclear utility to come up with a plan for evacuating the
population within a 10mile radius of its plant(s) in the event
of a reactor accident, although protective action was likely
to be necessary only in a part of the “emergency planning
zone.” The rule applied to plants in operation and under construction.
It called for plant owners to work with State and
local police, fire, and civil defense authorities to put together
an emergency plan that the NRC and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency would test and evaluate.
The NRC lacked the authority to force State and local
governments to participate in emergency preparedness procedures,
and it had little choice but to frame its regulations
on the assumption that they would cooperate. The agency
recognized that State or local governments, if they chose to,
could try to prevent the operation of nuclear plants by refusing
to work with Federal agencies to improve emergency
planning. That was precisely what the States of New York
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Chapter 3
and Massachusetts sought to do in the cases of 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 plant proponents pointed out that emergency
plans did not require the evacuation of all of Long Island
if a serious accident occurred, the State refused to join in
emergency planning procedures or drills. The NRC granted
Shoreham a low-power operating license, but the State
and the utility, Long Island Lighting Company, eventually
reached a settlement in which the company agreed not to
operate the plant in return for concessions from the State.
A similar issue arose at Seabrook, although the outcome was
different. The plant is located in the State of New Hampshire,
but the 10mile emergency planning zone extended across
the State line into Massachusetts. By the time that construction
of the plant was completed, Massachusetts Governor
Michael S. Dukakis, largely as a result of Chernobyl, had
decided that he would not cooperate with emergency planning
efforts for Seabrook. New Hampshire officials worked
with Federal agencies to prepare an emergency plan, but
Massachusetts refused to cooperate, arguing that crowded
beaches near the Seabrook plant could not be evacuated in
Opponents of a
full-power license
for Seabrook express
their views at NRC
headquarters in
Rockville, Maryland,
1990.
62
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
Three Mile Island
the event of an accident. As a result of New York’s and Massachusetts’
positions on Shoreham and Seabrook, the NRC
adopted a “realism rule” in 1988 that was grounded on the
premise that in an actual emergency, State and local governments
would make every effort to protect public health and
safety. Therefore, in cases in which State or local officials
declined to participate in emergency planning, the NRC and
the Federal Emergency Management Agency would review
and evaluate plans developed by the utility. On that basis,
the NRC issued an operating license for the Seabrook plant.
The arguments that raged over emergency planning and other
issues at Shoreham and Seabrook attracted a great deal of attention,
spawned heated controversy, and raised anew an old
question about the relative authority of Federal, State, and
local governments in licensing and regulating nuclear plants.
The lengthy and laborious licensing procedures that applicants
had to undergo in the cases of Shoreham (which had
received a construction permit in 1973), Seabrook (which
had received a construction permit in 1977), and other reactors
stirred new interest in simplifying and streamlining the
regulatory process. It seemed apparent that the complexity of
the licensing process was a major deterrent to utilities who
might consider building nuclear plants. By the late 1980s,
the nuclear option looked more appealing to some observers,
including some environmentalists, because of growing
concern about the consequences of burning fossil fuel, especially
acid rain and global warming. Furthermore, nuclear
vendors were advancing new designs for plants that greatly
reduced the chances of TMI-type and other severe accidents.
One way that the NRC proposed to facilitate licensing procedures
was to replace the traditional two-step process with
a one-step system to ease the burden on applicants. However,
this raised a vitally important question: What level of
detail would the NRC require in applications for advanced
plants in order to satisfy its concerns about their safety? The
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Chapter 3
agency had never required the detailed technical information
in construction permit proposals that it expected in operating
license applications. However, the NRC was uncertain
as to how much data it would need in this one-step licensing
process to evaluate and certify safety designs. After long
discussions that reflected differing views among the Commissioners,
the NRC staff, and nuclear vendors, the agency
reached a decision on what constituted an “essentially complete
design.” It established a “graded approach” in which
the level of detail that an applicant would be required to
submit varied according to the relationship of the structures,
systems, and components to plant safety. The objective of
the NRC’s action was to ensure safety while providing flexibility
for the development of new designs.
Radiation Standards
While the NRC was deliberating over a number of new
regulatory procedures and problems, it was also reviewing
some old issues. The most prominent of those issues was radiation
standards. The NRC had begun work on revising its
radiation protection regulations in the aftermath of the TMI
accident. Although the AEC had issued “design objectives”
that in effect reduced the permissible levels of radioactive
effluents from nuclear plants in the 1970s, the basic regulations
for occupational and population exposure had remained
unchanged since 1961 (an average of 5 rem per year
for radiation workers and 0.5 rem annually for individuals
in the general population). Based on new recommendations
by NCRP and ICRP and on new research findings, the NRC
tightened its regulations in several areas, the most prominent
of which was to restrict population exposure to 100 millirem
per year (rather than 500 millirem per year).
Despite new scientific information and epidemiological
studies, the health effects of low-level radiation remained
a source of uncertainty and controversy. Some studies
provided results that were reassuring about the hazards of
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The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and
Three Mile Island
radiation emissions from nuclear plants. For example, a major
survey conducted by the National Cancer Institute found
no increased risk of cancer in 107 counties in the United
States located near 62 nuclear power plants. However, other
evidence was more disquieting, such as a cluster of cancer
cases near the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts
and a high incidence of leukemia in children around
the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Great Britain.
None of the studies on the effects of low-level radiation
were, or claimed to be, definitive. The subject continued
to be a source of interest to, and debate among, scientists.
It also continued to be a source of considerable anxiety to
the public. The most graphic evidence of public apprehension
about radiation was the public’s reaction to the NRC’s
announcement of a new policy on radiation levels that were
“below regulatory concern” (BRC). In June 1990, the NRC
published a policy statement outlining its plans to establish
rules and procedures by which small quantities of low-level
radioactive materials could be exempt 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 personrem
per year, they could be eligible for the exemption. However,
the NRC would not grant this exemption automatically; it
would consider requests for exemptions for sites that met the
dose criteria through its rulemaking or licensing processes.
It intended that 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 time and resources to major regulatory
issues and thereby better protect public health and safety.
The NRC’s announcement of its intentions on the BRC
policy was greeted with a firestorm of protest from the
public, Congress, the news media, and antinuclear activists.
Some critics suggested that the agency was defaulting on its
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Chapter 3
responsibility for public health and safety and that BRC policy
would allow the nuclear industry to discard dangerously
radioactive wastes in public trash dumps. One antinuclear
group alleged that it was “a trade-off of people’s lives in
favor of the financial interests of the nuclear industry.” In
public meetings that the NRC held to explain BRC, aroused
citizens called repeatedly for the resignation of the Commissioners
or their indictment on criminal charges. Eventually,
the Commission decided to defer any action on the BRC
issue. The outcry over the BRC policy underscored the difficulty
of even attempting to sponsor a calm and reasoned
discussion on the subject of radiation hazards.
The uproar over the BRC policy was one of several indications
of how the regulatory environment had changed
since the passage of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 made
the development of nuclear power for electrical generation
possible. A public that had welcomed the growth of nuclear
power in the 1950s had become skeptical of the technology
and suspicious of those responsible for its safety. Nuclear
plants had become larger, more complicated, and more costly
to build. Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts,
the longest running nuclear plant until its closure
in 1992, had a capacity of 175 MWe, and its construction
cost was about $39 million. For example, Seabrook by comparison
had a capacity of 1,150 MWe and cost over $6 billion
to build. The length and complexity of the licensing
process had grown commensurately. The owners of Yankee
Rowe applied for a construction permit in 1956 and received
an operating license in 1960 without a murmur of protest.
Seabrook’s owners applied for a construction permit in 1973
and received an operating license in 1990 after long legal
proceedings and many angry demonstrations. The contrasts
between Yankee Rowe and Seabrook resulted from a series
of interrelated technological, administrative, and political
developments that shaped the history of nuclear regulation.
Chapter Four
New Issues,
New Approaches
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Chapter 4
The focus of the NRC’s activities gradually shifted away
from the licensing of new plants to overseeing the safety
of operating plants. Because it received no applications for
construction permits after 1978 and had completed work on
most operating license applications a decade later, it devoted
much less attention and fewer resources to its licensing responsibilities.
During the first half of the 1980s, the NRC’s
deliberations and policy decisions were in large measure a
response to the TMI accident. However, by the latter part
of the decade, the agency was addressing a wide range of
new questions related to the safety of the about 100 plants
in operation. Not surprisingly, the issues that the agency
considered often raised difficult and divisive questions for
which there were no ready answers.
Decommissioning and License Renewal
One key issue related to operating plants that the NRC
considered during the 1980s was decommissioning, the final
step of the life cycle for licensed facilities. Between 1947
and 1975, a total of 50 nuclear plants, including five small
experimental power reactors, were decommissioned. In the
late 1970s, this experience gave the NRC confidence that
the decommissioning of nuclear plants would not present
major problems when their licenses expired. However,
the NRC took a closer look at this subject in response to
an investigation by the U.S. General Accounting Office,
congressional hearings, and a petition from environmental
organizations. In 1984, the staff reported to the Commission
that existing regulations covered decommissioning in
a “limited, vague, or inappropriate way and are not fully
adequate.” As a result, the NRC drafted a rule that required
licensees to specify how they planned to ensure that sufficient
funding was available to clean up the sites on which
their plants were located and to make certain that radiation
levels at decommissioned sites were low enough to allow
the land to be used for other purposes. After soliciting public
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New Issues, New Approaches
comments and making modest revisions in the draft, the
NRC published a final rule in 1988.
The decommissioning rule was much more comprehensive
than earlier NRC regulations, but it did not resolve all of the
issues that arose on the subject. Within a short time after the
rule became final, the agency faced an unprecedented and
unanticipated question: What should be done about funding
for “prematurely shutdown reactors”? The closing of
three plants, including Shoreham, well before their operating
licenses expired raised questions about how to pay for
the costs of decommissioning reactors that had not operated
long enough to accumulate adequate funding. This issue was
underscored by the fact that the costs for decommissioning
the Yankee Rowe plant ran much higher than projected.
While the NRC wrestled with this question, it also deliberated
over the level of radiation that should be permitted at
the sites of decommissioned plants. This issue generated
opposing views and sometimes sharp differences between
the NRC and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
As decommissioning issues were debated, the NRC also devoted
considerable attention and resources to renewing the
operating licenses of nuclear power plants. Although some
utilities were closing reactors long before the expiration of
their 40-year operating licenses, others were weighing the
possibility of extending the lives of plants beyond 40 years.
The 40year licensing period for nuclear plants was a rather
arbitrary compromise written into the Atomic Energy Act of
1954. It was not based on technical information or operating
experience but instead on the amortization period for
fossil fuel plants. In the late 1970s, industry groups closely
examined the issue of plant life extension for the first time.
For example, the Electric Power Research Institute concluded
that the reconditioning of old plants offered potentially
major benefits, but it cautioned that the benefits depended
on financial considerations and on technical assessments,
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Chapter 4
environmental issues, and projections of power availability.
Those uncertainties were compounded by industry’s concern
that the NRC was not prepared to address the question of
license renewal promptly and knowledgeably.
In 1985, Chairman Nunzio J. Palladino prodded the NRC
to undertake a careful analysis of license renewal. The
agency had sponsored research on the critical question of
the safety effects of plant aging for years, but many technical
questions remained unanswered. License renewal also
raised complex legal and policy issues. The NRC staff cited
the “central regulatory question” that plant life extension
presented: What is an adequate licensing basis for renewing
the operating license of a nuclear power plant?
The NRC deliberated over this issue and its corollaries for
several years. Eventually, it decided that the maximum
length of an extended license would be 20 years. The agency
also concluded that using the existing regulatory requirements
governing a plant would offer reasonable assurance
of adequate protection if its license were renewed, provided
that the “current licensing basis” was modified to account
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 that were common to all or most nuclear plants. In
April 1998, Baltimore Gas and Electric Company became
the first utility to apply for license renewal for its Calvert
Cliffs plants on the Chesapeake Bay. Duke Energy Corporation
followed suit in July 1998 when it sought license extensions
for the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina.
Risk Assessment and Nuclear Safety
As the NRC considered its policies on license renewal, representatives
of the nuclear industry expressed concern that
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New Issues, New Approaches
the costs and uncertainties of the regulatory process would
negate the potential advantages of plant life extension. This
concern was consistent with strong industry criticism of
the NRC’s regulations or the ways in which these regulations
were implemented. Of course, industry protests about
regulatory burdens were nothing new, but they had taken
on increased urgency and intensity by the early part of the
1990s. Industry officials complained that NRC regulations
were in many cases excessive and potentially counterproductive.
They particularly objected to the agency’s numerical
ratings of plant performance, which they found to be
arbitrary and inconsistent. They also asserted that many of
the requirements imposed in response to the TMI accident
gave the NRC an unduly intrusive presence in the day-today
operations of its licensees.
A report prepared by the Towers Perrin consulting firm
for a prominent industry group, the Nuclear Energy Institute
(NEI), concluded in 1994 that the NRC’s policies and
practices represented a “serious threat to America’s nuclear
energy resource” by distracting plant management, undermining
public trust in nuclear power, and “pricing nuclear
power out of the competitive energy marketplace.” The report
called for prompt changes to “reverse the NRC’s role in
accelerating the decline of the nuclear industry.” The Towers
Perrin study found that the NRC regulatory approach was
“negative and punitive,” and it urged the agency to place
greater emphasis on performance-based assessments that
would recognize the significant improvements that industry
had achieved since the TMI accident.
By the time that the Towers Perrin report appeared, the NRC
had begun to evaluate ways in which risk assessment and
performance indicators should be factored into the regulatory
process. Nuclear industry representatives complained
that the NRC relied too heavily on “prescriptive” regulations
that specified a rigid solution to a licensee on how
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Chapter 4
to carry out a safety goal. In some cases, this meant that
licensees that had already met a regulatory standard using
their own methods had to expend considerable staff hours to
implement an alternative approach that the NRC preferred.
The Towers Perrin report urged the NRC to place greater
emphasis on nonprescriptive performance-based regulations.
This would allow licensees greater leeway in determining
how to accomplish regulatory goals and presumably cut
costs without sacrificing safety. Noting the rise in operating
and maintenance costs, NRC Chairman Ivan Selin (1992–
1995) declared, “We feel that the NRC has been a factor in
this and that perhaps it’s 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 investigate the feasibility of
using more performance-based regulations that focused on a
“result to be obtained, rather than prescribing to the licensee
how the objective is to be obtained.” This initiative received
strong support from Selin; his successor, Shirley Ann Jackson
(1995–1999); and their colleagues on the Commission.
The effective employment of performance-based regulations
was closely tied to informed analyses of risk. The Towers
Perrin report complained that the NRC made little effort to
distinguish safety from nonsafety issues and to appropriately
prioritize them. It claimed that the result was a “diversion
and dilution of licensee resources” away from the most
important safety issues, such as human performance when
problems arose at the plant. The industry and many in the
NRC called for the conduct of probabilistic risk assessments
(PRAs) as a more effective way to assess hazards and to use
resources efficiently to protect against them.
The benefits of PRAs had been debated within the NRC
since the Rasmussen report of 1975 without making a major
impact on the formulation or enforcement of the agency’s
regulations. Industry was concerned that the NRC remained
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New Issues, New Approaches
wedded to a “deterministic analysis” and a redundant
“defense-in-depth” approach that downplayed the role of
risk assessment in safety evaluations. Regulators using a
deterministic approach simply tried to imagine “credible”
mishaps and their consequences at a nuclear facility and
then required the defense-in-depth approach—layers of
redundant safety features—to guard against them. Before
TMI, no severe accidents that melted the core of a plant
had ever occurred, and no sure way existed to calculate the
probability of a major accident. NRC experts used their collective
judgment to determine what accidents were credible,
and the agency often mandated multiple safety systems to
compensate for the uncertainty of an accident’s probability
and consequences. This approach had worked well in
protecting public safety; defense-in-depth was critical in
preventing sizeable releases of the most dangerous forms
of radiation at TMI. However, the defenseindepth approach
was not effective in prioritizing accidents or in judging
when an extra, often expensive, safety system produced a
commensurate increase in margins of safety. Proponents
argued that a PRA, with its much more detailed use of probabilities
and modeling of plant and human behavior, could
better deal with such issues.
During the 1980s, the NRC moved cautiously to implement
PRAs. Industry and the NRC agreed on the general objective
of increasing the use of PRAs, but many uncertainties
about how to apply the concept of risk assessment in practice
remained. Too few data were available to allow PRAs
to offer reliable estimates of risk. For example, an NRC
tabulation of PRA data on the probability of core melting
indicated that uncertainties with the data and models meant
that the actual risk could be higher or lower by an order
of magnitude. A U.S. General Accounting Office report
of 1985 praised the NRC’s decision to limit the applicability
of PRAs to providing supplemental information in
environmental impact statements, helping to prioritize the
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resolution of safety issues that were generic to all reactors,
and determining the possible benefit of proposed regulatory
actions. The U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that
“substantial limitations of PRA in terms of the uncertainties
of the results” supported the continuation of its qualified use
in safety analysis and decisionmaking.
By the 1990s, the state of the art of PRAs had advanced
significantly, in part as a result of research programs
launched in the wake of the TMI accident. In 1991, the NRC
completed a major study entitled, “Severe Accident Risks:
An Assessment of Five U.S. Nuclear Power Plants,” that it
hailed as a “significant turning point in the use of risk-based
concepts.” In 1995, the Commission unanimously adopted
a policy statement that encouraged the broad application of
PRAs in the regulatory process to enhance decisionmaking
on safety issues and to ease “unnecessary burdens on licensees.”
Within a short time, the agency began to use the phrase
“risk-informed, performance-based regulation” to describe
its intention to take advantage of the insights provided
by risk assessment. The NRC suggested that risk analysis
would enable it to “focus on those regulated activities that
pose the greatest risk to the public.” Nevertheless, the policy
statement made clear that PRAs were still playing second
fiddle to the defense-in-depth approach and should be used
largely to identify “overly conservative regulatory requirements.”
The continuing precedence 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 “safe enough” without the spray system.
Despite the affirmation of the importance of defense in
depth, the NRC continued to search for ways to use PRAs
to improve the regulatory process. Eventually, it developed
a “reactor oversight process” to “inspect, measure, and assess
the safety performance of commercial nuclear power
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New Issues, New Approaches
plants and to respond to any decline in performance.” The
NRC evaluated individual plants on a series of performance
indicators with regard to reactor safety, radiation exposures
to workers and the public, and physical protection.
Quality Assurance and Plant Maintenance
One of the most important issues that the NRC tackled as
it turned its attention to the regulation of operating reactors
during the 1980s was quality assurance (QA), which had
been an issue of growing concern since the waning days of
the AEC. In 1974, John G. Davis, a regulatory staff member
in the AEC, told attendees at a nuclear industry meeting that
“considering the extent that AEC has gone in order to stress
the importance of QA, we find the continuing deficient
programs to be quite disappointing.” He suggested that
utilities, rather than viewing QA as an essential part of plant
management, too often merely met the minimum requirements
mandated by the AEC. To improve existing practices,
in addition to providing a “higher incentive” for performance
through stiffer fines for failures, the AEC introduced
a trial program of “resident inspectors” at two plant sites.
Their assignment was to provide regular onsite verification
that utilities complied with regulations instead of relying on
comparatively superficial, infrequent visits from inspectors
based in regional offices. In 1977, the NRC determined that
the resident inspector concept was workable and expanded
the program to more facilities.
In the wake of the TMI accident, the NRC gave increased
attention and resources to QA and proper maintenance in operating
plants. The agency estimated in 1985 that more than
35 percent of the “abnormal occurrences” that it had reported
to Congress over the previous 10 years were directly attributable
to maintenance deficiencies. Many of the problems
arose from human errors, such as failing to follow procedures,
installing equipment incorrectly, or using the wrong
parts to make repairs. The need for improvements in main75
Chapter 4
tenance was underscored when an incident in 1985 at the
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station in Ohio resulted in the
loss of all feedwater. Failures in feedwater pumps, including
auxiliary pumps that the plant had not tested or maintained,
caused what could have produced a major accident.
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 that
the rule was unnecessary, the Commission voted to adopt a
regulation that required adequate maintenance programs in
all commercial nuclear plants. It ordered the staff to prepare
broad guidelines to assist licensees in identifying existing
weaknesses and in establishing procedures that would fulfill
the NRC’s requirements.
The maintenance issue was an important part of the larger
problem of QA. After the TMI accident, the NRC decided to
station two resident inspectors at each plant. As the number
of inspectors and inspections increased, the hours devoted
to checking on licensees’ performance doubled by the early
1980s. At the same time, the number of inspection procedures
more than doubled, which made it difficult for the
resident inspectors to complete their tasks on schedule. As
a result, the NRC began to make greater use of risk assessment
and trend analysis in its overall QA and inspection
protocols. Risk assessment presented the possibility of prioritizing
those inspection activities most relevant to safety
and reducing the regulatory burden on licensees.
In 1987, the NRC staff announced a shift to performancebased
inspections. The staff would use the direct observation
of plant activities for the purpose of enhancing safety
76
New Issues, New Approaches
and reliability instead of document reviews that simply
demonstrated that a licensee conformed to regulations and
procedures. However, implementing performance-based
inspections proved difficult. The Towers Perrin report testified
to the industry’s view that inspectors’ evaluations were
frequently inconsistent and arbitrary. In 1995, the NRC’s
inspector general concluded that the agency’s resident
inspectors lacked a clear understanding of how to carry out
the performance-based concept. This conclusion led to a
revision of inspection guidelines and reforms in the training
of inspectors.
The NRC improved its use of data and risk assessment in
inspections. In 1995, the South Texas Nuclear Power Plant
suffered an extended shutdown after continuing problems
with emergency systems. The NRC found that many of
the plant’s problems were evident from earlier inspection
reports, but that the information had not been applied effectively
in overall performance assessments. The agency
sought to make better use of inspection data and reformed
its inspection program through greater emphasis on PRA.
In 2002, for example, it issued a new Standard Review Plan
as guidance for the use of PRAs in the inservice inspection
of piping.
The Millstone Controversy
Although risk-informed regulation offered many potential
benefits for evaluating the performance of nuclear plants, it
was not capable of detecting every safety issue that could
generate acute public concern. In that regard, risk-informed
regulation was not necessarily a useful means of building
public confidence in nuclear power technology or in
the NRC. This fact was amply demonstrated when a series
of problems arose at the Millstone Power Station, which
included three plants located on the northern side of Long
Island Sound in Connecticut. The safety issues at Millstone
required attention, but they were not so serious that risk
77
Chapter 4
analysis was likely to identify them as 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 created a great deal of controversy and
a barrage of criticism of the NRC.
The uproar over Millstone began in the early 1990s when
several plant employees claimed that they were harassed,
intimidated, or dismissed from their jobs by the owner of
the plant, Northeast Utilities, for calling attention to safety
problems and violations of NRC regulations. The NRC
investigated the concerns raised by these “whistleblowers”
and determined that the safety issues that they raised were
not of major significance and had been corrected. 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 NRC’s action in this case
did not satisfy the dissidents at Millstone or elsewhere, who
insisted that the agency was neither prompt nor firm in dealing
with the issues that they cited or in protecting them from
retaliation by their employers. As a result of the complaints
from Millstone and other plants, the agency reexamined and
eventually tightened its policies to better protect whistleblowers
who contacted the NRC about safety issues.
Meanwhile, new revelations at Millstone generated increasing
NRC scrutiny. They also commanded growing media
attention, much of which was sharply critical of the NRC. In
1993 and again in 1994, the NRC fined Northeast Utilities
for procedural violations that the agency viewed as serious
lapses in the management of the Millstone units. The utility
pledged to improve its performance and “to resolve issues
raised by [its] employees.” Nevertheless, another issue that
company employees reported soon triggered new reservations
about safety at Millstone and the effectiveness of the
NRC’s enforcement policies. In this case, the whistleblow78
New Issues, New Approaches
ers objected to the company’s practice of placing the entire
nuclear core into the spent fuel pool at Millstone, Unit 1,
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,
Millstone, Unit 1, had performed “full-core offloading” for
years as an “emergency” procedure, with the NRC’s knowledge
of this practice. Finally, after its employees questioned
the practice, Northeast Utilities applied for a license amendment
that expressly permitted full-core offloading, and the
NRC granted its approval in November 1995.
By that time, the utility and the NRC were the subjects of
extensive and unflattering coverage in the local media. In
March 1996, the criticism reached a new level of visibility
when 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 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 the implication that “the Millstone situation
borders on an impending TMI- or Chernobyl-type disaster.”
Amid the growing criticism, the NRC conducted its own
reviews to identify and correct errors that the Millstone experience
brought to light. An internal task force reported in
September 1996 that the “safety significance of Millstone’s
refueling practices was low.” Nevertheless, it recommended
a series of procedural, informational, and management improvements
designed to ensure that licensees complied with
NRC regulations and that the agency enforced its own rules.
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Chapter 4
The NRC sought to minimize “recurring exemptions” from
its regulations, such as those that occurred in the refueling
practices at Millstone, Unit 1. It reemphasized its position
that exemptions were intended to apply to special circumstances
in which specific requirements could be waived
without compromising public safety. The agency also undertook
a careful study of a frequently used provision in its
regulations that allowed licensees to make changes in their
plants without NRC permission under certain conditions.
In 1999, the Commission approved revisions designed to
clarify the rule and provide guidance on when NRC consent
was necessary within a risk-informed framework.
While the NRC examined its own regulations and procedures,
it conducted an expanding probe of the Millstone
plant. In May 1996, the NRC’s inspector general faulted
the agency for failing to recognize the problems at Millstone
and impose corrective actions much earlier. When the
NRC’s investigations, along with those conducted by the
utility, turned up hundreds of performance and procedural
deficiencies, the agency took the unusual step of stipulating
that the utility would not be allowed to restart its three units,
all of which had been shut down, without a formal vote of
the Commission. Eventually, after the utility made management
changes, took a series of steps to address its problems,
and decided to permanently close Millstone, Unit 1, the
Commission authorized the restart of Unit 2 (in 1999) and
Unit 3 (in 1998). The series of problems at Millstone threw
into sharp relief the general difficulties that the NRC had
encountered with plants that did not perform up to standards
and did not correct their deficiencies promptly or effectively.
The Commission devoted a great deal of energy to encouraging
or forcing improvements in plants that did not fully
meet its requirements.
80
New Issues, New Approaches
Regulating Nuclear Materials
Although reactor safety issues captured a lion’s
share of public notice, the NRC also devoted substantial
resources to a variety of complex matters in the area of
nuclear materials safety and safeguards. The protection of
nuclear materials from theft and diversion remained a major
agency concern, although it did not command the level of
public attention it had received during the 1970s. 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 lowlevel
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 agency’s rules elicited
protests from medical practitioners and organizations
who complained about regulatory overkill that intruded into
physician-patient relationships.
The issues surrounding the regulation of nuclear materials,
the problems at Millstone, and the use of risk assessment
in regulatory decisionmaking underscored the prevailing
patterns in the history of nuclear regulation over a period of
four decades. The nuclear industry and materials licensees
often asserted that regulatory requirements were too burdensome,
too inflexible, and too strict. On the other hand,
nuclear critics frequently lamented that regulatory requirements
were too lax, too sympathetic to industry concerns,
and too inattentive to public safety. The NRC, and the AEC
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Chapter 4
before it, attempted to find a proper balance between essential
and excessive regulation, but this task was difficult
and uncertain, and it usually elicited complaints from one
side or all sides of regulatory issues. The NRC sought to
separate valid criticisms from those that were exaggerated
or ill formed, but this process received little praise from the
agency’s different (and frequently competing) constituencies.
“The bane of the regulator,” a senior agency official
remarked in 1998, “is to feel unloved.” The ongoing effort
to promote the safe operation of nuclear power plants without
imposing undue burdens on their owners ensured that
nuclear regulation would remain a complex and controversial
public policy issue.
A Terrorist
Attack and a
Nuclear Revival
Chapter Five
83
Chapter 5
Shortly after the dawn of the 21st century, the NRC marked
the 25th anniversary of the date that it began operations in
January 1975. It continued to face many of the same issues
and controversies that had been a prominent part of the first
quarter of a century of its history. However, the new century
soon brought unexpected and unfamiliar new developments
that had a major impact on the agency’s policies, procedures,
and planning for the future.
The Impact of the Terrorist Attacks of
September 11, 2001
The first such event was the shock of 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 two crucial questions
for the NRC and the nuclear industry: (1) the vulnerability
of nuclear plants to a raid by terrorists who could disable
safety systems and cause a massive release of radiation to
the environment and (2) the possible effects of an airplane
loaded with fuel hitting a plant at a high speed.
As soon as the NRC learned of the attacks on the morning
of September 11, 2001, it told its licensees to move to their
highest level of readiness, Security Level 3. This meant
that licensees added to the size of their security forces on
site, increased the number of patrols that they conducted,
and made access to plants more difficult. The NRC pointed
out that security arrangements at nuclear plants before the
September 11 attacks had already been rigorous as a result
of the regulations that had been imposed during the 1970s.
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 the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the NRC
reviewed its regulations to consider what steps should be
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A Terrorist Attack and a Nuclear Revival
taken to improve existing requirements. In February 2002,
it 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 to the
public about the enhanced requirements. However, it generally
instructed licensees to conduct more patrols, build up
the size and capability of security forces, install additional
physical barriers, perform vehicle inspections at a greater
distance from reactors, provide tighter control of access by
plant workers to buildings and equipment, and improve coordination
with military and law enforcement agencies. The
NRC also decided that each plant would carry out force-onforce
exercises to evaluate the effectiveness of its security
regime every 3 years instead of every 8 years. In April 2002,
the Commission created the Office of Nuclear Security and
Incident Response to serve as the focal point for the NRC’s
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. The provisions
were not made public, but the agency announced that these
requirements would guard against “the largest reasonable
threat against which a regulated private guard force should
be expected to defend under existing law.”
The regulatory changes that the NRC made in the wake of
the September 11 attacks stirred criticism from those who
believed that nuclear plants were still vulnerable. Some
members of Congress, claiming that the NRC and industry
had failed to adequately address the dangers of terrorist
attacks, introduced legislation to establish a Federal guard
force under NRC authority. The NRC strongly objected to
the proposal on the grounds that it would be “a costly, unwieldy
solution” that would not benefit security but would
compromise the agency’s 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
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secret”—that 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 prepared and ill equipped to
fight off a well-armed band of commandos who were intent
on gaining access to a plant and causing a massive release of
radiation. They further contended that the simulated attacks
that the NRC used to test a plant’s 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 with the charges that its
security requirements were lax and ineffective. 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,” McGaffigan remarked.
“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 plant’s defenses
and perfect knowledge of the plant’s layout and the equipment
they need to attack to try to bring about core damage,”
they succeeded in reaching their targets in only 9 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.” The NRC made further improvements
in the program after the September 11 attacks.
The security of plants from a ground attack continued to be
a source 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
attacks, the NRC needed to improve the collection and
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A Terrorist Attack and a Nuclear Revival
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 September 11 attacks, including
the new design-basis threat and more realistic scenarios.
As the NRC was working on the protection of plants from
a commando strike, it was also considering another problem
that was equally difficult and even more ethereal—the
effects of an airplane hitting a reactor building or spent fuel
pool. Shortly after terrorists flew airplanes into the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, 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 protect against 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 what the
consequences would be “if a large airliner, fully loaded with
jet fuel…crashed into a nuclear power plant.” The critical
issue that industry and the NRC then faced was to assess the
vulnerability of plants to an air attack that could produce a
massive release of radiation.
In June 2002, NEI announced the results of a study conducted
by the Electric Power Research Institute that it had sponsored
on this issue. “We think it’s 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
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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 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” to
protect public health.
Nuclear critics argued that even if the containment structure
is strong enough to withstand the impact of an airplane,
spent fuel pools are much more vulnerable. The pools that
hold highly radioactive fuel rods, after their removal from
the core, are housed in separate buildings that are not as robust
as 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
to 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 that claimed that a terrorist attack with
an airplane or an antitank missile 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.
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A Terrorist Attack and a Nuclear Revival
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
that the NRC had conducted or sponsored, and the agency
commented that most of these studies “are not applicable to
terrorist attacks.” It revealed that research performed since
the September 11 attacks showed that the hazards cited in
the Alvarez report were overstated and misleading and that
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 based its position. They accused the NRC of hiding
its analysis “behind a curtain of secrecy.”
The standoff between the NRC and its critics on the vulnerability
of spent fuel pools led Congress to request a study
of the issue by the National Academy of Sciences. A group
of 15 scientists conducted the investigation and announced
their findings in April 2005. The group concluded 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 with that
contention. 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 philosophical differences
between the National Academy and the NRC were not easily
resolved because the agency, in accordance with legal requirements,
could not share sensitive, although unclassified,
information about defensive measures at nuclear plants.
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Chapter 5
This issue led to sharp exchanges with the National
Academy, which complained that guidelines for making
“safeguards information” available were vague. The NRC
suffered stinging criticism for its position. For example, 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 effectiveness 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 Academy’s 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.
“Significant Degradation” at Davis-Besse
At the same time that the NRC was evaluating security
requirements at nuclear power sites, it was responding to
a serious safety issue that arose at the Davis-Besse plant
in Ohio. In February 2002, an inspection of the reactor
revealed “significant degradation” of the pressure vessel
lid. To the surprise and consternation of the company that
owned the plant, First Energy Nuclear Operating Company,
and the NRC, it turned out that corrosion had created a
“large cavity” in the vessel head. The football-sized gap
measured about 4 inches wide and 7 inches deep. The corrosion
had displaced about 70 pounds of steel and left only
a comparatively thin layer of stainless-steel cladding about
three-eighths of an inch in depth. The damage to the head
was very disturbing because a failure of the corrosion-resistant
cladding could have led 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 and take action to correct the conditions that
caused the damage. Investigations by First Energy and the
NRC revealed that the company had paid insufficient atten90
A Terrorist Attack and a Nuclear Revival
tion to signs of corrosion and had made erroneous assumptions,
based on incomplete information, about the need for
careful inspection of the head. The utility found 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” by those findings.
The NRC established a “Lessons Learned Task Force” to examine
the agency’s role in the deficiencies at Davis-Besse. It
concluded that staff shortages and the attention commanded
by other troubled plants in the NRC’s Region III office had
contributed to the delay in finding the corrosion at Davis-
Besse. Davis-Besse was regarded as a “good performer,”
and the regional office focused its resources on other plants
that were shut down and that required augmented oversight.
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 also criticized the performance of the
resident inspectors and faulted them for not recognizing the
severity of the corrosion problem, reporting it to superiors,
or following established procedures for dealing with it.
The failures at Davis-Besse generated a great deal of concern
within First Energy and the NRC. The issue received considerable
coverage in newspapers around the country and extensive
treatment in Cleveland, Toledo, and other locations in
Ohio. The problem of corrosion at Davis-Besse soon became
linked to another controversy over the NRC’s inquiry into
a generic problem of potential cracking in control rod drive
mechanism nozzles in the vessel head. On August 3, 2001,
the NRC instructed owners of pressurized-water reactors
to check the status of the drive mechanism nozzles in
their plants by December 31, 2001. The agency acted in
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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 for refueling or other
reasons, and the NRC specified that the date for conducting
the surveys 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. The
NRC staff reviewed the request and determined that the
utility could run the plant until February 16, 2002, without
triggering a “significant safety concern.”
The question of the timing for inspecting the drive mechanism
nozzles for cracking soon generated an intense debate
within the NRC. First Energy had unexpectedly discovered
the corrosion of the vessel head in February 2002 in the process
of looking for evidence of damage to the nozzles. This
discovery threw into sharp relief the issue of whether the
NRC had erred in allowing the plant to operate for 6 weeks
beyond the December 31, 2001, deadline for inspecting the
nozzles. In December 2002, the NRC’s inspector general
The discovery of
extensive corrosion
on Davis-Besse’s
reactor vessel head
led to an extensive
shutdown for the
plant’s utility
company and
considerable reform
of NRC inspection
practices.
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A Terrorist Attack and a Nuclear Revival
sent a report on Davis-Besse to the Commission. The
inspector general had undertaken the study in response to
charges from UCS that the agency had failed to adequately
regulate the plant and that a loss-of-coolant accident could
have been the result of this failure. In the report, the inspector
general strongly criticized the NRC’s performance. It
found, among other things, that the agency had “considered
the financial impact to the licensee of an unscheduled plant
shutdown” rather than making public health and safety its
highest priority.
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
for inspection of the reactor vessel head at Davis-Besse
only after careful consideration by the staff. Furthermore,
the Commissioners admonished the inspector general 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 Commissioners’ concern that the original problem of the
cracking of the control rod drive mechanism nozzles would
be confused with the more urgent and more alarming problem
of corrosion of the reactor head was well founded. The
inspector general’s 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
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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 denounced NRC Chairman
Meserve and his “equally narrow-minded” colleagues for
“badmouthing” the inspector general’s 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 was 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 corrosion of the head was an “enormous failure”
on the part of the agency and the utility. However, it denied
that fracture of the cladding would have inevitably led to a
massive release of radiation from the plant. The agency emphasized
that the other barriers (including the containment
building) that are in place would have, in all likelihood,
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.”
A Nuclear Revival?
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. In the
aftermath of the TMI accident, the nuclear industry adopted
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a series of reforms to correct deficiencies that the accident
had so graphically revealed. Changes in operator training,
plant management, control room design, and equipment
led to significant improvements in the safety and reliability
of nuclear power. The capacity factor for nuclear plants
indicates the percentage of time during which the plants
produce power. This factor increased from 50 to 60 percent
in the 1970s to 90 percent currently. The cost of generating
electricity from nuclear reactors fell significantly. A series
of safety indicators, including the number of reactor scrams
(the sudden shutting down of a nuclear reactor), safety
system failures, and collective radiation exposure for plant
workers, showed consistent and substantial industrywide
improvement. Nevertheless, the long-term prospects for the
nuclear industry did not look promising. During the 1990s,
it appeared doubtful that any new reactors would be built
because of the high capital costs of construction relative to
other sources of power. “The industry is doing better now,”
Matthew Wald wrote in the New York Times in March 1999,
“but ironically extinction is in sight.”
During the early years of the 21st century, however, the
outlook for nuclear power brightened considerably. One
important reason was the increasing need for power. During
the 1990s, energy consumption in the United State grew by
about 23 percent while production expanded by less than
3 percent. It seemed apparent that many new plants would
have to be built to generate enough power to meet America’s
energy demands. In May 2001, President George W. Bush’s
administration estimated that the Nation would need at least
1,300 and perhaps 1,900 new power plants over a period of
two decades. The disadvantages of fossil fuel as a source of
energy were evident. A growing percentage of the country’s
oil came from politically unreliable nations and domestic refining
capacity had declined substantially. Coal was plentiful
but exceptionally dirty. Natural gas had been the fuel source
of choice during the 1990s, but there were acute concerns
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Chapter 5
about the adequacy of supplies and cost. In that context,
nuclear power began to look attractive or at least worthy of
consideration. “We have even seen the first stirring of interest
in the possibility of [nuclear plant] construction in the
United States—a thought that would have been unthinkable
even a year ago,” commented NRC Chairman Meserve in
March 2001.
The advantages of nuclear power appeared even more apparent,
at least to some observers, as public knowledge and
concerns about global warming grew rapidly in the first
decade of the 21st century. Scientists had theorized about
the possibility that increasing quantities of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere could lead to climate change as far back as
1899. In 1965, a report to the President’s 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.” By the end
of the 20th century, proposals to arrest climate change by
limiting the use of fossil fuels had become a prominent public
policy issue. Demands for taking steps to stabilize concentrations
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, combined
with the need for plants to generate sufficient electricity to
meet projected energy requirements, gave new impetus to
reconsidering nuclear power.
In 2000, a group of analysts from various fields of expertise
argued in an article in Science magazine that “nuclear power
can play a significant role in mitigating climate change.”
Their position received strong support in an interdisciplinary
study conducted at MIT and published 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 emissions—hundreds of billions of
tonnes of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide.” It concluded
that the “nuclear option should be retained precisely
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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 MIT study also called for tax credits and other
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 the growth of the industry.
Despite the need for power, 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, Congress passed and President
Bush signed an energy bill that sought to ease the financial
burdens on utilities that built new nuclear plants with loan
guarantees and other subsidies. The financial incentives
were intended to encourage what was often referred to as
the “nuclear renaissance.” The revival of the nuclear option
proceeded steadily but not without considerable uncertainty.
In 2006, National Geographic ran an article entitled, “It’s
Scary. It’s Expensive. It Could Save the Earth.” It began by
asking the question, “Nukes Again?” Its answer was equivocal:
“Maybe.” By June 30, 2009, the NRC had received 18
combined operating license applications for 28 new nuclear
plants. However, only a few of the companies who submitted
applications planned to start construction as soon as they
received NRC approval.
Regardless of the extent of the nuclear renaissance or the
pace at which it proceeds, the nuclear industry, the NRC,
and other stakeholders should be keenly aware of the history
of the first nuclear boom of the 1960s and mindful of the
lessons to be learned from the experiences that followed,
especially the need for conservative design, scrupulous
operation, and careful regulation.
NUREG/BR-0175, Rev. 2
October 2010