Commissioners rejected critical staff recommendation to make the Fukushima safety upgrades mandatory
 
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Congress’s leading voice on nuclear safety, released the following statement in response to today’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) vote on the second phase of the post-Fukushima safety upgrades.
 
“While I welcome the step the Commission took today, I am disappointed that a majority of the Commissioners voted to reject the recommendation of the NRC Near-Term Task Force on Fukushima that the safety upgrades be made mandatory and not leave their implementation subject to a future cost-benefit analysis. With this vote, the Commission has raised questions about its commitment to ensuring that the lessons of Fukushima truly will be learned. Once again, I call on each Commissioner to do more than simply state their commitment to nuclear safety – the votes are what count.”
 
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the NRC determined that nuclear security upgrades were required to be implemented for the “adequate protection” of all U.S. nuclear reactors. This meant that nuclear reactors would not be considered to be sufficiently secure without these new measures, and that an additional cost-benefit analysis would not be required to justify their implementation.  Both the NRC Fukushima Task Force and the NRC staff who reviewed the Task Force report concluded that these new safety recommendations were also necessary for the “adequate protection” of U.S. nuclear power plants, and that cost-benefit analysis should not be required to justify their implementation either.  Chairman Greg Jaczko announced his support for all the recommendations made by the Task Force.
 
The Markey report entitled “Regulatory Meltdown” found that on November 7, 2011, Commissioner William Magwood’s chief of staff emailed the Commissioner recommending that he add an item to his as-yet unpublished vote on the decision the NRC announced this morning.  The item was also reportedly included in Commissioner William Ostendorff’s unpublished vote, and would disapprove the NRC staff’s recommendation to require the safety upgrades to be implemented as retrofits to existing reactors in order to ensure the “adequate protection” of these facilities.   If such an item was approved, it could mean that these safety upgrades might not have to be undertaken at all because the industry could argue as part of that future analysis that the requirements are too expensive.
 
The final materials NRC released today indicate that Commissioners Magwood and Ostendorff’s views evidently prevailed, because it states that making a decision on whether the Fukushima Task Force recommendations should be mandatory and necessary for the adequate protection of nuclear reactors was “premature”.
 
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