Union of Concerned Scientists: NRC Reactor Oversight Process Has Failed to Improve Reactor Safety

[kristopher]

A Decade Later: NRC Reactor Oversight Process Has Failed to Improve Reactor Safety, New Report Finds

WASHINGTON (February 4, 2011) -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) reactor oversight process, introduced 10 years ago to better monitor safety at nuclear power plants and trigger appropriate agency responses, has failed to improve nuclear safety, according to a report released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

The NRC established the oversight process after a 1997 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed the agency routinely failed to require plant owners to correct serious safety problems. The agency intended the process to provide timely, objective assessments of safety levels along with clearly defined NRC responses when problems were detected.

“The oversight process was supposed to detect safety problems so the NRC could ensure that plant owners restored safety levels quickly,” said David Lochbaum, director of UCS’s nuclear safety project and author of the report, "The NRC's Reactor Oversight Process: An Assessment of the First Decade." “Regardless, for more than five out of the last 10 years, seven reactors operated with known safety shortfalls and, for at least four years, 13 other reactors operated with NRC-identified performance problems.” (See below for a list of the reactors.)

The reactor oversight process uses ...

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/nrc-oversight-failing-0498.html

[madokie]

1. That doesn't surprise me any

Kind of like the agency overlooking the deep water drilling rigs in bed with the oily bastids, or the people who were responsible for the levies in NO that were breached.
In order for an agency to actually be effective they have to be completely separate from the industry they regulate. We've got a mess and the bush/cheney cabal made it worse and its going to take a long time to every get it all cleaned up..

[NNadir]

2. It's pretty much impossible to improve reactor safety for this reason....

...reactors are so extraordinarily safe that making them much safer, when Amory Lovins' pals at BP are so unsafe, would be a huge waste of money.

If anti-nuke dumbbells could find one millionth as many people who die from dangerous fossil fuel related safety each year, they'd carry on and on and on and on and on for decades about it.

How do I know? Because they do it every damn day.

Nuclear power need not be perfect to be vastly superior to all the stuff that anti-intellectual, anti-science anti-nukes don't care about.

It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

Last year more than 1000 people died in this country from dangerous natural gas explosions. Anti-nukes couldn't care less. Last year more than 1.5 million people died from air pollution. We have NEVER heard a single illiterate anti-nuke come here to mention any of these things.

Why? Because they have selective attention, are completely mindless, and think that their illiterate echo chamber means something. It doesn't. The world has 62 nuclear reactors now under construction, almost any one of which will easily produce within the walls of a single building more energy than all of the whirling metal wind turbines in Denmark.



Have a nice day.

[kristopher]

3. Not true...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=273449&mesg_id=273744

[FBaggins]

4. How many people died in those incidents?

Any even injured? How about ill?

None?

How about here?
http://www.katu.com/news/9383316.html

Each of the incidents that you listed (which are among the worst in recent decades), was still a number of failures away from a dangerous incident. If the head had corroded further and the containment wall at Davis-Besse turned out to have the same kind of containment weakness that Crystal River had, and if the pumps/drains became clogged, and the reactor failed to shut down in time... then you could see a release of radiation into the environment.

A chain of highly unlikely failures that all have to occur at the same time does not become appreciably more likely when one of those potential failures is caught before it becomes a problem.