As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission celebrated its 50th anniversary Oct. 11, a word and a concept – “efficiency” – was on the minds of the staff, the commission, and the distinguished panel of former, iconic commissioners who addressed the celebration.
The prominence of the term came in the new fundamental legal framework for the commission – embodied in Congress’s recent passage and the White House’s signature – the “Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act of 2024,” or the ADVANCE Act (Congress has an unfortunate compulsion to invent highfalutin names for its often-mundane work products). The new law for the first time adds “efficient” to the agency’s mission to assure the safety of nuclear power plants.
The statutory language calls on the NRC to “update the mission statement of the Commission to include that licensing and regulation of the civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy be conducted in a manner that is efficient and does not unnecessarily limit— (1) the civilian use of radioactive materials and deployment of nuclear energy; or (2) the benefits of civilian use of radioactive materials and nuclear energy technology to society.”
The amended mission statement requirement has caused a buzz in the agency, as some have taken it to mean that the agency should adopt a less rigorous analysis of requests for NRC licenses. Indeed, that is the aim of some of the legislators who wrote the new law, and of many in the industry who have long complained that the NRC process is an impediment.
Many outside observers have long argued that evidence for the industry claim is lacking. The industry’s historic problems were of their own making along with historic macroeconomic trends. Some NRC staff worry that the new language is a Congressional “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” telling the regulators to place economic considerations (time is money) above safety in their decision-making.
At the birthday party at the agency’s towering Rockville, Md., headquarters last Friday, NRC Chairman Christopher Hanson sought to downplay the discomfort over adding efficiency to the agency’s mission. Hanson, a Biden appointee in his second term as agency head, acknowledge some “consternation” among the agency’s staff.
Don’t worry, Hanson advised. He said efficiency has always been on the commission’s mind. Efficiency, he said, “is not the enemy of safety. It does not mean cutting corners.” He noted that efficiency has always been on the commission’s mind. The agency’s first public report in 1975 noted that “in some instances efficiency calls for regulatory change and in others efficiency calls for regulatory stability.”
With that background, the celebration turned to some of its past leaders for institutional memory and inspiration, in chronological order.
First up was Victor Gilinsky, 90, a veteran of the regulatory staff at the Atomic Energy Commission when Congress separated the regulators from the promoters and abolished the AEC (along with the abolition two years later of the Joint Committee of Atomic Energy). He was then nominated to first commission. He is the only surviving member of the original five NRC commissioners. President Gerald Ford named Gilinsky to serve on the new commission. President Jimmy Carter reappointed him and he served briefly during the Reagan administration.
Physicist Gilinsky was skeptical of the ADVANCE Act, which he did not bring up directly in his comments at the NRC festivities. Rather, he stressed the continuing fundamental agency mission of nuclear safety. The AEC model of combining the regulators with the technology promoters, he recalled, “didn’t work well.” The dominant AEC promoters had “a grand vision” of fast reactors and plutonium breeding as the future of civilian nuclear power. They “didn’t want anything to stand in the way of that.” They were convinced hundreds, even thousands, of fast breeder reactors would be built.
The powers that ran the AEC were also convinced that the in-house safety regulators “believed regulators were a hinderance to this project and they push the regulators down. I was there, was part of the AEC.” The fast reactors were a failed vision, Gilinsky pointed out, while the light water reactors the safety regulators came to favor dominate the industry. “It didn’t help that the fast reactor was so unrealistic commercially that none was ever built.”
Today, Gilinsky noted, fast reactors and other designs that never made the commercial realism cut are back in vogue. Looking at the hype being generated in Washington for these new designs, Gilinsky warned that “safety requires careful examination of designs, to avoid serious errors. Beware of sliding back into the AEC mode.”
Gilinsky recalled what Adm. Hyman Rickover, the tough-minded founder of the nuclear Navy and developer of the first U.S. civilian plant at Shippingport, Pa., told him: “I pass his advice on to you. You have an important job protecting the public. Make sure you do it well.”
Theoretical physicist Shirley Ann Jackson, the first African American woman to earn a doctorate degree from MIT, who chaired the NRC from 1995 to 1998, recalled her role in moving the commission toward probabilistic risk informed performance and for pushing the agency into strategic planning. She said, “It is important not only to talk about what ones’ responsible and missions are but in fact to get things done. It’s good to have a vision, but one has to have a mission to get things done and take advantage of one’s window in time.”
She noted that among the challenges that faced the NRC in her term was the looming need to be ready for license renewal. She also cited a need to understand the NRC’s weakness “exposed by the shutdown of the Millstone 1 Plant,” which the agency shut down for two years in Nov. 1995. The vintage 660-MW General Electric boiling water reactor permanently shut down in July 1998.
Jackson said the goal was to “move away from good buy versus bad guy regulation. Once the mental view of licensing developed, that would be the lens through which that licensee would be deal with.” She added she also pushed to examine “potentially undocumented changes to the safety envelop” of operating reactors.
When Jackson left the NRC, in 1999 she became the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., where she served for 23 years, retiring in 2022.
The presentations of former regulators concluded with lawyer and physicist Richard Meserve, who served as a Clinton appointment as chairman in late 1999 and then as a commissioner during the George W. Bush administration until 2003. He was the chairman during the NRC’s 25th anniversary and in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. He served on the NRC during the large wave of relicensing proceedings.
Meserve cited the aphorism attributed (without evidence) to Mark Twain that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” He said, “We contemplated that there was going to be a nuclear renaissance. We had concerns about staff resources and capabilities. We were worried by a surge of licensing applications. Of course, it didn’t occur.”
–Kennedy Maize
To comment: