Kerry-Leiberman bill undermines NRC

[bananas]

From UCS new blog, "All Things Nuclear" http://allthingsnuclear.org/

http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/610490464/nuclear-powers-perfect-day

May 18, 2010 • Comments
Will Kerry and Lieberman Ruin the “Perfect Day” in the Life of a Nuclear Power Plant?

| by Edwin Lyman | nuclear power safety | nuclear energy |

One of the more obscure provisions in the nuclear power subtitle of the discussion draft of the “American Power Act” (or simply “K-L”) circulated by Senators Kerry and Lieberman last week is the blandly titled Section 1108, “Inspections, Tests, Analyses, and Acceptance Criteria.” This section, comprising a mere six lines of text, would strike out a sentence of the Atomic Energy Act and replace it with the following: “Following issuance of the combined license, the Commission shall ensure that the prescribed inspections, tests, and analyses have been met.”

<snip>

To be sure, we do not believe that it is the industry’s desire to start operating new plants without taking steps to ensure that critical safety systems will work. But plant licensees may have less stringent criteria than those of the NRC for deciding when a system will “work,” especially if they are under economic pressure to get a new plant up and running. This is why the NRC needs the authority to ensure that no new plant should start up until a day that, if not perfect, is still pretty darned wonderful.

UCS does not believe that it is appropriate for Congress to waive a magic wand and short-circuit the NRC’s deliberative process, especially when it is dealing with subtle and heavily technical issues. NRC should be allowed to follow its current path for resolving these difficult questions through rulemaking, which will afford both industry and the public with the opportunity to review and comment on the proposed rules. Senators Kerry and Lieberman should remove Section 1108 before their important climate and energy bill is finalized.

It's important to test components before a reactor is first turned on, because nuclear power plant failures are described by the bathtub curve, where high infant mortality rates make catastrophic failure more likely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

[kristopher]

1. The functioning of safety related regulatory structures also fits the bathtub curve.

The OP and the recent attention focused on "fixing" the regulatory failures that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster is predicated on the demonstrably false belief that it is possible to create regulatory systems that are highly effective. Unfortunately that ignores all evidence that over time ALL regulatory systems are prone to degradation through things like corruption, altered perceptions and values, incompetence, forgotten lessons and diminishing motivation for excellence and general stupidity.

Anything that requires a highly effective bureaucracy to prevent something like a Chernobyl scale disaster has only one chance of success - it has to be short lived. If it is, like a nuclear power plant, something that must be managed for half a century or more, then the success of the regulatory safety checks is bound to be affected by those degrading influences mentioned.

[politicasista]

2. Mr. Lyman should call both senators and personally tell them to remove it

or he could go after the ones who need to help make this a stronger bill.

Always felt like this bill was going to be trashed because, well, Lieberman's name is on the bill, and Kerry, despite environmental creds is disliked because of everything and the bill is not pure enough for top environmentalists. JAO