The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today said the agency should quickly upgrade safety requirements for U.S. nuclear plants.

NRC has acted too slowly in implementing complex safety regulations in the past and should not take more than 15 years to improve safety rules for nuclear plants following Japan's nuclear crisis, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said during an agency hearing today. Other NRC commissioners rebuffed Jaczko's call earlier this year to make all safety changes by 2016.

"Fifteen years from now, if we're still dealing with post-Fukushima, that's not where anybody needs to be," Jaczko said. "If we do this the way we've always done, we won't get it done in a reasonable amount of time."

The five-member panel heard from environmental groups, industry representatives and other federal agencies today on how to ensure that plants can withstand extended power outages, earthquakes, floods and accidents involving multiple reactors at one site.

The agency is considering a dozen safety recommendations from an internal task force that reviewed the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, triggering explosions, radioactive leaks and evacuations.

At the agency's request, NRC staff released a report last week that prioritized the task force safety proposals. NRC staff supported a majority of the task force recommendations but emphasized the urgency for installing instrumentation on spent fuel pools and ordering operators to harden reactor vents on Mark II reactors (E&ENews PM, Oct. 5).

The commission should view safety upgrades in a short-term context to keep pace with plant retirements and relicensing procedures, Jaczko said. It is not clear when the commission will vote on the staff's proposals, but today's discussion will inform the voting process, he said.

Jaczko said a rulemaking to ensure plants can withstand widespread power loss -- also known as "station blackout" -- should not take an extensive amount of time to craft and implement. Officials are essentially considering extending the amount of backup batteries nuclear plants must have in case of emergencies and increasing the facilities' coping time, Jaczko said. NRC could easily gather experts to compile a rule and put it in place, he added.

Christopher Paine, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's nuclear program, agreed with the chairman and said NRC should move through the safety upgrades quickly. Paine said the staff's recommendations for dealing with flooding and seismic inspections seem "needlessly bureaucratic, time-consuming and cumbersome," with multiple requests for studies and staff review before changes are made.

NRC staff said the agency should expedite a rule to ensure plants can handle extended loss of power, a problem that plagued the Fukushima plant and hampered its ability to continue cooling overheating reactors. But Paine criticized the staff for giving the agency more than four years to develop and issue a final rule to address the issue.

"The staff proposal means that improved protections against [station blackout] would not be in place until the first quarter of 2016 at the earliest, and probably much longer," Paine said. "NRDC finds this delay to be unacceptable, and indicative of a continuing commission mindset that the worst case simply cannot happen in the United States."

The agency should also take note of what other countries have done to make their nuclear fleets safer, Paine said. "Sometimes it seems like NRC exists in a vacuum and doesn't care that countries have done this," he said.

But Charles "Chip" Pardee, chief operating officer of Exelon Generation, the largest U.S. reactor operator, said the agency needs to exercise caution and ensure that any safety upgrades are focused and prevent unintended consequences. Pardee said he saw no reason the station blackout rule couldn't be crafted within five years, and that the pace of such changes depends on what upgrades are required for existing systems.

The industry supports the thrust of the NRC staff's near-term proposals, Pardee said. Even so, officials with the Nuclear Energy Institute have questioned whether some proposed changes are justified as safety-related measures (ClimateWire, Oct. 6).

Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, applauded the NRC staff for recommending re-examining the technical basis for the current 10-mile emergency planning zone, which UCS has determined is an arbitrary and inadequate limit for many reactor locations.