The nuclear power industry yesterday strongly challenged a central recommendation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Japan Task Force that calls for mandatory safety protections against extreme natural disasters or emergencies that now are considered too unlikely to be covered by enforceable NRC rules.

The NRC task force, in its report to the commission delivered Tuesday, concluded that explicit safety standards should be established to protect against extended power outages at plants and other severe emergencies. These rules should be adopted under the NRC's basic authority to assure "adequate protection" of public health and safety, and not be subject to the commission's "backfit" rule requiring that the safety benefits of plant modifications ordered by the NRC must substantially exceed their costs, the task force said.

"Implementation of this concept would require strong Commission support for a clear policy statement, rule changes, and revised staff guidance," said the task force, which was appointed by the commission to consider the implications of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster for the U.S. industry.

Anthony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer of the industry's Nuclear Energy Institute, said the task force recommendation on that issue meant "there would be no regulatory analysis or cost-benefit analysis of these changes. [That] policy that has been in place for decades. And the commission is going to have to think long and hard about that one," he told reporters.

The commission's first chance to respond to the task force report will come at an NRC meeting next Tuesday.

The task force of NRC experts proposed that the NRC require nuclear plants to re-evaluate and make necessary upgrades to protections against earthquake and flooding threats; ensure backup electric power to operate emergency cooling for reactors and spent fuel pools; and harden vents in Mark I and Mark II reactor models that relieve dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas when reactor cores are damaged in emergencies.

The task force said that inspections of U.S. reactors after Japan's nuclear accident found inconsistent adherence to existing voluntary guidelines for dealing with extreme emergencies. "[S]ome licensees have treated the industry voluntary initiative [the "severe accident mitigation guidelines," or SAMGs] in a significantly less rigorous and formal manner, so much so that the SAMG inspection would have resulted in multiple violations had it been associated with a required program," the task force report says.

NRC task force presses need for rules change

"Adequate protection has been, and should continue to be, an evolving safety standard supported by new scientific information, technologies, methods, and operating experience. This was the case when new information about the security environment was revealed through the events of September 11, 2001," the task force said, referring to new NRC policies after 9/11 governing the threat of terrorist assaults on nuclear plants with hijacked aircraft.

"Licensing or operating a nuclear power plant with no emergency core cooling system or without robust security protections, while done in the past, would not occur under the current regulations. As new information and new analytical techniques are developed, safety standards need to be reviewed, evaluated, and changed, as necessary, to insure that they continue to address the NRC's requirements to provide reasonable assurance of adequate protection of public health and safety.

"The Task Force believes, based on its review of the information currently available from Japan and the current regulations, that the time has come for such change."

Pietrangelo said he agreed with the task force recommendation that it is time to "take a step back and look at integrating our emergency operating procedures that already exist."

But he said the industry regards the task force report as the beginning of what must be a long and careful review of responses to the Fukushima accident, with extensive industry input. The report is anything but a finality, he said, downgrading the scope of the task force review.

The six-member task force headed by the NRC's Charles Miller was confronted by what Pietrangelo called "an almost impossible task: Six people for 90 days, talking to each other and some NRC staff and trying to figure out what happened at Fukushima as well as trying to delve back into the history of their own regulatory process and understand why certain things were done the way they were."

Industry wants a longer probe of disaster

He added, "This needs to be vetted thoroughly. ... The NRC has another 3,996 people there that have expertise. We've got another 100,000 people in the industry that have a lot of expertise. And there are other stakeholders that need to get engaged."

"The report is a good first step that was obviously limited and constrained by time and certainly no systematic interaction with anyone outside the agency. That's what should start now," he said.

Pietrangelo took strong exception to the task force conclusion that the NRC's Regulatory Oversight Program (ROP) has been weakened by the use of risk assessments to determine what activities or equipment should be sampled for NRC inspection. "The ROP's reliance on risk undervalues the safety benefit of defense-in-depth and consequently reduces the level of NRC resources focused on inspecting defense-in-depth characteristics that contribute to safety," the task force said.

"To make a statement that the ROP, the risk-informed process, undervalues defense-in-depth to me was an indefensible statement," the NEI executive said.

The industry's response frames a debate about how and when the commission should act on the task force recommendations.

David Lochbaum, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Nuclear Safety Project, said there should be no need to wait on some of the recommendations. "Some of the things are going to be done in fairly short order. They are talking about using orders to implement some of the upgrades on a fairly expedited time frame. Some will take longer-term. We are concerned that the NRC needs to implement these measures as quickly as possible."

NRC action is long overdue on fire protection rules for reactors and on transferring spent reactor fuel from storage pools to less-vulnerable dry casks, when the fuel is cool enough to remove from pools, the UCS said.

"It's when the NRC ... takes a long time, and deliberates and ponders and flip-flops around, that no one gains," Lochbaum told reporters. "The NRC needs to move expeditiously on its list of recommendations to make sure that these safety and security fixes are made and not debated for the next decade."