The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff yesterday sent an agenda for post-Fukushima safeguards to the agency's commissioners that supports or goes beyond key proposals of the NRC task force that investigated the Japanese nuclear catastrophe in March.

NRC commissioners are scheduled to meet Tuesday to review the regulatory actions proposed by the staff for strengthening the ability of U.S. nuclear reactors to survive extended power outages, severe earthquakes and flooding, accidents to multiple reactors at the same plant site, and dangerous pressure spikes from core accidents. Staff members said it was not clear when commissioners would vote on the agenda.

NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, whose fast-track approach for acting on the task force proposals was challenged by other commissioners, said he hoped the staff's proposal would attract solid majority support on the commission.

"Most of the recommendations are pretty straightforward, especially the short-term actions," he said in an interview. He said commissioners will have their first opportunity to respond to the recommendations Tuesday, and he hopes that the initial decisions will follow shortly thereafter.

"I'm sure there will be some changes" made by the commission, he said. "I hope the commission can put end dates on some of the recommendations," he added. Yesterday's staff paper set schedules for the commission to initiate actions within a year on several key recommendations, but did not set a deadline for completion of required changes.

Jaczko predicted that "the real discussion" will be on whether the actions will be taken under the NRCs "adequate protection" process, which applies to changes that are required to assure plant safety. Safety-related rules are not subject to a cost-benefit determination. Non-safety-related improvements fall under the commission's "backfit" rule, and costs must be justified by benefits. If threats are considered extremely remote, the benefits from safeguards may not pass this test.

The industry's Nuclear Energy Institute said it supported the thrust of the NRC's staff's near-term proposals, but it again raised the issue of whether the changes were justified as safety-related measures. NEI spokesman Mitch Singer noted yesterday that "the NRC staff agrees with the task force that 'none of the findings pose an imminent hazard to public safety.'"

Calls for earthquake monitoring improvements

"The industry applauds the NRC's recognition that post-Fukushima enhancements should not be the overriding factor in determining the agency's priorities. The agency should continue to focus on high-priority issues such as implementing the emergency preparedness rule, resolving generic seismic issues, implementing new fire protection guidelines and licensing activities for existing and new reactors," Singer said.

A majority of the commission had insisted that the NRC staff management assess the recommendations of the NRC Fukushima task force and make its own recommendations, rather than act directly on the task force's proposals, as Jaczko had sought.

The NRC staff yesterday supported task force recommendations on major issues. It recommended that the commission develop and issue an order requiring plant operators to install reliable instrumentation on spent fuel pools to confirm whether stored fuel rods were safely covered with cooling water during accident emergencies. It called for an order to be issued within six months, with compliance within another four months.

The staff yesterday also supported a task force recommendation that the NRC, after consulting with industry, order operators to harden reactor vents on Mark II reactors. The Mark II designs have larger containment structures than the Mark I units -- the designs that suffered core melting at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Vents allow operators to relieve a dangerous buildup of steam and hydrogen gas when cores are damaged in accidents, and failures at unhardened vents at Fukushima are blamed for the crippling hydrogen explosions there. Mark I reactors in the United States are required to have hardened vents, and there was a question of whether the staff would order Mark II reactor vents to be hardened, as well.

The staff went beyond the task force in recommending that the commission consider the need to accelerate the transfer of spent fuel from pools to dry cask storage when possible, and to improve instruments that monitor earthquakes at plant sites. An official of the U.S. Geological Survey told the NRC that an evaluation of the impact of the August earthquake on Dominion Resource's Lake Anna nuclear plant was compromised by outdated measurement instrumentation that was under the plant's control.

The staff's recommendations yesterday also called for "walkdown" inspections to assess plants' defenses against anticipated earthquakes and major floods, as the task force had recommended.

Re-evaluating threats in the wake of the Missouri River floods

While the vast majority of U.S. reactors are not exposed to a tsunami threat, the danger to the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant near Omaha, Neb., from a flooding Missouri River this summer focused attention on this issue for U.S. reactors. The NRC staff said that some U.S. reactor defenses do not consider the impacts of intense rainfall and inadequate site drainage. The heights of expected maximum flood threats are calculated inconsistently at some plants, and plants may face a "cliff-edge" effect when small increases in flooding may suddenly trigger emergency conditions.

The staff recommended that operators be required to re-evaluate flooding threats over an eight-month period and develop orders for corrective actions. No deadline was set for decisions to issue orders.

David Lochbaum, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Nuclear Safety Project, said he was "pleasantly surprised" by the staff's recommendation to give priority to improving instrumentation of spent fuel pools.

But Lochbaum faulted the staff for proposing to take more than four years to develop a rule for assuring that current and new reactors can withstand an extended loss of outside power that could disable reactor and spent fuel cooling systems -- Fukushima Daiichi's plight.

The task force had recommended that the NRC require operators to be able to withstand a loss of alternating-current power for eight hours after an accident with standby battery or other backup power, and to have equipment and trained personnel to get through a 72-hour loss of normal power to the core and spent fuel pools. The industry had questioned the rationale for those time frames.

The staff said yesterday that since "no imminent hazard" was identified in this area, the issue should be handled through a standard rulemaking, recommending a 4.25-year schedule for issuing the rule.

"We fought World War II in 3.4 years, and it was complex," Lochbaum said. Since the Fukushima accident, the NRC has approved nine requests for renewed operating licenses, he said, "and it hasn't slipped a deadline. If they can continue to provide skilled bodies to do the business of the industry, but don't have them to do safety, something is wrong with the agency."

Lochbaum said that the nuclear industry has "jumped ahead" of the NRC on protecting emergency equipment that could be used to cope with power losses. "They have multibillion-dollar assets they don't want to see go down the drain. Many have already figured out how to address that issue should they face a Fukushima scenario."

Lochbaum's colleague, USC Senior Scientist Edwin Lyman, credited the staff for raising two issues involving emergency preparedness following a nuclear accident.

"The NRC staff has recommended 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," he said. "It also opened the issue of distributing potassium iodide pills beyond the current 10-mile limit, which would help protect more local residents who would be at high risk for developing thyroid cancer in the event of a reactor accident."