A pivotal question hangs over today's scheduled meeting between Nuclear Regulatory Commission senior staff management and the NRC commissioners: Do the managers fundamentally agree or not with the controversial safety recommendations of the NRC's Fukushima task force?

On the one hand, the NRC management, headed by Director of Operations Bill Borchardt, gave a vote of confidence to the Fukushima Near Term Task Force (NTTF) in a letter Friday to the commissioners. "The staff believes that all the NTTF's overarching recommendations, if adopted, would enhance safety and the staff agrees to moving forward with each of these recommendations," the letter said.

On the other, however, the ad hoc management team headed by Borchardt proposed different regulatory paths than the task force chose on some key short-term safety issues, including safeguards against earthquake and flooding hazards.

The NRC management team has an opportunity today to clarify how far it wants to go in following the task force agenda, said NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, in an interview. "I hope to have a very thorough discussion of the short-term recommendations," he said. If there are disagreements between the staff and the task force, "I expect to get a very good understanding of the reasons."

Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Photo courtesy of NRC.

Jaczko's colleagues on the commission who did not support Jaczko's fast-track plan for implementing task force proposals may seek staff support for their insistence on greater industry and public input before final decisions are made. NRC commissioners will meet Oct. 3 to consider the task force and staff proposals and may cast their first votes then on the task force issues.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, backed by some members of Congress, criticized some central task force conclusions as premature, saying that the complex safety issues on the agenda required more industry study and comment. The NRC managers concurred with the need for more study and feedback.

"In many cases, external stakeholder engagement is recommended to inform these efforts so that the regulatory action and the licensee actions taken effectively resolve the identified issues and the implementation challenges are identified in advance," the NRC managers said.

Earthquakes and flooding are major concerns

The NTTF -- six current or former NRC staff officials -- recommended in July that the NRC order U.S. nuclear plant operators to re-evaluate seismic and flooding hazards and, if necessary, update plant systems and structures to deal with any increased threats.

Another of the major proposals recommended that the commission order plant operators to perform inspections or "walkdowns" of plants to identify any vulnerabilities to earthquakes or flooding and verify that seismic and flooding protections were adequately monitored and maintained.

In response, the management team urged that the NRC proceed not with orders on these issues but through a fact-finding and consultative process with industry and the public, as the industry had asked. The staff recommended that the NRC "continue stakeholder interactions to discuss the technical basis and acceptance criteria for conducting a re-evaluation of site specific seismic hazards."

"In this case, the industry may be saying there could be other regulatory tools, other than orders, given the fact that there are already requirements and initiatives under way," said Daniel Stenger, an attorney with Hogan Lovells who specializes in nuclear power regulation.

Whether the managers' approach would lead to a slower NRC response to its safety review is not clear. "In some cases it [the managers' strategy] may be more methodical and slower," said one NRC expert. "But NRC orders aren't issued overnight, either."

NRC orders are intended to respond to clear threats to the public health and safety and are not generally subject to comparisons of costs and benefits, Stenger said. It remains to be seen whether some of the task force recommendations will be handled through other NRC processes that do require balancing of costs and benefits, which could result in less demanding changes than the task force proposed.

On another front, the task force called for the commission to begin a rulemaking aimed at assuring each plant's ability to protect reactors and spent fuel pools against a complete loss of alternating-current power from the grid or emergency generators for eight hours. The eight-hour "coping" requirement would give operators time to restore outside power or restart emergency diesel power, the task force said. Operators should be equipped to maintain safety operations for up to 72 hours with emergency power, it added.

Industry opposes 'coping' deadlines

NEI opposed the specific coping times. "The nature of challenges to AC [alternating-current] power supplies by natural phenomena are plant- and site-specific. ... The basis for the proposed 72-hour additional coping is unclear.

"For some plants assistance and reliable AC generation may be able to be supplied within 24 or 48 hours, at other sites, under different circumstances it may be longer. Thus, the approach must assure a degree of flexibility," NEI said in a statement.

Instead of embracing the specific eight-hour and 72-hour coping times proposed by the task force, the management staff said the NRC should "engage stakeholders in support of rulemaking activities" to strengthen nuclear plants' defenses against a prolonged blackout.

One of the most controversial task force recommendations called for a rulemaking to require nuclear plant operators "to confirm seismic hazards and flooding hazards every ten years and address any new and significant information" with any required improvements to safety systems and controls.

NEI responded that reassessments of plant defenses should occur whenever a need arises, not on a 10-year review schedule. "If we get new information that causes you stop, think and do an assessment ... we don't think you want to wait 10 years," said NEI official Adrian Heymer. "If there is a question, we should move forward."

Some industry experts said the 10-year review proposal was particularly threatening to the industry because it could shift the burden of proof sharply on the industry to establish the safety of its plants from seismic or flooding threats.

Nuclear plant operators want precise understandings of what the NRC's safety rules require, not an open-ended process, one expert said. The 10-year review could require plant operators to make a more comprehensive review of potential seismic or flooding hazards, disclose their vulnerabilities to the NRC, and commit to fixing them. This starts to look like a new relicensing test, this expert said. "And the operator doesn't know what the answer will be."

But the staff said this issue was a long-term one and should not be on the shorter-term calendar.