The Nuclear Regulatory Commission management staff yesterday said they hoped to issue initial timetables by Oct. 3 for the first regulatory actions responding to Japan's nuclear disaster and promised their continuing requests for industry and public views will not lead to stalemate.

"We are not going to get bogged down," said James Wiggins, director of the NRC Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response and one of the senior officials who briefed NRC commissioners on their assessments of the NRC's Near-Term Task Force that investigated the Fukushima Daiichi reactor meltdowns.

NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko pressed another member of the NRC managers' steering committee about whether the group supported the dozen major recommendations made in July by the task force of NRC veterans. "Yes," replied Martin Virgilio, NRC executive director for reactor and preparedness programs. "We need to move forward on these. We're ready to move forward," Virgilio said.

Where the committee differed with the task force in several cases was over the choice of NRC actions to carry out the recommendations, steering committee members said. In some areas, the steering committee felt more information was needed to seek consensus with industry and non-governmental organizations about best actions and ways of measuring results, members said. "What we want to get out of this process is that we both understand what success is," said Eric Leeds, director of the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.

On some key issues, the steering committee recommended proceeding with requests for information, rather than initiating orders or beginning rulemakings now. Virgilio said the information route should not be taken as necessarily implying a slower or less forceful response.

It is a "very powerful regulatory tool," Leeds added. It requires an industry response and can be used to determine whether a license should be modified, suspended or revoked, he said.

Later, Commissioner Kristine Svinicki, who has sparred with Jaczko over the NRC's post-Fukushima agenda, questioned the steering committee's support of the task force conclusions. Svinicki had insisted that the task force conclusions be vetted by a senior management steering committee.

The steering committee concluded that the task force recommendations would enhance the safety of nuclear reactors, she noted. Would it have reached the same conclusion if the Fukushima accident had never occurred? she asked.

Virgilio replied affirmatively. "They would enhance safety," he said.

'State of knowledge is not complete'

"I want to confront you" on that," Svinicki replied. The NRC still doesn't have the full story about what happened at Fukushima, she said, but yet the post-Fukushima review is moving forward with the top-level issue, "'How safe is safe?'" she added. "At the end of the day, it is more complicated than looking at whether [the task force recommendations] enhance safety," she said.

"We recognize our state of knowledge is not complete," Virgilio responded. "We will definitely learn more," he added. But on some of the issues, "we felt we did have enough information to move forward."

An example, he said, was the task force's focus on strengthening the "station blackout" defenses -- the ability of plants to maintain cooling of reactors and spent fuel pools when outside power to the plant is lost, and when additionally, backup generators fail, as happened at Fukushima. While the steering committee did not endorse the specific task force recommendations on this issue, it said the issue would be ripe for action once more plant specific information had been gathered.

Svinicki asked if the steering committee was influenced to toughen its response by the outside scrutiny it got. Leeds replied, "I think we acknowledged that we'll probably get criticized from both sides."

The steering committee's appearance was preceded yesterday by an exchange between commissioners and a panel of "both sides" that included Charles "Chip" Pardee, chief operating officer of Exelon Generation, the largest U.S. reactor operator; Thomas Cochran, consulting senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council; and Ed Lyman, senior staff scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Pardee said that hitting the nuclear industry with too heavy an agenda of Fukushima-related changes could backfire. "We could clearly overload our operating staffs in the analysis of these events," he said, producing a net loss to safety.

Cochran said that if implementing the Fukushima recommendations taxes NRC or nuclear plant staff, more people should be hired. "Chip Pardee is not running a boys' school, and we are not trying to figure out a new syllabus for teaching math."

He criticized the steering committee for seeking more time to evaluate the need for hardened vents in Mark II model reactors that still lack them. The vents would carry high pressure steam and hydrogen gas away from reactor containment structures in a serious accident. Vent failures led to hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima reactors.

Short- and long-term agendas

The staff "ought to operate like commanders of nuclear submarines," Cochran said, with a nod toward Commissioner William Ostendorff, a former Navy nuclear submarine commander. "You ought to be able to tell them what do to do" and expect them to do it, he said.

Pardee replied that it was not simply a case of too few people, but of too little expertise available to the industry on issues like earthquake risks.

It may take five years or more to complete some of the major actions that the task force called for, officials indicated. A reassessment of U.S. reactors' vulnerability to earthquakes, one such recommendation, will fold in an ongoing NRC inquiry called Generic Issue 199, Leeds said. Based on new evidence of earthquake threats to reactors east of the Rocky Mountains published by the U.S. Geological Survey, the inquiry has been under way since 2005, and the NRC does not expect to issue a final request to industry for information until next year.

After the information is gathered and decisions are made, any resulting changes to nuclear plants would typically occur over two refueling cycles, or three to four years, said Anthony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer of the industry's Nuclear Energy Institute.

But a requirement for inspection "walkdowns" at each plant to assess vulnerabilities to earthquakes or flooding hazards under current guidelines could occur much more quickly, NRC officials said. If any safety vulnerabilities are found, they would have to be disclosed and dealt with, NRC officials said after the meeting. The example, officials said, is the 2010 NRC inspection of the Fort Calhoun, Neb., nuclear plant, which disclosed vulnerabilities in the plant's defenses against extreme flooding. After initial sparring, NRC staff prevailed and the operator, the Omaha Public Power District, agreed to strengthen water barriers. The final actions were taken just before heavy flooding on the Missouri River might have flooded the plant.

Leeds said that the steering committee concluded that the response to Fukushima should be based on an expansion of a redefinition of the NRC's requirement to provide "adequate protection" of public safety, to extend policy coverage to a wider range of potential threats and accidents.

Virgilio cited a speech by Ostendorff just before the Fukushima crisis that discussed the reach and limits of the "adequate protection" doctrine. While Congress required the NRC to assure that protection is provided, it didn't define it, and federal courts have deferred to the NRC to make those calls. That gives the NRC wide discretion to determine what protection is required, Ostendorff said.

He added that the doctrine does not require the commission to eliminate all risk, but to consider whether all "reasonable" risks have been accounted for, at a reasonable cost, consistent with the agency's precedents. That is the page that the staff and commission will be trying to fill, beginning as early as next month.