The safety measures proposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Fukushima task force should not take precedence over ongoing NRC inspections and routine licensing activities that have greater potential safety benefits, the commission's executive director for operations said yesterday.

Bill Borchardt, head of the agency's management team, cautioned NRC commissioners yesterday that the NRC's staff members "have full plates already." While the lessons learned from Japan's March 11 nuclear disaster raise important safety issues, the NRC task force proposals "ought not automatically jump to the top of the priority list because [they] may likely displace something that has a greater safety benefit."

At the same time, senior staff members assured the commission that while some final actions to deal with severe threats from natural disasters may be years away, new safety defenses could follow relatively quickly from inspections of seismic and flooding hazards that the staff has called for. They could also come from additional emergency backup power and water supply equipment that will be ordered.

Seven months after the catastrophic core melting at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the NRC commissioners are now ready to vote on a complex plan proposed by the staff to address potential threats to the 104 U.S. commercial reactors from extreme natural disasters. Yesterday's session did not offer clear clues to the final outcome of the NRC's Fukushima accident review, but it indicated that the NRC staff has joined with industry leaders in saying that the Fukushima actions must be measured against the rest of the agency's safety agenda.

Commissioners will circulate proposed decisions among themselves in search of a consensus. Commissioner William Ostendorff said he hoped his proposal could be ready in two weeks. Commissioner Kristine Svinicki said she had not set a deadline for her actions. She told the staff she hoped the commission could act soon on the staff's proposed action plan. "I think we owe you that," she said.

"The biggest issue is really 'When are we going to be able to get this done?'" NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said in the meeting's morning session.

He singled out the commission's long struggle to complete rulemaking on fire hazards at reactors and to deal with accident scenarios in which debris blocks critical recirculation of cooling water to reactor cores -- "two issues that drive me nuts, and they are going to continue to drive me nuts until I'm no longer in this job," Jaczko said.

A long hangover from Fukushima

"We do things very slowly around here," he added. "We don't move quickly, sometimes with good reason, but I'm not sure that's always for good reason."

"If those serve as models for how we're going to do this, we'll be working on this [the Fukushima recommendations] for the next 15 to 20 years," he said, his frustration palpable.

Jaczko's impatience was seconded by Christopher Paine of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was part of a panel of industry representatives and nuclear industry critics that met with the commission before its session with the senior staff. Some of the increased safety measures proposed by the staff have been in place for years in Europe, Paine said. It should be possible to put experts in a room and tell them to come out with the answers on some of the Fukushima recommendations, he said. "This isn't rocket science."

Charles "Chip" Pardee, chief operating officer of Exelon Generation, the largest U.S. nuclear plant operator, said that utilities are ready to position emergency equipment at regional sites. Some steps could be accomplished within five years, such as strengthening backup battery capabilities to protect cooling functions when outside power is lost.

But changes to hardened exhaust vents at Mark II reactors -- another staff proposal -- are a complex engineering challenge, he said. "My goodness, that is fraught with opportunity to do it incorrectly and introduce another problem," he said.

Jaczko has been unable to persuade a majority of the five-member commission to adopt his fast-track proposal for acting on the task force recommendations.

He did not attend the afternoon portion of the NRC meeting, attending to an immediate personal matter, the staff said. So he did not hear Borchardt and staff colleagues emphasize that the Fukushima recommendations would have to be placed properly among other ongoing NRC responsibilities.

"It is critical that we implement the right fixes the first time, and not just the quick fixes," Borchardt said.

The staff is fully engaged now, he said, and having the Fukushima actions added onto work schedules "concerns me a lot. ... A lot of safety-significant work will have to be deferred, delayed or shed. ... I'm sure the commission will be involved" in those decisions.

He added that the staff has already determined that the Fukushima actions should not draw resources away from a handful of top priorities, including plant fire protection requirements, the sump debris issue, implementing the recently adopted emergency preparedness review, and the current combined operating license reviews for new plants.

Action relatively soon on seismic and power loss issues

Eric Leeds, the NRC's director of nuclear reactor regulation, said that some commission critics have urged that the NRC hold up on nuclear operators' applications to uprate or increase the output of reactors, or on relicensing reactors for extended lives.

That would be a mistake, he said, giving an example of one uprate that led to a strengthening of a plant's auxiliary water supply system, and a license renewal that focused on electrical cable issues and degradation of a reactor's containment shell.

"We want those to go on; they raise safety significant issues -- issues that are safety significant today," not more remote threats of the kind that struck Japan, he said.

James Wiggins, director of the NRC's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, said that while detailed reassessments and remediation of seismic risks at reactors are long-term issues, there will be inspections relatively soon to check on immediate earthquake vulnerabilities, as the task force called for. The NRC will require plant operators to bring in experts to make these "walk down" inspections, he said. "I believe they [the operators] will react to what they see."

Likewise, the staff is heading toward an entirely new approach to strengthening nuclear plant defenses against a loss of outside power -- the calamity that crippled the Fukushima plant's ability to maintain cooling of reactor cores.

Currently, U.S. reactors are required to have emergency equipment to allow cooling systems to function for a fixed period of eight hours or less. The new process will include additional on-site emergency equipment in more secure locations than at present, Wiggins said. Then operators will have to be able to bring in the next level of backup power and equipment to run cooling systems indefinitely, until outside power is restored, he said.