The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's first orders responding to Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster will be issued before the March 11 anniversary of the tragedy, an NRC commissioner said yesterday. The orders will cover mandatory upgrades to emergency equipment at all U.S. plants, regulate hardened vents for older reactors of the same design as the Fukushima Daiichi reactors and require the addition of instruments to monitor water levels in spent fuel pools during accidents.

NRC Commissioner George Apostolakis, speaking at a conference yesterday, confirmed the orders that the five NRC commissioners have approved, which were telegraphed last week when they released their votes on the NRC staff's recommendations. While the exact language of the orders has not been released, the effect is clear, he said. "The five votes are out there," he said. "These three things they [the nuclear plant operators] must do."

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An occasional series looking at the political and policy -- and literal -- fallout from the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan.

"There is no question about it," he said.

Apostolakis also said that a special NRC risk management task force he heads, created after the Fukushima disaster, would recommend a new approach to regulating extreme threats to reactor safety. These hazards go beyond the "design basis" threats -- the postulated maximum risks that reactors now must be designed to withstand.

The extreme threats could include earthquakes or flooding that exceed current assumptions, an extended loss of power to operate vital cooling systems during emergencies or a crisis that struck several reactors at the same site. The NRC's Fukushima "lessons learned" task force concluded last year that the beyond-design-basis accidents were covered by an inconsistent "patchwork" of policies.

In one case, the threat of massive fires and explosions at plant sites caused by a terrorist attack in a hijacked airliner is subject to specific regulations. But NRC's directive to plant operators to harden vents on Mark I reactors -- the same designs found at the Fukushima Daiichi complex -- was voluntary. NRC has not routinely inspected the hardened vents to determine whether they could relieve dangerous pressures inside reactor containments during accident emergencies. Vent failures are blamed as part of the causes leading to hydrogen explosions at Fukushima Daiichi.

Another set of voluntary standards, the "severe accident mitigation guidelines (SAMGs)," applies to hazards that were considered too remote to cover with mandatory requirements. But NRC inspections following the Fukushima disaster revealed failures at some U.S. plants to keep the emergency guidelines and operators' training up to date. Some emergency pumps were not operable. Some emergency equipment was missing or had been diverted to other purposes. And some plants were modified so that emergency procedures would not have worked, NRC inspections found.

The NRC Fukushima task force concluded "that voluntary industry initiatives should not serve as a substitute for regulatory requirements, but as a mechanism for facilitating and standardizing implementation of such requirements."

Call to replace voluntary actions with mandates

Apostolakis said the risk management task force he heads will recommend that NRC launch a rulemaking to create a new regulatory category governing beyond-design-basis accidents. The regulations, replacing voluntary standards, would be "performance-based," providing for flexible responses by plant owners; updated periodically; justified by cost-benefit considerations; and implemented on a site-specific basis, he said.

In addition to the three orders, NRC will take additional actions prior to March 11, using other regulatory processes that proceed more slowly than orders. Changes in the severe accident guidelines will be handled through a future NRC rulemaking, as will changes to the current station blackout requirements. NRC will use its request-for-information process to solicit industry comment on assessing earthquake and flood hazards and emergency preparedness strategies, including evacuation plans that would be called upon to protect the public from radiation releases.

All of the top-tier actions based on the Fukushima recommendations are to be taken before the end of 2016, NRC has decided. But any changes in plant designs based on new evaluations of seismic risks won't be completed until 2019, said Christopher Paine, director of the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "For the rest of the decade, nothing is going to get done from a regulatory perspective" to respond to new earthquake threat assessments, he said.

The Union of Concerned Scientists also criticized NRC's handling of beyond-design-basis events yesterday.

In a report on the Fukushima disaster's aftermath, the UCS noted that backup pumps and other emergency equipment that would be called on to maintain reactor core cooling in an extended loss of normal power -- the station blackout condition -- currently do not have to be "safety grade," that is, designed to withstand earthquakes and located in earthquake-protected buildings.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, representing the U.S. reactor owners, has proposed a "FLEX" plan, or flexible coping strategy, to deal with extreme emergencies triggered by an extended power blackout following an accident or natural disaster.

Industry would install new anti-blackout gear

Under the NEI plan, each plant operator has committed by the end of this month to acquire or place orders for new emergency equipment to cope with blackouts, NEI CEO Marvin Fertel said yesterday. Fertel followed Apostolakis at the conference, which was hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Nuclear plant owners would also spend up to $100 million to establish up to six regional warehouses where additional portable emergency equipment would be stored and kept ready for delivery to nuclear plants in emergencies, under the FLEX plan.

Fertel said NEI's approach would allow plant operators to use commercial pumps and other emergency equipment. "We don't think everything has to be safety-grade."

"NRC ought to have a footprint on whatever we put in place, and make sure that they are OK with it from a maintainability standpoint, from a functionality standpoint, and operational, with training and procedures," Fertel told reporters at the conference. Requiring that the emergency equipment be seismically qualified would impose unneeded costs, he said. "We would pay 100 times more for the same nut and bolt as will do the same job commercial-grade."

The UCS report contends that the NEI approach "consists of the industry trying to 'wag the dog' by moving forward before the NRC has taken the time to develop its own approach."

"An NRC official explained to UCS that the FLEX equipment need not be safety-related at this point, but if the commission decides to later expand the design basis, the equipment would have to be upgraded. This is a problematic strategy, as the industry could run to Congress and complain that the NRC was imposing standards that would render useless all the equipment it had just bought. The NRC needs to tell the industry in no uncertain terms that it is purchasing FLEX equipment at its own risk," the UCS said.