The NRC Loses Its Way: Why Should Controversial Plants Take Longer to Review?

Unequal Treatment for Similar Nuclear Plants

A few days ago, two ranking Republican senators wrote a letter to NRC Chairman Jaczko about the glacial pace of license renewal for nuclear plants that are perceived to be controversial. Platts reported on the letter, quoting Senators James Inhofe and David Vitter. These two senators said that the NRC has developed a "dual standard" for license applications, granting licenses quickly in many cases, but allowing "excessive, unmanaged delays for applications perceived to be more controversial."

What kind of delays are we talking about? As I noted in a previous blog post, Vermont Yankee and Duane Arnold are sister plants, BWRs of almost exactly the same size and vintage. However, tracing back from the NRC web page on license renewal, we see that Duane Arnold submitted its renewal application on 10/01/08 and was granted its renewal on 12/16/10, slightly more than two years later. On the other hand, Vermont Yankee submitted its application on 1/27/06 and has not received its renewal yet, more than five years later. In a recent letter from a vice-president of Entergy, Duane Arnold was listed as the second-most reliable of sixteen sister plants, while Vermont Yankee was the fourth-most reliable. Duane Arnold's capacity factor is 93.1% while Vermont Yankee's factor is 92.6%. This difference is certainly not worth three extra years of license review by the NRC.

It's Not About Regulation Anymore

I'm on a private listserve of nuclear communicators, and I sent the group a link to the Platt's article, along with this provocative message:

Read it and weep. The NRC no longer has objective criteria by which it evaluates plants. It's all about what the neighbors think.

The trouble with being provocative is that people got provoked. I received two opposite types of reply from the people in the group:

• Right on, Meredith!
• We can't exclude ordinary people from the process of licensing nuclear plants. It wouldn't be fair.

My answer is simple: Either there are objective criteria for evaluating a plant for relicensing---or there aren't. If the criteria are not objective, the situation is horrendous.

Let's imagine politics mattered for the safety inspections for a car. Say that cars with Obama bumper stickers got a real going-over when it was time for their safety inspections. What if everyone knew that the extent of a safety inspection depended partially on your car, and mostly on how your politics matched the politics of the inspectors or your neighbors? This would be a terrible situation. Sort of like the situation we have now in the nuclear industry.

The NRC is not supposed to have politics as one of its criteria. Supposedly, it doesn't. That should mean that plants are judged against a set of regulations, not against the plant-specific contentions of pro or anti- nuclear groups.

The Voice of the People?

My comments were provocative, and people in my email group had legitimate concerns. Would my comment about unequal treatment end up as a recommendation that ordinary people be excluded from the NRC relicensing process? Such an exclusion was not my intention.

I believe the public should be involved in the licensing and re-licensing process. However, the public should be involved in as it is involved in other public issues. The public should help to make the rules. The public should not be empowered to make exceptions about enforcing the rules. In a democracy, the public make the rules, but many systems are in place to ensure that the rules are enforced fairly.

For example, think of a town that is very proud of its attractive downtown area. The town has strict rules about signs on businesses: No neon signs, and signs must be smaller than a certain standard. The people of the town made those sign rules, but they are enforced on every business equally. If some people think shoe stores are ugly, those people still can't require that a shoe store must have a smaller sign than any other store. Rules are made with general input, and enforced fairly.

Fairness to power plant owners is not some kind of wild new concept that will take decades of trial and error to achieve. The NRC can learn about fair enforcement in many areas, such as zoning. All the NRC has to think about is this:

With Justice for all.

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The top photo is from the NRC homepage in July. It shows Chairman Jaczko meeting with intervenors against Vermont Yankee in Brattleboro this summer. At that time, Jaczko met with plant opponents, but declined meetings with plant supporters. The image is more fully described in a previous post on this blog.

Sculpture of Lady Justice by J. L Urban. The statue is part of a court building in the Czech Republic. Lady Justice holds a book instead of scales, and is not blindfolded. I consider her to be Lady Justice for the Regulatory Process. (The usual Wikimedia license.)

Neon sign from Wikipedia.

Widening the View: From Vermont to Iowa and England

Starting in Vermont

This morning, the Brattleboro Reformer had an interesting and controversial op-ed about Vermont Yankee. Since Howard Shaffer and I had visited the Reformer offices recently to have a background-style talk, I was interested in the editorial.

The op-ed claimed that Vermont Yankee is unlikely to close "on schedule." It pointed out that Entergy could bring several types of lawsuits against the state-ordered closing. Any of these lawsuits could extend the plant license for twenty years (if Entergy wins) or for a couple of years (while the lawsuits wend their way through the courts) even if Entergy doesn't win. The potential suits fall into three categories:

1. Federal pre-emption. What were all those Vermont Senators doing when they inveighed against the dangers of tritium and insisted the plant must close down? Weren't they aware that radiation safety is an NRC issue, and cannot be decided by a state? The Senators were giving grounds for a lawsuit on pre-emption of the NRC.
2. Contract violation. Entergy signed a Memorandum of Understanding that said it agreed that it would abide by a Public Service Board issuing (or not issuing) a Certificate of Public Good. After the contract was signed, the Legislature voted itself the privilege of telling the Public Service Board whether or not it could issue that Certificate. This legislative veto power was not in the original contract.
3. What is an MOU? A Memorandum of Understanding is a contract. On the other hand, with some lawyers getting into the act, an MOU could also be considered non-binding, or it could be considered more binding than the usual contract. Fun for all, I suppose.

I covered many of these topics in two February 2010 blog posts called The Day After the Vote and The Morning After. I discussed pre-emption, contract law, and the possibility of lawsuits. I would call myself a real fortune-teller, except that I expected the lawsuits to begin more-or-less immediately at that time. No lawsuits began. Entergy quite reasonably decided to find and remediate the tritium leak before getting lawyers involved.

There's still time in the future for a lawsuit. At this point, these lawsuit ideas are simply speculation.

Expanding to Iowa

A local blog, Vermont Tiger, discussed the Reformer op-ed in a post Drop Dead Date for Yankee? Vermont Tiger compared the fierce opposition to Vermont Yankee with the general acceptance of the license extension recently granted to Vermont Yankee's sister plant, Duane Arnold in Iowa. Duane Arnold is a 615 megawatt BWR: it even has a low bank of cooling towers, just like Vermont Yankee. (picture above). The Iowa paper describes Duane Arnold as an employer, a provider of taxes, a provider of energy, and a "valuable corporate neighbor."

I appreciate Vermont Tiger for widening my view of how people look at nuclear plants. Too many people in Vermont declare: "We are Vermont and we are very very special. Nothing is quite good enough for us." These people give Vermont a smug problem. Without Vermont Yankee, Vermont will have gas-fired generation, and we will also have a smog problem. Nice to know that Iowa has a different view of nuclear!

Britain

And now, looking across the seas, Centrica, a UK gas company, moved into the nuclear market in 2009. They made this video to educate their employees about their investment in the UK nuclear program. This video shows why Britain needs nuclear energy. It also shows why Iowa and Vermont need nuclear energy. Or basically, why the whole world needs nuclear energy.

Images from Wikipedia and NRC.