Tag Archives: regulatory capture

NRC Report on San Onofre: Close Enough for Government Work

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An aerial view of the San Onofre Generating Station. (photo: Jelson25 via Wikipedia)

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission released its report on recent failures at the San Onofre nuclear facility [PDF] on Thursday, stating that, as far as the government regulator was concerned, the operators of the power plant did nothing wrong when they reported major design changes as simple equipment replacement.

At issue at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) is the replacement of two giant steam generators less than two years ago. A metal heat-transfer tube in one generator ruptured in January, releasing superheated radioactive steam and triggering a shutdown. Further examination of that generator and its twin revealed unprecedented and unsettling rates of wear in hundreds of other tubes. SONGS has been completely offline ever since.

Investigation of the problem by plant operators and the NRC, as well as independent watchdogs, found that flaws in the computer modeling of the radically redesigned replacement generators lead to building and installing tubing that vibrated substantially more than was anticipated, and substantially more than the equipment could tolerate. Within 18 months of starting up the retrofitted reactors, vibration caused rapid degradation of the metal tubes, resulting in the rupture.

Still, according to the NRC, no laws were broken. Southern California Edison (a division of Edison International, the majority owner of SONGS) did not mislead regulators about the extent of the changes. Federal officials were not lax in their oversight. Things may not have gone exactly as planned, but no one on this side of the Pacific was to blame. Maybe the Japanese at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the folks who built the replacement parts, have some ‘splainin’ to do, but SCE and the NRC performed just like they were supposed to.

And that’s exactly the point, isn’t it?

To any outside observer (well, to any observer willing to plow through technical data and design specs), the replacement generators at San Onofre were quite obviously a major redesign–something requiring a more careful, time-consuming and, yes, costly government approval process. Mitsubishi was not the original manufacturer of the SONGS generators, and Edison was not looking to have Mitsubishi machine exact replacement parts. That would have been more expensive–much more expensive.

Instead, SCE sought out what would be the nuclear industry equivalent of “off the shelf” parts, and hoped to engineer a way to make them work with their 30-year-old reactors. Further, Edison desired to increase the output of this power plant. More power theoretically equals more profit–and, to oversimplify the technical details, more tubes could equal more power. The new generators had many times more heat-transfer tubes than the originals.

So, the major design changes at San Onofre were, to turn a phrase, very much by design. But to call them major design changes would have increased the cost, the time, and the amount of oversight required, so, as the NRC report seems to make clear, the rules are written to insure that such changes pass under the regulatory radar:

The agency staff investigation concluded that Edison “provided the NRC with all the information required under existing regulations about proposed design changes to its steam generators,” according to a statement.

But a key question remains under study: Does the agency need to change the process that was used to approve the replacement generators? At issue is whether tubing problems that eventually sidelined the reactors might have been identified by changing rules under which utilities swap equipment at nuclear power plants.

For example, the report concluded that there were “major design changes” between the original and replacement generators at San Onofre, yet they qualified as essentially identical replacements that did not require an exhaustive review by the NRC.

Show me what regulatory capture looks like; this is what regulatory capture looks like

The “letter is willing but the spirit is weak” tone of the San Onofre report seems especially poignant/disturbing coming, as it does, within a fortnight of the latest Japanese report on the Fukushima disaster. That lengthy study found that government officials colluded with the nuclear industry to avoid upgrades and evade scrutiny, resulting in a severe undermining of public safety. Summaries of that report focused on aspects described as unique to Japanese culture, but the NRC’s San Onofre findings demonstrate that this well-choreographed dance between industry and regulators crosses cultural and national boundaries.

The SONGS report also comes the same week as a party thrown by supporters of the recently deposed NRC chairman, Gregory Jaczko:

A cadre of veterans from the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are organizing an effort to pay down the legal debts taken on by Gregory Jaczko, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, who stepped down amid a fierce industry-backed assault.

Jaczko, a former Reid staffer, racked up tens of thousands in legal fees defending himself. The thinking behind the fundraising effort is straightforward: High-level staffers for top senators can command high salaries in the private sector, many times more than can be earned in public service. So former Reid staffers who have spent their post-Senate years in more lucrative pursuits are coming to the aid of a colleague who made a different, and quite costly, decision.

. . . .

Jaczko’s former colleagues will gather Tuesday evening with Reid and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), another former boss of his, to thank him for his time on the nuclear panel. (No fundraising can legally take place while Reid and Markey are at the event, organizers said.)

. . . .

The industry’s two top representatives, Alex Flint and Marvin Fertel of the Nuclear Energy Institute, are planning to attend the event, said Karen Wayland, a former Reid staffer who, along with [another former Reid aid Susan] McCue, spearheaded the effort.

Tuesday’s event will also co-hosted by Jimmy Ryan, Dayle Cristinzio and Kai Anderson, high-powered corporate lobbyists who were senior aides to Reid.

Since the writing of that story, the event took place and Senator Reid’s Searchlight Foundation has made known its intention to donate $10,000 to Jaczko’s defense fund.

To be clear, what happened to Jaczko, who was forced out after he advocated for modest safety improvements at US nuclear plants and coordinated with the Department of Energy to end work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, is itself a lesson in regulatory capture. The US nuclear industry sees any new safety requirements as a threat to their bottom line, and it desperately needs the federal government to find a storage solution for their vast piles of highly radioactive spent fuel and related waste–and so Jaczko was purged and a message was sent.

But, as the guest list would tell you, it is hard to call anyone in this crowd a pure hero. When key figures behind your ouster are also guests at your farewell party and fundraiser, you have to ask yourself if you were really that tough–and everyone around you has to see that industry and government are too cozy.

Close is not good

If online etymologies are to be believed, the expression “close enough for government work” has its origins in the World War II saying, “Good enough for government work.” Back then, the saying was understood to mean that the government had exacting standards, so if the work could pass government inspection, then it could meet any benchmark.

The phrase quickly devolved, however, into its sarcastic opposite–defense contracting will have that effect–and now “close enough for government work” means barely acceptable.

And government–at least when it comes to agencies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission–has sought to live up to that new understanding ever since.

But when it comes to nuclear power, with the ominous safety implications of substandard work and lax oversight, close enough is not good enough. And if government and industry “working closely” on a problem means what it seems to have at San Onofre, then “close” pretty much never means “good.”

Made in Japan? Fukushima Crisis Is Nuclear, Not Cultural

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(photo: Steve Snodgrass)

Since the release of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Committee’s official report last week, much has been made of how it implicates Japanese culture as one of the root causes of the crisis. The committee’s chairman, Dr. Kiyoshi Kurokawa, makes the accusation quite plainly in the opening paragraphs of the executive summary [PDF]:

What must be admitted – very painfully – is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan.” Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.

That this apparently critical self-examination was seized upon by much of the western media’s coverage of the report probably does not come as a surprise–especially when you consider that this revelation falls within the first 300 words of an 88-page document. Cultural stereotypes and incomplete reads are hardly new to establishment reportage. What might come as a shock, however, is that this painful admission is only made in the English-language version of the document, and only in the chairman’s introduction is the “made in Japan” conclusion drawn so specifically.

What replaces the cultural critique in the Japanese edition and in the body of the English summary is a ringing indictment of the cozy relationship between the Japanese nuclear industry and the government agencies that were supposed to regulate it. This “regulatory capture,” as the report details, is certainly central to the committee’s findings and crucial to understanding how the Fukushima disaster is a manmade catastrophe, but it is not unique to the culture of Japan.

Indeed, observers of the United States will recognize this lax regulatory construct as part-and-parcel of problems that threaten the safety and health of its citizenry, be it in the nuclear sector, the energy sector as a whole, or across a wide variety of officially regulated industries.

No protection

The Japanese Diet’s Fukushima report includes a healthy dose of displeasure with the close ties between government regulators and the nuclear industry they were supposed to monitor. The closed, insular nature of nuclear oversight that might be attributed to Japanese culture by a superficial read is, in fact, a product of the universally familiar “revolving door” that sees industry insiders taking turns as government bureaucrats, and regulatory staff “graduating” to well-compensated positions in the private sector.

Mariko Oi, a reporter at the BBC’s Tokyo bureau, described the situation this way when discussing the Fukushima report on the World Service:

When there was a whistleblower, the first call that the government or the ministry made was to TEPCO, saying, “Hey, you’ve got a whistleblower,” instead of “Hey, you’ve got a problem at the nuclear reactor.”

A disturbing betrayal of accountability in any context, it is especially troubling with the ominous repercussions of the Fukushima disaster still metastasizing. And it is also ominously familiar.

Look, for example, just across the Pacific:

[San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station] was chastised two years ago by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for creating an atmosphere in which employees fear retaliation if they report safety concerns.

. . . .

Edward Bussey, a former health physics technician at the plant, sued Edison in state court after he was fired in 2006 under what he said were trumped-up charges that he had falsified initials on logs documenting that certain materials had been checked for radiation. Bussey contended that he was really fired in retaliation for complaining about safety concerns to his supervisors and the NRC.

San Onofre–SONGS, if you will–has been offline since January when a radioactive steam leak led to the discovery of severely degraded copper tubing in both of the plant’s existing reactors. But here’s the real kicker: whistleblower suits at SONGS, like the one from Mr. Bussey, have routinely been summarily dismissed thanks to a little known legal loophole:

San Onofre is majority owned and operated by Southern California Edison, a private company, but it sits on land leased from the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base.

That puts the plant in a so-called federal enclave, where courts have held that many California laws, including labor laws intended to protect whistle-blowers, do not apply.

Lawsuits filed in state court by San Onofre workers who claimed that they were fired or retaliated against for reporting safety concerns, sexual harassment and other issues have been tossed out because of the plant’s location.

The Los Angeles Times cites examples dating back to the construction of San Onofre where personnel who complained about safety or work conditions were terminated and left without many of the legal options normally afforded most California citizens. The history of SONGS is liberally peppered with accidents and safety breaches–and the lies and cover-ups from its owner-operators that go with them. Considering that San Onofre employees are regularly punished for exposing problems and have fewer whistleblower protections, is it at all surprising that SONGS is reported to have the worst safety record of all US nuclear plants?

If San Onofre’s track record isn’t evidence enough of the dangers of weak regulation, the findings and conclusions of the latest Fukushima report make it crystal clear: “safety culture” is not undermined by Japanese culture so much as it is by the more international culture of corruption born of the incestuous relationship between industry and regulators.

It’s a nuclear thing…

But the corrupt culture–be it national or universal–is itself a bit of a dodge. As noted by the Financial Times, the Japanese and their regulatory structure have managed to operate the technologically complex Shinkansen bullet trains since 1964 without a single derailment or fatal collision.

As the Diet’s report makes abundantly clear–far more clear than any talk about Japanese culture–the multiple failures at and around Fukushima Daiichi were directly related to the design of the reactors and to fatal flaws inherent in nuclear power generation.

Return for a moment to something discussed here last summer, The Light Water Paradox: “In order to safely generate a steady stream of electricity, a light water reactor needs a steady stream of electricity.” As previously noted, this is not some perpetual motion riddle–all but one of Japan’s commercial nuclear reactors and every operating reactor in the United States is of a design that requires water to be actively pumped though the reactor containment in order to keep the radioactive fuel cool enough to prevent a string of catastrophes, from hydrogen explosions and cladding fires, to core meltdowns and melt-throughs.

Most of the multiple calamities to befall Fukushima Daiichi have their roots in the paradox. As many have observed and the latest Japanese report reiterates, the Tohoku earthquake caused breaches in reactor containment and cooling structures, and damaged all of Fukushima’s electrical systems, save the diesel backup generators, which were in turn taken out by the tsunami that followed the quake. Meeting the demands of the paradox–circulating coolant in a contained system–was severely compromised after the quake, and was rendered completely impossible after the tsunami. Given Japan’s seismic history, and the need of any light water reactor for massive amounts of water, Fukushima wouldn’t really have been a surprise even if scientists hadn’t been telling plant operators and Japanese regulators about these very problems for the last two decades.

Back at San Onofre, US regulators disclosed Thursday that the damage to the metal tubes that circulate radioactive water between the reactor and the steam turbines (in other words, part of the system that takes heat away from the core) was far more extensive than had previously been disclosed by plant operators:

[Each of San Onofre’s steam generators has] 9,727 U-shaped tubes inside, each three-quarters of an inch in diameter.

The alloy tubes represent a critical safety barrier — if one breaks, there is the potential that radioactivity could escape into the atmosphere. Also, serious leaks can drain protective cooling water from a reactor.

Gradual wear is common in such tubing, but the rate of erosion at San Onofre startled officials since the equipment is relatively new. The generators were replaced in a $670 million overhaul and began operating in April 2010 in Unit 2 and February 2011 in Unit 3.

Tubes have to be taken out of service if 35 percent — roughly a third — of the wall wears away, and each of the four generators at the plant is designed to operate with a maximum of 778 retired tubes.

In one troubled generator in Unit 3, 420 tubes have been retired. The records show another 197 tubes in that generator have between 20 percent and 34 percent wear, meaning they are close to reaching the point when they would be at risk of breaking.

More than 500 others in that generator have between 10 percent and 19 percent wear in the tube wall.

“The new data reveal that there are thousands of damaged tubes in both Units 2 and 3, raising serious questions whether either unit should ever be restarted,” said Daniel Hirsch, a lecturer on nuclear policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is a critic of the industry. “The problem is vastly larger than has been disclosed to date.”

And if anything, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is underplaying the problem. A report from Fairewinds Associates, also released this week, unfavorably compared San Onofre’s situation with similar problems at other facilities:

[SONGS] has plugged 3.7 times as many steam generator tubes than the combined total of the entire number of plugged replacement steam generator tubes at all the other nuclear power plants in the US.

The report also explains that eight of the tubes failed a “pressure test” at San Onofre, while the same test at other facilities had never triggered any more than one tube breach. Fairewinds goes on to note that both units at San Onofre are equally precarious, and that neither can be restarted with any real promise of safe operation.

And while the rapid degeneration of the tubing might be peculiar to San Onofre, the dangers inherent in a system that requires constant power for constant cooling–lest a long list of possible problems triggers a toxic crisis–are evident across the entire US nuclear fleet. Cracked containment buildings, coolant leaks, transformer fires, power outages, and a vast catalogue of human errors fill the NRC’s event reports practically every month of every year for the past 40 years. To put it simply, with nuclear power, too much can go wrong when everything has to go right.

And this is to say nothing of the dangers that come with nuclear waste storage. Like with the reactors, the spent fuel pools that dot the grounds of almost every nuclear plant in America and Japan require a consistent and constantly circulating water supply to keep them from overheating (which would result in many of the same disastrous outcomes seen with damaged reactors). At Fukushima, one of the spent fuel pools is, at any given point, as much of a concern as the severely damaged reactor cores.

Ions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Even with the latest findings, however, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda pushed ahead with the restart of the precariously situated and similarly flawed nuclear reactor complex at Oi. It is as if the PM and the nuclear industry feared Japan surviving another summer without nuclear-generated electricity would demonstrate once and for all that the country had no reason to trade so much of its health and safety for an unnecessary return.

But the people of Japan seem to see it differently. Tens of thousands have turned out to demonstrate against their nation’s slide back into this dangerous culture of corruption. (Remember, the Oi restart comes without any safety upgrades made in response to the Fukushima disaster.)

And maybe there’s where cultural distinctions can be drawn. In Japan, the citizenry–especially women–are not demonstrating “reflexive obedience,” instead, they are demonstrating. In the United States, where 23 nuclear reactors are of the same design as Fukushima Daiichi, and 184 million people within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant, when the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission suggested requiring some modest upgrades as a response to the Fukushima disaster, the nuclear industry got its henchmen on the NRC and in Congress to push him out. . . with little public outcry.

Still, the BBC’s Mariko Oi lamented on the day the Fukushima report was released that Japanese media was paying more attention to the birth of a giant panda at a Tokyo zoo. That sort of response would seem all too familiar to any consumer of American media.

That baby panda, it should be noted, has since died. The radioactive fallout from Fukushima, however, lingers, and the crisis at Daiichi is far from over. The threat to global heath and safety that is unique to nuclear power lives on.

House Postpones Witch Hunt While Nuclear Industry Awaits Results of Latest Power Play

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The Salem Nuclear Power Plant is in New Jersey, not Salem, MA, but you get the idea. (photo: peretzp)

In case you were wondering what it was all about–“it” being the dealings of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission actually making the popular news for a few months–the House Committee on Energy and Commerce indefinitely postponed its Thursday hearing on the “politicization of the [NRC] and the actions and influence of Chairman Jaczko.” Gregory Jaczko, of course, announced his resignation on May 21, and President Obama nominated Allison Macfarlane as his replacement three days later.

Though stressing that his committee would keep an eye on the NRC, “including a full review of the inspector general’s pending report” on the “breakdown in collegiality at the commission,” Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) did not schedule a new hearing.

And there is no apparent update from Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and, until about the third week of last month, one of the loudest and most persistent critics of workplace morale at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Before Jaczko’s resignation, Issa, too, was promising more hearings. Instead, Issa has turned again to attacking loan guarantees for renewable energy projects (and so, attempting. . . again. . . to make Solyndra an issue in the presidential election)–which also serves his masters (as in, largest campaign contributors) in the nuclear industry just fine, thank you.

Meanwhile, things are suddenly moving on the Senate side. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has given a more public blessing to the suspected private deal discussed here during the weeks leading up to Jaczko’s move. Because Dr. Macfarlane is considered an opponent of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, Senator Reid has agreed to put aside his vocal objections to a second term for NRC commissioner Kristine Svinicki and advance both nominations toward confirmation as a pair. (Stopping Yucca, of course, has been one of Reid’s top priorities throughout his political career.) California Democrat Barbara Boxer, whose Environment and Public Works Committee will conduct the hearings on the NRC nominees, has sidestepped her own strong objections to Svinicki, and now says both the current and potential nuclear regulators should be considered before the end of the month.

So, there you have it–matters supposedly related to oversight of the nuclear industry and the safety of the American people have quite visibly taken a back seat to influence peddling and classic beltway horse-trading. In an era where even cynical deals are rarely struck, some might hail this move to quickly restock the NRC as something resembling bipartisan compromise (as if that were an end in itself). But success is not measured by the number of commissioners collecting government paychecks, it is seen in the actions of regulators who actually regulate.

In the wake of the ongoing Fukushima crisis, and in the presence of countless problems at a multitude of aging American nuclear plants, there is, indeed, much regulating to be done. But when one member of the NRC is forced out for vainly advocating the most minor of safety improvements, while another commissioner is rewarded with reappointment for consistently supporting the nuclear industry, the chances of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulating much of anything seem slim. It effectively defines “regulatory capture,” and practically guarantees that, no matter how fair or interpersonally gifted Dr. Macfarlane might be, the NRC will do little to police nuclear power.

As has been noted here on numerous occasions, the regulatory system is broken. Scientists, citizens, and lawmakers cannot “assume we have a can opener” and pretend a process exists to make commercial nuclear power clean and safe. The NRC may–may–have been created to provide oversight, but, in reality, it works instead to provide cover. Without an honest and active regulatory body, there is no credible argument for a “nuclear renaissance“–there is only the promise of another nuclear disaster.

Obama Taps Allison Macfarlane as New Head of Nuclear Regulatory Commission

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Seal of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (via Wikipedia)

President Barack Obama has nominated Allison Macfarlane to be the new head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Macfarlane is currently an associate professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, and was part of Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, a panel that was, among its responsibilities, asked to examine how the country should deal with its growing nuclear waste storage crisis. She holds a PhD in Geology from MIT.

If confirmed by the Senate, Macfarlane will replace Gregory Jaczko, who announced his resignation Monday after months of pressure from the nuclear industry and their friends in government.

As predicted, in choosing Macfarlane, Obama tapped someone who is on record as opposed to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. Macfarlane quite literally wrote the book on the subject–she is the editor (along with Rodney Ewing) of Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste, a review that is predominantly very critical of the choice of the Yucca site. Because confirmation has to move through the Senate, it would need the consent of Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), a longtime opponent of the Yucca project.

But Macfarlane could not be labeled an opponent of nuclear power. Indeed, Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones cited MacFarlane’s own words in which she called herself a nuclear “agnostic”:

In terms of nuclear energy, I would describe myself as an agnostic. I’m neither pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear. I think nuclear has been doing a good job in the United states and some other industrial countries at providing a good, reliable energy, and they’ve been improving on that. At the same time, I think I think in terms of an expansion in nuclear power over the next 50 years or something, nuclear has lot of liabilities and I don’t know if it can get over them.

If Macfarlane has objections to the expansion of commercial nuclear power, it would seem to be based on the cost–as she explained in a 2007 MIT lecture–and issues of waste storage.

To that second problem, Macfarlane is on record as favoring so-called interim solutions. As explained to me by Beyond Nuclear’s Kevin Kamps, who has met with Dr. Macfarlane, the NRC nominee thinks dry cask storage is “good enough” for now, and is in favor of “centralized interim storage”–a plan to collect spent fuel form the nation’s nuclear plants and move it to a handful of regional, above-ground storage facilities until some unspecified time in the future when a long-term program is completed.

Sites rumored for possible interim storage facilities include the Utah desert, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Dresden nuclear facility in Illinois. The state governments of New Mexico and Arizona have also made moves to request they be considered as repositories for nuclear waste.

The problems with dry casks and centralized interim storage are many. Kamps, a longtime critic of standard dry cask storage, notes that current dry casks are built to shield workers from radiation, but not designed to withstand long-term exposure to the environment or to survive a hostile attack. Some of the nation’s casks already show signs of wear, cracking, and corrosion. Beyond Nuclear recommends hardened dry casks–something different from standard casks–for this level of storage. Kamps was unsure what Macfarlane’s position was on requiring hardened dry casks.

There are massive security concerns around the idea of centralized interim storage, too. Not only would the facilities themselves be potential targets for terrorist attack, the transportation of nuclear waste would be vulnerable. And, it should be noted, as currently conceived, centralized sites would necessitate transport of waste through densely populated areas over insecure stretches of rail lines.

Kamps was also dismayed over Macfarlane’s enthusiasm for the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland. The underground facility, still under construction on Onkiluoto Island, has come under scrutiny by nuclear watchdogs for some of the same reasons critics worry about Yucca Mountain.

Macfarlane is on record, however as concerned about the overcrowded spent nuclear fuel pools that sit next to the nation’s fleet of aging reactors. In a 2003 paper, co-authored with Bob Alvarez and others (PDF), she issued this dire warning:

Because of the unavailability of off-site storage for spent power-reactor fuel, the NRC has allowed high-density storage of spent fuel in pools originally designed to hold much smaller inventories. As a result, virtually all U.S. spent-fuel pools have been re-racked to hold spent-fuel assemblies at densities that approach those in reactor cores. In order to prevent the spent fuel from going critical, the fuel assemblies are partitioned off from each other in metal boxes whose walls contain neutron-absorbing boron. It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission products, including 30-year half-life 137Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl.

Of course, recent events in Fukushima have shown Macfarlane et al to be eerily on target. No doubt, Macfarlane would at least like to see spent fuel moved out of pools (even if it is to dry casks) to bring the density down to original design parameters. Whether Macfarlane will feel inclined to push the nuclear industry in this direction is another matter. Kevin Kamps estimates that moving spent fuel from pools to dry casks would cost roughly $100 million per facility, and cost has been a principle reason nuclear operators have dragged their heels on transferring older spent fuel to dry storage. To date, about 75 percent of the nation’s spent fuel remains in liquid pools.

Heartening, too, when it comes to this mother lode of radioactive waste, is word that Allison Macfarlane has been critical of nuclear fuel reprocessing. As discussed here many times, reprocessing is expensive, energy intensive, and actually creates more nuclear waste, not less.

The nomination of Macfarlane no doubt signals a deal between Sen. Reid and the White House. Reid, for his part, praised Macfarlane, and announced plans to hold confirmation hearings alongside those for Kristine Svinicki, the sitting NRC commissioner re-nominated by Obama but publicly opposed by Reid. According to the Majority Leader, both nominations will be considered next month.

Given that Macfarlane has not given her unwavering support to everything the nuclear industry wants, questions remain about the ease with which Macfarlane’s nomination will move through the Senate. While it is hard to dismiss the possibility that some GOP Senator will place a hold on Macfarlane–it is, like with the scorpion, in their nature–it should be noted that the nuclear industry’s biggest lobbying group has called for both Svinicki and Macfarlane to be confirmed:

The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, called Macfarlane “an active contributor to policy debates in the nuclear energy field for many years” and urged the Senate to confirm her nomination as soon as possible.

“It would not serve the public interest to have her nomination linger,” the group said. “We urge the Senate to confirm both Commissioner Svinicki and Professor Macfarlane expeditiously.”

Watch this space, as they say.

As noted with the news of Jaczko’s resignation, the problems of nuclear power transcend the role of any individual. The dirt and danger–and most notably the costs–that come with nuclear power do not change with the personnel of the NRC. And, though it seems hard to imagine, the problems of regulatory capture loom even larger. The only reason Macfarlane is being discussed is because the nuclear industry grew tired of Gregory Jaczko. That the industry and their political pals were successful in pushing out one regulator cannot bode well for another that is in the least bit inclined to regulate.