NRC chief comments on reactor safety
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WASHINGTON -- Nuclear Regulatory Commission chief Gregory Jaczko ventured into the den of the anti-nuclear group Public Citizen on Monday, facing some critical questions about the industry he regulates. 
"The discretionary authority of the NRC is very broad," Jaczko said, calling oversight of the nation's 100 operating nuclear reactors a "thorny issue." Among the concerns he discussed at the talk were instilling a "safety culture" in the nuclear industry, speeding discussion and development of regulations and ongoing reviews of "lessons learned" from the reactor crisis in Japan. Among those are disposition of the spent fuel rods kept at reactors in pools today, a source of radiation leaks in Japan.
"I recognize there will likely be a need to make some changes," at U.S. nuclear plants, Jaczko said. But he called for "systematic and methodical" review of the accident, in a short-term 90-day review now about two weeks old, and a more wide-ranging six-month review still getting started. In particular, he stressed investigation of the risks of nuclear plant power loss nationwide (at the root of the Japanese crisis), rather than a narrow focus on earthquake or tsunami threats alone.
Jaczko, 40, faced some of the toughest questions from Public Citizen's co-founder, Ralph Nader, the well-known activist, who called a 50-mile evacuation from areas near some U.S. nuclear power plants, "completely unworkable," in the event of a disaster like the one in Japan. (The NRC had recommended a 50-mile evacuation of U.S. citizens from the Japanese reactor in March. Standard first practice for the agency is a 10-mile evacuation at the beginning of an emergency or potential one.)
In response, Jaczko said it would be impractical to conduct full-scale evacuation tests of the communities around the nation's nuclear plants. Regular mock drills, involving emergency services sending each other alerts, he said, serve sufficiently to test evacuation plans.
"If we had a similar type of event in the U.S. (as the Japanese disaster), we certainly would be producing more information to the public," Jaczko said, than Japanese officials have in the Fukashima Dai-ichi crisis. In response to questions, he said that he felt adequately informed by Japanese authorities in his March testimony to Congress over the crisis.
See photos of: Japan
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