I have written numerous posts about nuclear safety on the blog. One point that I keep coming back to is the idea governments are failing in their duties to protect their citizens because of what is called regulatory capture. This occurs when the industry being regulated exerts political pressure to avoid being held accountable for violating regulations. But in order for this to happen, there has to be regulation in the first place. Often, industries will lobby against new or existing regulations. This is a more direct route. You cannot violate a regulation that does not exist.
The Swiss have been pushing for more stringent international regulation of nuclear power plants to prevent nuclear meltdowns. They have been strong supporters of an European Union initiative to modify and strengthen existing international reactor safety standards since the horrible nuclear disaster in Fukushima Japan in March of 2011. Both the United States and Russia have been strong opponents of changing the safety regulations. The E.U. coalition was going to present a formal amendment to safety standards for a vote at the February 2015 International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Convention on Nuclear Safety. However, intense lobbying by the U.S. delegation to the Convention resulted in the plans for the formal presentation to be cancelled. Instead, the E.U. coalition will present a statement that has not voted upon and does not make any changes to existing safety standards.
Officially, the U.S. delegation stated that they were not opposing the call for safety upgrades to nuclear reactors because it would increase costs to the nuclear industry and result in a loss of market share. However, there are people in the U.S. Congress that doubt that statement. Senators Edward J. Markey (Dem/MA) and Barbara Boxer (Dem/CA) sent a letter to the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December of last year. The NRC head, Allison Macfarlane, resigned her post at the end of 2014. In the letter, the senators detailed the reasons for their opinion that the NRC helped to undermine the proposed changes safety standards in spite of a statement by Macfarlane that cost of upgrades to nuclear power plants was not a factor in U.S. opposition.
There is precedence for the Senator's concerns. The NRC Japanese Learning Task Force was charged with learning what lessons could be learned from the Fukushima disaster. The JPTF recommended that all U.S. power reactors with the same design as Fukushima (GE Mark I and Mark II boiling water reactors) "install high capacity external radiation filters for hardened vents on the vulnerable containment systems." The JPTF said that such filters were “a cost-benefited substantial safety enhancement.” The new filters would vent extreme heat, high pressure and explosive gases while at the same time preventing the release of radioactive particles into the atmosphere. An international energy investment bank predicted that the NRC would reject the call for the new filters because “added stress this places on the incumbent’s portfolio and the fragile state of affairs of their licensees' financial and economic condition." While Europe and Japan have made it a practice to install such filters, the third of the U.S. power reactors that share the Fukushima design are not required to install them.
Basically, it appears that the rejection of the new safety standards at the Convention were a result of the NRC and the U.S. government protecting the nuclear industry in the U.S. from having to pay the substantial cost of upgrading their power reactors. Adding insult to injury, when pressed, the U.S. government lied when it said that nuclear industry costs were behind rejection of the new standards.
IAEA Convention on Nuclear Safety:
