Nuclear Reactors 305 - The NRC Makes A Change To Its Safety And Operational Rating System For Nuclear Power Plants
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is charged with licensing, inspecting and regulating nuclear power reactors operating in the U.S. The NRC has been using the Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) for the past fifteen years. The ROP is used to assess the performance of a nuclear power plant over seven different factors in the operation of the facility.
The performance indicators are color coded and referred to as "cornerstones." The NRC says that the four color codes which include green, white, yellow and red are based on objective data with respect to safety and general plant operations. Green is considered the best safety and operation while the rest of the colors indicate problems of increasing severity until they reach red which is the most serious code.
These indicators are collected by the licensees of the power plants and reported to the NRC. While the NRC claims that the data is objective, the fact that it is being collected and reported by business entities which could be fined based on the data raises some concern over the honesty of the reporting.
The ROP has columns in charts that plants are placed in based on the assessment of their safety and operations standards as determined by the color coded indicators. Column One represents the highest safety and operational ratings. Plants can be moved from Column One to Columns Two, Three, Four and Five if inspections find problems in safety and operation. Any plant placed in Column Five is required to immediately halt operations and address the problems that were found.
Currently, if a plant that is in Column Two reports two white inputs to the rating system in the same cornerstone or one yellow input, it is moved to Column Three. This results in a considerable increase in required resources of both the NRC and the licensee. When a plant is moved from Column One to Column Two, an additional forty hours of additional inspections must be carried out. Moving a plant from Column Two to Column Three requires that an additional two hundred hours of additional inspections must occur.
The NRC has just announced that they have decided that three white incident reports are equivalent to one yellow incident instead of the previous equivalence of two white incidents to one yellow incident. This means that a plant can avoid being moved from Column Two to Column Three if they have two white incidence. While this results in a substantial reduction in resource requirements for both the NRC and the licensee, I am concerned that this change may have been motivated by a desire to reduce resource demands on the NRC instead of an objective assessment of their rating system. It is also quite possible that licensees in Column Two lobbied to have this change made to save money.
It seems to me that this NRC ROP is vulnerable to exploitation by licensees who have inordinate influence over the NRC which should be an entirely independent agency. Unfortunately it has been a victim of regulatory capture. Hopefully we will not find out that the rating system change prevented increased inspections which should have been carried out to prevent a serious accident.
