Nuclear regulatory policy

DEFINITION: Overall plan of action used by a government in the control and licensing of industries involving radioactive materials

Governments must give careful consideration to the public health and safety in formulating policies regarding the use and handling of nuclear materials. The mishandling of radioactive wastes, for example, can have long-term negative environmental impacts.

In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is the federal agency responsible for licensing nuclear power plants and regulating the civilian nuclear power industry. The federal government has broadly preempted the authority of individual US states to regulate the industry. The NRC’s mission is threefold: to protect public health and safety, to safeguard national security, and to ensure environmental protection.

The NRC licenses plant owners to construct and operate nuclear power reactors and issues a wide variety of technical and procedural rules governing reactor operation. In the United States, electrical utility companies have historically owned and operated nuclear power plants, but restructuring of the utility industry may eventually lead to ownership by other kinds of companies.

The nuclear regulatory system is largely based on self-regulation by plant owners, who are responsible for meeting the NRC’s requirements. Utility company personnel maintain and inspect their companies’ plants and submit regular reports to the NRC. Plant owners must notify the NRC of important safety lapses and equipment malfunctions. As with many industries, federal regulators set forth specific rules, but federal inspectors only spot-check for compliance. After the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island (TMI) plant in Pennsylvania, the NRC stationed full-time inspectors at all US nuclear power plants to conduct inspections and monitor compliance with NRC rules. Special additional NRC inspection teams are called in when warranted by serious equipment or operator failures.

Utilities found in violation of the NRC’s rules may be subject to fines and penalties. When violations are sufficiently serious to raise questions about the safety of a plant’s operation, operators customarily shut down the reactor before being ordered to do so. Although the NRC has the authority to order an operating plant to shut down, it has rarely done so. However, the NRC may withhold permission for a plant to restart—sometimes for years—after a shutdown until the utility can demonstrate it has corrected the problems.

Many other countries have based aspects of their nuclear regulatory systems on the US model, particularly with regard to technical oversight, since roughly 80 percent of the world’s nuclear plants utilize US reactor designs. However, organizational structure, staffing levels, practices, and requirements differ from country to country. In many nations, such as France and Canada, the relationship between the regulatory agency and plant licensees is much closer than in the United States. In most developing countries, the public has little access to the regulatory and policy processes. In industrialized nations, a wide range exists with regard to opportunities for public participation and the related ability to seek judicial review. In France and Japan, which operate the world’s second- and third-largest nuclear programs, regulatory policies are highly centralized and largely closed to public participation.

State Regulation

US states are largely preempted by federal law from health and safety regulation of the nuclear aspects of nuclear power plants. States retain the authority to regulate other aspects of nuclear plants that are common to all electricity-generating facilities. The most important of these are the ability of state public-service commissions to set utility rates and financial returns on utility investments and the broad powers of state agencies to regulate land use, facility siting, and nonnuclear environmental impacts.

States and members of the public have long been able to apply to the NRC to be granted status as “intervenors” in NRC licensing proceedings. This aspect of the regulatory system has been fundamentally adversarial. NRC licensing hearings have often resembled judicial proceedings in which parties enjoy certain rights with regard to reviewing documents, cross-examination, the right of appeal to the courts, and so forth.

Antinuclear Activism

Beginning in the early 1970s, antinuclear activism and the number of interventions in construction permit and operating license proceedings increased. Industry proponents often claimed that most interventions were mere delaying tactics intended primarily to lengthen licensing times and drive up costs. Critics of the nuclear power industry argued that most interventions were warranted, and many brought to light safety-related problems that would not otherwise have been identified. Studies by government agencies and others concluded that most—but not all—delays in building nuclear plants resulted from factors other than interventions, such as changes in regulatory requirements and construction problems.

With regard to operating plants, the public has little access to the regulatory process. Although NRC regulations permit members of the public to submit a petition to seek a hearing regarding modification or revocation of a utility’s license on the grounds of possible safety or environmental problems, the NRC has granted hearings for only a handful of the hundreds of such petitions received.

US Regulatory History

The American effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War II was accompanied by a tight government monopoly on nuclear materials and technology. The 1946 Atomic Energy Act created the civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which oversaw all aspects of atomic energy, and the powerful congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), which was given authority over all nuclear-related legislation and oversight. Amendments in 1954 loosened the government’s monopoly in an effort to spur the development of a private nuclear power industry. The AEC was given the additional charges of actively promoting the development of commercial nuclear energy and regulating the new industry. Government and private companies cooperated in what was regarded as a joint effort.

Between 1963 and 1974, forty-four US commercial nuclear power plants began operation. Because of the cooperative nature of the endeavor and the relatively few operating facilities, federal regulation was initially modest. However, reactor safety issues soon began to draw media and public attention, and the AEC was widely perceived as too friendly with the industry it was supposed to regulate. In 1974 the US Congress, responding to criticism that the AEC’s dual missions of promotion and regulation were conflicting, replaced the AEC with two new agencies. The task of regulation was given to the newly created NRC. Promotion of nuclear energy was assigned to the Energy Research and Development Administration, which was superseded in 1977 by the Department of Energy. In 1976 the JCAE was dissolved for largely the same reasons as the AEC, and congressional authority was divided among various committees.

Critics, including what was then known as the US General Accounting Office (later the Government Accountability Office), noted that the staff of the new NRC was drawn largely from the AEC and thus retained essentially the same mentality. However, the years following the NRC’s creation were also marked by increased regulatory scrutiny. Between 1975 and the mid-1980s, NRC safety research increased; by 1981 the inspection and enforcement staff had grown to become the agency’s largest division. The 1979 TMI accident created a new atmosphere that was initially marked by a brief moratorium on licensing for new plants and several independent investigations into the accident’s causes. An industry group was formed to try to improve safety performance. The NRC responded to public and congressional safety concerns by setting new requirements for construction and operation of plants and by industry compliance more closely. However, these actions were counterbalanced by the actions of NRC members appointed during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, who began initiatives to reduce federal regulation, an effort from which the NRC was insulated but not immune.

Changes in NRC Regulations

Beginning in the late 1980s, the NRC enacted a number of new regulations long sought by the nuclear industry. The most important changes addressed licensing of new reactors, emergency planning, siting, reactor design certification, and operating license extensions. For all reactors licensed through 1996, the NRC followed a two-step licensing process mandated by Congress in 1957. First, a utility company applied for a permit to begin construction. When the plant was completed, the utility applied for an operating license. In numerous cases, intervenors opposed the granting of operating licenses, usually on grounds of safety-related allegations relating to design, construction, or infeasible emergency planning. In 1992 the industry achieved a longtime goal when Congress approved a 1989 NRC regulation change that implemented one-step licensing for new reactors, permitting the NRC to issue a single combined construction and operating license prior to the onset of construction. The rule sharply limited the ability of intervenors to raise environmental and safety issues after a license has been granted, both during construction and before operation begins. Other rule changes in 1989 narrowed intervenors’ procedural rights during licensing hearings.

Following the TMI accident, the NRC adopted regulations requiring the agency to approve state and local emergency response plans before a plant could be granted an operating license to ensure that members of the public could be protected or evacuated if a serious accident occurred. In several celebrated cases (the Diablo Canyon, Seabrook, and Shoreham reactors), states refused to cooperate on emergency planning and opposed the issuance of operating licenses on the grounds that no feasible emergency planning was possible because of error. In 1987 the NRC adopted new rules permitting the agency to grant an operating license based on emergency plans drafted by the plant owner alone; in 1988 President Reagan issued an executive order authorizing federal agencies to draft emergency plans. These actions effectively bypassed state opposition.

In 1989 the NRC adopted regulations that permitted utilities to seek approval for reactor sites before any license was granted and to retain the ability to use approved sites for up to forty years. Under these rules, utilities are permitted to seek approval of emergency plans for a site before filing any application to build a plant. In 1989 the NRC also adopted new rules allowing reactor vendors to seek approval for “standardized” reactor designs, which would be certified by the agency for fifteen years. The rule prohibits critics from raising design-related safety and environmental issues when a utility seeks to build a new plant using the certified designs.

All US reactors operating by 1996 were issued forty-year operating licenses, 40 percent of which were scheduled to expire by the year 2015. In 1992 the NRC adopted a rule that permits plant owners to seek license extensions of up to twenty additional years. The net results of these regulation changes, which were adamantly opposed by nuclear critics, have been to facilitate the licensing process for new and existing reactors while significantly restricting public access to the regulatory process. Most nuclear plant licenses in the United States will expire in the 2030s or 2040s.

Criticism of the NRC

The nuclear industry and antinuclear activists alike have criticized the NRC’s regulation, although for different reasons. In the late 1990s the nuclear industry argued that the NRC’s requirements unnecessarily raise plant operating costs. The industry also complained that the NRC fails to set objective criteria by which adequate levels of safety and licensees’ compliance can be judged and that the agency does not rank the relative safety significance of compliance requirements and adjust regulatory priorities and enforcement emphasis accordingly. Meanwhile, antinuclear activists have asserted that the NRC has generally been allied with the industry and has often failed to maintain an arms-length relationship with its licensees. They also argue that the NRC has retreated from tough regulation, has failed to pursue important safety questions, and has been either unresponsive or obstructive to substantive participation by individuals and citizen groups.

The allegations are not mutually exclusive, and there is evidence to support arguments on both sides. However, it is difficult to deny that there has been a fundamental alignment of interest between the NRC and the nuclear industry. Such relationships between federal regulatory agencies and the industries they regulate are widely acknowledged, although the degree of cooperation or tension between the two sides may fluctuate over time. By the late 1990s, assisted by improved safety performance, momentum had shifted toward lighter regulation under the influence of presidential administrations, appointees, and a Congress more sympathetic to the industry’s views. By 2023, the commission had come under scrutiny for hampering the deployment of nuclear technologies by using a lengthy, complicated regulatory process. Stakeholders attempted to accelerate the process but, as of 2024, had made little progress. This led to some companies implementing conveyor-belt-like manufacturing and adding microreactors at existing facilities to avoid regulatory and licensing hurdles.

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