In March, Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant received a 20-year license extension from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC); the NRC extension ends in 2032. Vermont's legislature, however, voted last year to shut down the plant in 2012, when its state certificate runs out.
To keep the plant running, Entergy has sued the state of Vermont in federal court. There are many areas of contention in the Entergy lawsuit. One of the most important arguments is that Vermont is attempting to judge plant safety, and therefore pre-empting the NRC's federal role in safety assessments for nuclear plants.
Entergy has also filed for an injunction to prevent the state from shutting down the plant while the legal process proceeds.
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A while back, the Vermont Legislature set up a state-authorized Public Oversight Panel to make a technical determination on whether Vermont Yankee should continue to run.
Since safety and radiological issues are the responsibility of the NRC, the Public Oversight Panel supposedly dealt only with “reliability” issues. The panel called its report a Comprehensive Reliability Assessment.
The panel consisted of Arnie Gundersen, William Sherman, C. Frederick Sears, and Peter Bradford: four part-time members, one of whom is a lawyer, not an engineer. (For a while, there were five members of the panel, but membership has varied.) The panel also had support from Nuclear Safety Associates, a nuclear consulting group that prepared a report for the Public Oversight Panel and legislature.
After the Public Oversight Panel and Nuclear Safety Associates had submitted their reports to the state, Vermont Yankee's tritium leak was discovered. The legislature then reconvened the panel for another investigation.
The tritium leak was never a reliability issue: it never caused the plant to go off-line, for example. Still, the legislature wanted an investigation. So, the Public Oversight Panel met again, wrote another report, and was particularly concerned with whether the plant had given it incorrect information about plant piping.
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The Public Oversight Panel pretended to assess reliability, but in my opinion, it focused on safety.
The panel quickly abandoned investigating service water issues (which can actually lead to reliability problems) to focus on the sexier work of tritium leaks, strontium in soil near the plant, piping diagrams, backlog of repairs, and “safety culture” assessments. There also was a legal report on who-knew-what about the piping diagrams.
While the Public Oversight Panel worked, the plant had a breaker-to-breaker 531-day run and became one of the most high-performing plants in the Entergy fleet. The Public Oversight Panel gives a sentence to this “significant achievement” in its report. It doesn't let it affect its “reliability” assessment much.
The Public Oversight Panel's part-timers attempted to investigate all the things that the NRC sends teams of its own people to inspect, including safety culture and equipment-aging process planning. Then, the panel complained that the plant didn't give it enough information, gave it wrong information once about piping, and that it didn't have time to do a really good job.
Well, what did the panel expect? The legislature asked three engineers and a lawyer to do, in a few months of part-time, highly-paid work ($300 per hour), what teams of NRC inspectors do all year, every year.
Side note: There was a bit of wink-wink, nudge-nudge about this term “reliability.” I sat in several hearings in which a Vermont senator or representative would talk about the dangers the tritium leaks posed to the people of Vermont. Then the legislator would smile at the audience and remind them that “we can't use the s-word.”
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I decided I needed to know a bit more about the NRC process, so I e-mailed Diane Screnci, senior public affairs officer for New England. I asked her how many person-years of inspections and related oversight the NRC did, per plant, per year.
She told me that each plant has at least two full-time inspectors assigned to it, as well as other NRC staff. Each plant has about 5,000 person-hours per year of NRC inspections. At somewhat less than 2,000 hours per person per year, that is between two and three person-years of inspection per plant.
Vermont was not going to be able to do an NRC-level inspection with the Public Oversight Panel staff. In the long run, the Public Oversight Panel was exactly what it was meant to be: a political tool of almost no technical credibility. The Public Oversight Panel was a group of part-timers and a lawyer, attempting to do a safety inspection of a nuclear plant.
Individually, the panel members had varying degrees of credibility. As a panel, it had none. I am not attacking their backgrounds, though why a lawyer was on this panel remains a bit of a puzzle.
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Watching the Public Oversight Panel at work, it was clear to me why the NRC has jurisdiction, and why nuclear regulation cannot be a state privilege. Nuclear energy cannot be regulated by a group of people who may be eager to please their legislative employers. There need to be objective criteria, assessed by full-time experts, in order to keep a plant working well.
Having the internal workings of the plant doubly assessed, by a group of people chosen politically, could get in the way of plant operations. It could even possibly degrade safety. Part-time inspectors with political agendas? This is not the same as having the Occupational Safety and Health Administration come to the plant. Trained OSHA inspectors go to many industrial facilities.
The NRC catches a lot of guff in the nuclear industry: The NRC is slow to act. The NRC is an expensive, overgrown bureaucracy. The NRC is headed by political appointees.
But still, down in the trenches at the inspection level, the NRC knows what it is doing. The inspectors are trained and professional. They don't have political agendas. They won't accept a cup of coffee from the people they are inspecting.
After watching the Public Oversight Panel activities, it is clear to me that nuclear regulation is the business of the federal government. The Atomic Energy Commission was the precursor of the NRC, and kept the nuclear safety regulation at the federal level of the government. That is how it must remain.
Thank you, NRC, for your day-to-day professionalism.