a year ago at the Salem plant had not been properly handled by the NRC, there was no real evaluation of this, and there were no significant recommendations for improvement at NRC. I sense an increasing tendency to be defensive about the agency's shortcomings. It is a fact of regulatory life that those who license an activity are generally not the best ones to assess dispassionately a failure of the system. In air transportation, where the FAA is in charge of licensing, this problem has been dealt with by giving responsibility for investigating accidents to the National Transportation Safety Board. To correct the analogous problem at NRC, I would create an independent Safety Board to investigate mishaps, assign probable cause and make recommendations for improvements, both at power plants and at the NRC. The Commission should, in any case, devote more of its time to understanding the causes of safety problems. Instead, a great deal of Commission time has been spent on matters peripheral to its safety responsibilities but which are politically fashionable. I put in this category the agency's "licensing reform" effort, which was intended to smooth the way for future reactors. The resulting legislative proposal hardly justifies the effort expended on it. Another example of NRC bending with the wind too easily is the agency's response to the "licensing crunch" of three years ago, when it was told in effect that it was expected to license 33 reactors in two years. The agency was turned inside out to avoid licensing delays projected on the basis of utility schedules. As it turned out, the projected delays were a mirage. The utility schedules were completely unrealistic and only 7 of the plants were completed and ready to be licensed in that time. However pleased we may be that the NRC completed its part of the licensing work for these plants well ahead of time, we should recognize the price we paid in terms of safety work not done elsewhere. SIMPLIFYING THE HEARING PROCESS Something needs to be done about the overly legalistic nature of the hearing process. Most of the proposals for changes made so far have failed to meet the basic test of fairness and I have opposed them. But I am convinced that change is needed. The overly legalistic cast of the hearings originated in the Atomic Energy Commission's modeling of its administrative proceedings on court procedures. This was thought to be a useful gesture in view of that Commission's obvious bias in favor of promoting nuclear power. Since then, a succession of Commissions have found in the Licensing Board hearings, and the surrounding judicial trappings, a ready excuse for not involving themselves in individual proceedings and not taking responsibility for safety decisions. The creation of the Appeal Board to handle appeals from Licensing Board decisions enabled the Commission to further distance itself from the hearings. This remoteness of the Commission from the nitty-gritty of the agency's main work has been the source of many of the NRC's problems. There is no single cure for these ills. There are, however, a few measures which could readily be taken to make the NRC system more effective. Get NRC Staff Out of Hearings as a Party - both in The first of these is to get the NRC staff out of the hearings as a party. The current role not only involves a tremendous waste of the staff's time but is inconsistent with its health and safety responsibilities appearance and in reality. The staff habitually lines up with the utility to argue for a license. Not surprisingly, this makes the public suspicious. The TMI case is the perfect example of that. Inevitably, the staff role as advocate in hearings also affects its substantive decisionmaking. It would be surprising if it did not. To understand the present arrangement, you have to know that the Commission, over the years, has viewed the staff, and not the Boards, as its real representative in the hearings. The staff has shared this view: one of the chief staff lawyers once told me that the Commission had to rely on the staff to make sure the plants were licensed because they could not count on the Boards to do so. That isn't the way the system is supposed to work. The Byron case, in which the Licensing Board recently denied an application for an operating license, demonstrates the problems which exist. There, it is quite clear that the staff, which was seeking approval of the license, tried to circumvent the Licensing Board's review of the plant's quality assurance program ard failed to inform the Board or the Commission promptly of some of the problems at the After the Board's denial of the license, the NRC staff and the plant's owners met to discuss how best to extract the license from the Boards. Again, the Commission was out of the picture. While the NRC staff argues that its discussions with the Byron owners were about the "underlying technical issues", it is clear that the object of the meeting was to determine how to reverse the setback suffered before the Licensing Board. Nor is that prohibited by our current rules. These situations arise because the Commission and the staff are barred from communicating privately with each other when the staff is a party in a hearing. As a result, the Commission is sometimes not even aware of the agency's major actions. If the staff ceased to be a full party, these barriers to information could be eliminated. The NRC staff's participation in hearings also has a budgetary aspect. I have been told by NRC resident inspectors at sites involved in hearings that they spend as much as half of their time on the hearing. Much, if not most, of this time is attributable to the fact that the NRC staff is a party. There is no reason for the NRC to spend its limited resources duplicating hearing work that can, and should be, done by the utilities. This would also enable us to reduce the number of lawyers at the NRC. Abolish the Appeal Board Making the Commission directly responsible for appeals from Licensing Board decisions by eliminating the Appeal Board would both tighten decisionmaking and reduce the excessive legalism which that Board has promoted in the conduct of hearings. While the Commission would, of course, have to rely on the support of a hearing office, perhaps under the General Counsel, the Commission would still be far more intimately involved in the decisions than it is now. And it wouldn't hurt if Commissioners occasionally wrote their own decisions. The objection is often made that the Commission could not possibly duplicate the Appeal Board's role in reviewing every single case. I see no need for that. Keep Commission in Approval Process for Operating Licenses Since the TMI accident the Commissioners have themselves been passing on all operating license approvals before they go into effect. These Commission reviews, brief as they are, have led to some very significant improvements in plant hardware and operations, not to speak of the fact that they have been very informative for the Commission. There are, however, pressures to relinquish this function to return to the old way of doing things and there is some support - for this on the Commission. I urge you not to let this happen. |