Question. What is the status of licensing reform bills in Congress? Answer. The NRC licensing reform legislation (H.R. 2512, S. 893) was submitted to Congress in February 1983. Several congressional hearings have been held concerning the proposed NRC legislation and similar licensing reform legislation proposed by the Department of Energy (H.R. 2511, S. 894). To date, no licensing reform legislation has been reported out of committee. Question. Comment on the Commission's views on a strict one-step licensing process. Answer. The Commission does not favor the strict one-step licensing process proposed in the DOE legislation. The majority of the Commission favors the combined CP/OL licensing approach in the NRC-proposed legislation which would require a supplemental Commission review prior to the commencement of operation. This review would be to assure that the facility was built in conformance with the Commission's regulations and the CP/OL. In addition, the NRC proposal would provide for a supplemental opportunity for public hearing prior to the commencement of operation. This supplemental hearing would be restricted to matters that were not and could not have been considered in the prior CP/OL hearing. (Some aspects of these issues might be handled at an earlier stage.) PRICE-ANDERSON ACT Question. Briefly explain your major recommendations on the need to modify and/or extend the current Price-Anderson Act provisions on utility liability which expires in 1987. Answer. In its report to Congress of December 1983, "The Price-Anderson Act-The Third Decade," NUREG-0957, on the need for continuation or modification of the Price-Anderson Act, the Commission made the following recommendations: (1) The Commission recommends that the Congress extend the Price-Anderson Act. The Commission believes that the act provides a valuable public benefit by establishing a system for the prompt and equitable settlement of public liability claims resulting from a nuclear accident. The act should be extended to cover future as well as existing nuclear powerplants. (2) The Commission recommends that the Congress amend the Price-Anderson Act to substitute an annual limitation on liability for accidents at large commercial nuclear powerplants for the present absolute limitation on liability in the act. This annual limitation on liability would permit the assessment of retrospective premiums in succeeding years until all public liability claims from an accident are paid. The annual limitation on liability should apply to existing (ie., plants now covered by the act and by indemnification agreements) as well as future plants. This approach should ensure the availability of sufficient insurance funds under the act to pay public liability claims even for high-consequence accidents. At the same time, this approach should avoid imposing potentially catastrophic losses on utilities or suppliers of nuclear goods and services. (3) The Commission recommends that the Congress amend the Price-Anderson Act to raise the maximum retrospective premiums that can be charged from the present $5 million per reactor per incident to $10 million per reactor per incident per year until all claims are paid. An increase in the size of the retrospective premiums to $10 million would substantially increase the amount of funds available shortly after a nuclear accident to pay public liability claims. This amount of funds for public liability claims would be roughly comparable to the amount of insurance coverage now provided for most large commercial nuclear powerplants to pay onsite property damage and other utility claims. An increase in the size of the retrospective premiums to $10 million also should not jeopardize the financial viability of the participating utilities. (4) The Commission recommends that the Congress should retain the present statutory language for the finding of an extraordinary nuclear occurrence to establish a definitive basis for valid claims and conserve resources to pay for these claims. Additionally, the Commission notes that it intends to define, by rulemaking, the criteria for an extraordinary nuclear occurrence. Commissioners Gilinsky and Asselstine recommended that the Congress eliminate the term "extraordinary nuclear occurrence" from the Price-Anderson Act and amend the act to require the waiver of defenses for all nuclear incidents. This change would es tablish no-fault coverage for all nuclear incidents, would assure more uniform determinations on recovery for public liability claims from nuclear incidents, and would eliminate difficulties in establishing practical and workable criteria for making ENO determinations. (5) The Commission recommends that the Congress extend the statute of limitations for filing a public liability claim arising from a nuclear incident from 20 to 30 years. This change should provide greater assurance that latent injuries caused by a nuclear accident are provided protection under the Price-Anderson system. The Commission recommends that experience gained in the future from other administrative systems for compensating latent injury claims be studied, but the Commission does not recommend further changes to the causation and proof of damages provisions of the PriceAnderson Act at this time. (6) The Commission recommends that the Congress investigate with nuclear liability insurers the potential for increasing the private insurance capacity made available through the insurance pools for the basic layer of insurance. The Commission believes that this capacity has not kept pace in recent years with inflation and should be increased if possible. (7) Congress should clarify its intent on the following issues that have been or can be sources of uncertainty in implementing Price-Anderson: (a) Application of the waiver of defenses provision of the Price-Anderson Act to all situations in which financial protection is required (i.e., for indemnified nuclear materials licensees) and not just, as presently, to production and utilization facilities (reactors). (b) Exclusion of the costs of investigation, settlement and defense of claims from the two levels of financial protection as well as the presently excluded Government indemnity level. Question. Comment on the current liability limits which, I believe, were set back in 1957. Answer. In the form passed in 1957, the act limited the total liability for any single nuclear accident to $500 million in Government funds plus the amount of liability insurance available in the private market-$60 million at the time. Utilities operating large power reactors (with a power level of 100 electrical megawatts (MWe) or more) were required to purchase the maximum available amount of privately underwritten public liability insurance. The act provided that if damages from a nuclear accident exceeded the amount of private insurance coverage ($60 million), the Federal Government would indemnify the utility licensee and other persons indemnified (suppliers, designers, and anyone else who may be liable for the accident) in an amount not to exceed $500 million. The private insurance just described ($60 million in 1957), whereby utilities pay a premium each year for liability coverage of a fixed amount, is also referred to as primary insurance or primary coverage. The obligation by the Government to provide funds for a nuclear accident once the private insurance for that accident has been exhausted is referred to as Government indemnity. The total ceiling on liability, called the limit of liability, was the sum of private insurance coverage plus Government indemnity that amounted to $560 million in 1957. The act was modified in 1975 to direct the Commission to require that licensees maintaining the maximum amount of financial protection participate in a retrospective premium insurance plan. Under the plan, licensees would be required to pay up to $5 million per reactor per incident in retrospective premiums (also called deferred premiums) in the event of a nuclear incident resulting in damages exceeding the amount of primary insurance purchased from private insurance pools. The private insurance just described, based on retrospective premiums, is referred to as secondary insurance or secondary coverage. Because the limit of liability remained at $560 million, the effect of the secondary layer of insurance was to reduce the indemnity obligation of the Government. In November 1982, when the 80th large nuclear power reactor plant was licensed, the total retrospective premium became $400 million (80 reactors times $5 million). The $400 million, when added to the $160 million basic insurance layer by now available, resulted in a total of $560 million-equal to the existing limit of liability-so that the need for further Government indemnity funds for such reactors under the current provisions of the act was essentially eliminated. Congress also provided that the limitation of liability comprising the total protection of the primary and secondary layers of insurance would grow in $5 million increments as each new power reactor was licensed to operate. Thus, as of March 1984, the limit of liability is $585 million, $425 million of which is the amount of secondary insurance from 85 licensed reactors. Although the two layers of insurance provided under the act should provide sufficient liability protection for most nuclear accidents, there remains a low probability of a high-consequence accident that could result in public liability claims well in excess of the present amount of nuclear liability insurance under the act. The limitation on liability has served to prevent potentially catastrophic losses to producers of nuclear goods and services and to utilities that could result from a high-consequence accident. At the same time, the limitation on liability has shifted the risk of such losses to the victims of an accident or, through the subsequent enactment of legislation, to the Federal Government. The Commission believes that the limitation on liability under the Price-Anderson Act should be modified to minimize the potential for uncompensated losses by the victims of a commercial nuclear powerplant accident and to minimize the potential need for additional financial contributions by the Federal Government to meet public liability claims resulting from a commercial nuclear powerplant accident. The modification that the Commission has recommended is described in the response to the preceding question (recommendations 2 and 3). Question. What do you estimate could be the actual range of damages resulting from a reactor accident? Answer. In spite of the potentially large consequences of some postulated reactor accident sequences, the risk calculated is usually very low because of the very small likelihood of occurrence of these accidents. As a general rule, the larger the consequences, the smaller the probability of occurrence, so that the estimated monetized risk of a single nuclear accident off-site is usually no larger than some tens of thousands of dollars per year. Of course, these estimates are subject to substantial uncertainties because of the complexities of risk analyses and the lack of an actuarial base of experience. The consequences depend on many factors, such as the exact operational conditions under which the accident occurs, prevailing weather conditions, population distribution around the reactor site, and assumptions that are made in the analysis of the events associated with the accident and the resulting consequences. The estimates of consequences of a nuclear accident are highly dependent on site-specific and plant-specific factors and are influenced greatly by the assumptions made for purposes of the analysis. Thus, generic conclusions regarding consequence estimates from any risk analysis of specific reactors should be reached only after considering these many factors and uncertainties. There are also many uncertainties in the various factors that go into the overall assessment of public risks. The probabilities are one such uncertainty. Another is in the estimate of the amount of fission products released (ie., accident source term estimates). This latter factor is believed by many analysts to be conservative and is a concern currently under extensive reevaluation. Other uncertainties in probabilistic risk assessment relate to completeness. For example, sabotage is not included and the risk from seismic events is frequently not considered. Also, the economic models have not been subject to rigorous critique, especially the property damage models. The NRC staff and its contractors conducted a study of the source term matter in 1980-81 and published the results in NUREG-0772, "Technical Bases for Estimating Fission Product Behavior During LWR Accidents." That report was not conclusive in establishing substantial reductions in accident source term estimates, but it showed that, with additional research, such reductions were likely to be established. That research has been underway since 1981 and its results are now under peer review by the American Physical Society. A report on the subject is to be released by the NRC for public comment after the scientific peer review of the work is completed in late 1984. 1 Risk is the term applied to the result of the consequences multiplied by the probability of an accident occurring. Present work in probabilistic risk assessment is expected to better characterize the uncertainties, both in accident probabilities and in the analysis of possible releases from the containment. Of course, uncertainties will still remain. Thus, the current emphasis on risk analysis is part of the continuing long-term effort to improve safety and NRC staff understanding of the overall risk of nuclear powerplants. Probabilistic risk assessment methods are continually evolving to study very unlikely or rare events that could lead to major radioactive releases and to trace through the paths of potential impacts on the environment (persons and property). Subsequent to NRC's completion of its report on accident source terms, an estimate of the range of projected damages resulting from reactor accidents can be made. NUCLEAR WASTE POLICY ACT Question. What major new requirements are imposed on the NRC by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act? Answer. The new requirements imposed by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) are summarized in the following document: |