By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: August 13, 2012
ROCKVILLE, Md. — The new chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has good news and bad news for the nuclear power industry.
 |
| Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times Allison M. Macfarlane, the new chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is the first geologist to serve on the panel. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/08 /14/us/NUKE/NUKE-articleInline.jpg |
The good news is that although an impasse over the storage of nuclear
waste now threatens some of the industry’s routine activities, the
chairwoman says she believes that a permanent repository can be set up
eventually.
The bad news is that she considers the industry’s evaluation of
earthquake vulnerability — an issue that was once believed to be settled
when a nuclear power plant was licensed — to be inadequate.
Allison M. Macfarlane,
the first geologist to serve on the commission, which regulates power
plants and the civilian use of radioactive materials, arrives at a time
when geology has moved to the center of the industry’s concerns. Since
the triple meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant
last year, which was caused by an earthquake that the Japanese industry
had not believed was possible, a question has reverberated: Are the 104
reactors in the United States prepared for the worst challenge they
could face?
Nuclear waste is also a crucial issue for the commission these days. In
June, a federal appeals court ruled that the agency has acted too
hastily in issuing licenses to power plants on the theory that waste
could be safely stored at the plants until a final resting place is
established.
The Obama administration canceled plans to store the waste at Yucca Mountain,
a site in the Nevada desert, in 2010. With no repository now in sight,
the commission has not shown that the reactors were prepared for this
“interim” period, the court said.
So last week, the commission voted 5 to 0 to suspend licensing for plants until it can prove that the lack of a storage plan does not threaten public health and safety.
In what will probably be a setback to the industry, Dr. Macfarlane says
the commission has no deadline in mind for drafting a policy that will
satisfy the court and allow it to resume licensing activity.
“This is a really fresh issue,” Dr. Macfarlane said in an interview. “We will evaluate what the court sent to us.”
She was far more optimistic, however, about the country’s ability to
reach a consensus on a site for burying nuclear waste.
“It’s worth remembering that the United States is the only country in
the world with an operating deep geologic repository for nuclear waste,”
she said, referring to a site near Carlsbad, N.M., that began receiving plutonium-laced waste from the nation’s nuclear weapons program in 1999. The waste is buried 2,150 feet under the desert floor in the middle of a thick layer of salt.
“We should keep that in mind when thinking about whether the U.S. can accomplish that,” she said.
Dr. Macfarlane, who was sworn in last month, declined to comment on
several safety questions before her agency, including how it would rule
on handling nuclear waste until a repository is found.
But as a member of a blue-ribbon commission
appointed to explore alternatives to Yucca Mountain, she argued for
changes in the process used to choose a site. (Congress chose Yucca
Mountain over the objections of Nevada, which later gained enough
political and legal muscle to fight it off.)
While Dr. Macfarlane was upbeat about the long-term prospects for
nuclear waste, she took a somewhat harsher tone on the industry’s
evaluation of earthquake risk. The old approach, which involved building
a plan to withstand the strongest earthquake a site has ever had, will
not do, she said.
Sometimes engineers do not understand geology and approach it as a static body of knowledge, she said.
“As a geologist, I also know that geological knowledge is constantly
changing,” she said. For example, she said, geologists did not think
there could be a mega-earthquake off the east coast of Japan until the Indian Ocean earthquake off Indonesia in December 2004, which also produced a devastating tsunami.
That earthquake happened at a “subduction zone,” a spot where one
tectonic plate slides under another. After that quake, she said,
geologists realized that any such zone that was long enough could create
a major earthquake.
“This is a dynamic set of knowledge, which requires regular feedback and interaction,” Dr. Macfarlane said.
The American industry recently began a re-evaluation of its earthquake
vulnerability after the United States Geological Survey released a new
estimate of the prospects for earthquakes in the eastern United States.
And there may be more revisions in the future, she said.
Dr. Macfarlane succeeded Gregory B. Jaczko, a physicist who was deeply unpopular with the other commissioners and much of the staff.
Joining a commission long dominated by engineers, academics, lawyers and
the occasional admiral, Dr. Macfarlane acknowledged that she was “from
the outside.” But she said the staff and the other commissioners had
been welcoming.
On another front, Dr. Macfarlane said she had instructed her staff to “use more transparent language.”
“People who live near a nuclear facility should be able to read the
documents that the N.R.C. produces,” she said. “That will certainly give
them more confidence of our ability to regulate safety.”
No comments:
Post a Comment