Only one third of the heat energy produced in a nuclear reactor is transformed into electricity.  In Japan, the remaining two thirds of the energy that remains in the water vapor– that is, twice as much energy as contained in the generated electricity – is disposed of in the sea.  In the cooling system, seawater is used to cool the water vapor, which condenses again to water and is circulated through the reactor once again.  This heated seawater is called “thermal discharge”.  How much heat does this thermal discharge carry into the sea?  The amount is startling.

Before the Fukushima accident, that is, at the end of 2010, Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors were producing a total of 49,112,000 kilowatts of electricity.  So every day they were throwing away twice that much, approximately 100,000,000 kilowatts of energy, in the form of heat, into the sea.

This means that every day they were pumping into the sea energy equivalent to 100 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. The Hiroshima bomb destroyed the city in an instant and ended the lives of some 140,000 people, but when energy 100 times that great is “dropped” into the sea daily, what effect does that have?  That it would not be destructive of the ocean’s ecology is unimaginable.  Before saying that “nuclear power plants supply one third of the demand for electricity”, it needs to be said that “twice as much energy as the electricity they produce is used to heat up the sea.”

I want to ask, what kind of global warming debate is it that never discusses this fact?

In Japan, the number one global warming agent is the nuclear power plants.

After I left the company I was working for, I spent a long time translating medical books.  In the 1970s I was translating books depicting the suffering of people whose health was damaged by environmental pollution, and at the same time through an agent was accepting work from industry.  At that time I received a request from

TEPCO to translate a 1970s report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  In it was the following passage.

“When thermal discharge from nuclear power plants is released into the sea, the heat does not immediately disperse.  Rather it concentrates and remains suspended in what are called “hot spots”.  For this reason it has a very large effect on sea life near the shore.  In the shallows, even a difference of two or three degrees can kill fish eggs or young fish.”

I translated this English correctly and delivered the manuscript to TEPCO.  The report of which it was a part was apparently suppressed within the company.  To this day it has never appeared.

Moreover, the claim that nuclear power is a cheap form of energy is also untrue.  Nuclear power plants are located far from the users of the electricity, so they require extraordinarily long transmission systems (In 1964 the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) stipulated that “Dangerous nuclear power plants must not be located in heavily populated areas”).  The nuclear power plants that deliver electricity  to the capital are the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini reactors, Niigata Prefecture’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactor, and Ibaragi Prefecture’s Tokai Daini reactor.   The 14 nuclear power plants sending electricity to the Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe) area are lined up along the faraway shore of the Japan Sea at Wakasa Bay, in Fukui Prefecture.　When you take into account the transmission systems connecting the power plants with the metropolitan areas they serve, you cannot call it an inexpensive source of electricity.

Without Nuclear Power, Will There Be Blackouts?

After the Fukushima Daiichi accident, TEPCO carried out planned blackouts, and the Kan Naoto administration, “in order to avoid a major blackout due to electricity shortages in the summer months” is considering enacting measures enforcing limits on electricity consumption for the first time since the oil shock of 1974. This deep-seated “blackout fear” held by so many seems to be grounded in the idea that we must continue gingerly to maintain the nuclear power industry, which advertises itself as providing one-third of the country’s electricity. What I see in the opinion polls is the attitude, I don’t like living with nuclear power plants, but without them there is no way to get the electricity, so there’s nothing to be done because like they say, you can’t exchange your back for your belly.

This is a huge misunderstanding that must be corrected.

A survey by year of the generating capacity of Japan’s main sources of electrical power compared with the total amount of electricity demand tells a different story.  In no year has the peak demand for electricity – that is, the demand for electricity in the hours between 2 and 3pm on the hottest days of summer – exceeded what could be provided by the combination of fossil fuel and water powered generators.   Moreover, the highest recorded peak demand was in 2001, and has never been surpassed in the ten years since then.  Rather, with the economic downturn, demand for electricity fell in 2008 and 2009.

From whence, then, comes the misunderstanding that nuclear power plants supply one third of the country’s electricity, and that without them there would be blackouts?.  The answer sounds like a joke, but it is true: it is that while Japan has a very large capability for generating electricity from natural gas, these facilities have been intentionally kept operating at only 50-60 per cent of capacity.  Among the major sources of electricity used in the advanced countries, natural gas is the cleanest.  Then there are the petroleum powered plants; amazingly they are operating at only 10 to 20 per cent of their capacity.  (This figure may sound unbelievable, but since the 1970s Oil Shock, most of the developed countries have a policy of reducing oil consumption as far as possible.  Japan’s fossil fuel power plants use mainly coal and natural gas.) The idea that without nuclear power there would be blackouts is nonsense.

The reason TEPCO carried out intentional blackouts after the earthquake is that the fossil fuel reactors in the region also suffered temporary damage. No doubt there was also difficulty delivering fuel.  But repairing fossil fuel power plants is nowhere near as difficult at repairing nuclear power plants.  It’s just a matter of replacing damaged parts.  Once repair work begins, it doesn’t take long before the plant is operating again.  And once the fossil fuel plants are back on line, electricity demand is no problem.

After its nuclear plants were so badly damaged, TEPCO should have put its natural gas and petroleum plants into full operation, but it did not.  Rather it carried out intentional blackouts, bringing confusion to the metropolitan area and bringing losses both to industry and to private citizens.  In this it did not fulfill its responsibility as an electricity provider, and revealed a fundamental problem.  And now we hear  everywhere language fanning the fear of summertime blackouts, but this is only a false  rumor being spread by people who know nothing of electrical power generation. (Translators note: in fact in the summer since this was written, there were no electrical blackouts in Japan.)

A natural gas power plant can be built in a few months.  This was made clear in an article appearing the April 6, 2011 edition of Gasu Energii Shinbun (Gas Energy News) by Ishii Akira, head of the Energy and Environment Research Center, titled “After Fukushima, the Age of Natural Gas”.  In this article, Ishii explains Japan’s energy situation from the standpoint of a professional.  The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident took place on March 11.  Why didn’t TEPCO begin immediately to take action to ensure that there would be no electrical shortage?  If they couldn’t get it done in time, why did they not immediately ask the world’s largest manufacturer of natural gas power plants, America’s General Electric (GE) to do it for them?  An electric company that can’t supply electricity to the public has no right to be called an electric company.

Nuclear power supporters will argue that the supply of natural gas is limited.  But this too is the outdated opinion of one who does not know the energy industry.  As Ishii Akira pointed out in an article of Feb 2, 2011 in Gas Energy News, new sources of natural gas are being discovered one after another all over the world.  In the Mediterranean Sea, offshore from Madagascar, under the sea to the east of India, on the continental shelf in northwestern Australia, in Brazil, in Turkmenistan – in the ten years up to 2009 the world’s known supply of underground deposits has increased by close to 30 per cent.  In addition to this natural gas supply, new, so-called non-traditional gases such as coal bed methane, tight sand gas, shale gas, and methane hydrate are being developed one after another.  According to Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (which is dedicated to locating natural resources for Japan) the underground reserves of these new forms of natural gas total more than 922 trillion cubic meters, more than five times the reserves of traditional natural gas. No doubt there will be future discoveries one after another, so I would say that we have enough gas reserves alone to last well over 200 years.

Translated by Douglas Lummis, ideaspeddler@gmail.com

Takashi Hirose can be contacted at takhi@jcom.home.ne.jp

This is excerpted from the concluding chapter of Takashi Hirose
Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster now available in English from Amazon Kindle Books.

While all international surfers signed up for the petition, over 1000 members of the audience signed the petition and added their names to the line of yellow flags, one flag per protestor …
Supertubes Foundation also had an excellent stall at the entrance to the Refereshment area, adjacent to the main Billabong stand, all praise to Alison Kuhl of the Supertubes Surfing Foundation.

Pictures courtesy of Keith Lurie

New research by Ipsos MORI shows that three in five global citizens (62%) oppose the use of nuclear energy – a quarter (26%) of those have been influenced by the recent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

The latest Ipsos Global @dvisor survey shows that support for nuclear energy is far below that for solar power (97%), wind power (93%), hydroelectric power (91%) and natural gas (80%) as a source of electricity.

Just one in four (38%) adults across 24 countries support the use of nuclear energy. Support is highest in India (61%), Poland (57%) and the United States (52%).

Britons are split on the issue with half supporting (48%) and half opposing (51%) the use of nuclear energy. One in five (20%) Britons that are against the use of nuclear energy say they their opinion has been influenced by the events in Fukushima.

Managing Director of the Ipsos MORI Reputation Centre, Milorad Ajder, said:

“Nuclear energy is a controversial issue at the best of times and the disaster in Fukushima has clearly had a negative impact on the way people see its use. With mounting global opposition, some countries are already decided to scale back its use, with some abandoning it all together.”
Download the full presentation slides
Technical Note

This survey was conducted in 24 countries including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States of America. An international sample of 18,787 adults aged 18-64 in the US and Canada, and age 16-64 in all other countries, were interviewed between May 6 and May 21, 2011 via the Ipsos Online Panel system.

Approximately 1000+ individuals participated on a country by country basis with the exception of Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Russia and Turkey, where each have a sample 500+. Weighting was then employed to balance demographics and ensure that the sample’s composition reflected that of the adult population according to the most recent country Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe.

A survey with an unweighted probability sample of this size and a 100% response rate would have an estimated margin of error of +/-3.1 percentage points for a sample of 1,000 and an estimated margin of error of +/- 4.5 percentage points for a sample of 500 19 times out of 20 per country of what the results would have been had the entire population of the specifically aged adults in that country been polled.

Much of the grounds at Fort Calhoun nuclear plant in Nebraska are under two feet of water from the rising Missouri River. But the plant’s critical systems sit six feet above the flood’s expected crest.

Pete Spotts, Staff writer, Christian Science Monitor, June 27, 2011

Flooding along the Missouri River has overspread much of one nuclear power plant’s boundaries, forcing it onto emergency generators, and threatens a second plant downstream.

In both cases, regulators and operators say the plants appear to be in no danger of the kind of sequence of events – exacerbated by plant-design flaws – that led to the tsunami-spawned nuclear disaster in March atJapan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The two plants, nestled along the Missouri River inNebraska, “will be annoyed but not destroyed,” adds David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and nuclear-safety specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.

At the plant facing the biggest challenge, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station, about 30 miles north ofOmaha, the Missouri River is predicted to crest Wednesday at 33 feet above flood stage – some six feet below the level critical buildings at the plant were designed to handle. That flood crest would put the flood level roughly half an inch higher than it is currently.

Much of the plant’s grounds are under at least two feet of water. Through early Saturday morning, the reactor-containment building and its adjacent auxiliary buildings were high and dry, protected by a 2,000-foot-long water-filled berm. But workers operating heavy machinery ruptured the eight-foot-high berm, allowing water to lap at these structures as well. Some water has leaked into the turbine building, which houses no nuclear material.

Read full article

Among the issues:

• The plant had stockpiled plenty of sandbags but not the sand to fill them.

• The Omaha Public Power District, which runs the plant, installed floodgates designed to keep floodwaters from overpowering the doors behind the gates. But the floodgates must be shored up on the outside – and topped – with sand bags. The support structures across the top of the gates weren’t strong enough to withstand the weight of sandbags that would be place on top of them.

Read full article

VIENNA — The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday urged a worldwide review of safety measures to prevent new nuclear disasters, but acknowledged that since his organization lacks the authority to enforce  rules any improvements are only effective if countries apply them.

While some countries at the 151-member IAEA’s meeting want any new safety regime to be mandatory, most prefer them to be voluntary and don’t want a regulatory role for IAEA. If the IAEA cannot enforce safety standards, those rules will be only as good as they are being enforced by IAEA nations.

“Even the best safety standards are useless unless they are actually implemented,” Amano said.

Asked outside the meeting if he would like to see the IAEA have the same authority against safety violators as it now has against nuclear proliferators – which includes referral to the U.N. Security Council – he said: “I do not exclude that possibility.”

But he said a sense of post-Fukushima urgency dictated action now under existing rules.

“We have to move by days, weeks, months, and I cannot wait years” – the time it would take to revise the IAEA’s mandate for the 35-nation board – he said. “We need to have a sense of urgency.”

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(Reuters) — Global action to protect the nuclear industry against possible terrorist attacks is urgently needed, a leading expert said, as are safety steps to prevent any repeat of Japan’s Fukushima
accident.

“Both al Qaeda and Chechen terrorist groups have repeatedly considered sabotaging nuclear reactors — and Fukushima provided a compelling example of the scale of terror such an attack might cause,” Matthew Bunn of Harvard University said.

Some countries had “extraordinarily weak security measures in place,” he said in an Internet blog posted this week, without naming them.

“The nuclear industry in many countries is much less prepared to cope with security incidents than with accidents,” wrote Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard Kennedy School who specializes in nuclear issues.

Steps to protect against both sabotage of nuclear facilities and theft of nuclear weapons or the materials to make them were “particularly urgent.”

Read full article

Thank you for supporting our previous efforts to build a nuclear-free future for our kids. More than ever, the Coalition Against Nuclear Energy needs your help to make that future a reality.

The disaster in Japan continues to unfold – with authorities now admitting three meltdowns and some reports putting Japan’s nuclear disaster on a par with Chernobyl.

The terrifying reality is the same thing could happen in South Africa. Government has nailed its colours to the mast by promising SIX REACTORS as part of its “nuclear fleet”. In addition, Rob Adam of NECSA has promised us “localization” with uranium enrichment, fuel assembly and spent fuel reprocessing. All this despite the opposition from the Civil Society Energy Caucus, faith- labour- and community-based Organisations.

We must urgently work to prevent that. To that end, leading campaigners & activists from NGOs and civil society organisations associated with C.A.N.E., academics and professionals plan to hold a “summit” on 27 and 28 July to tackle the problem. And our budget is virtually non-existent.  It is called a “summit”, because – this is designed expressly for leadership to discuss ways and means of defending our country against the threat of a “nuclear fleet”, which (according to IPAP2 by the Department of Trade & Industries) will cost us R1.3 trillion.

We aim to discuss strategy and tactics over the next two years, as well as budgets for fund-raising purposes.  We will also seek fresh elections for the National Executive to take us forward with a renewed mandate from the Summit.

We seek to ensure that the lessons learned from the nuclear meltdown in Japan are incorporated into S.A. regulations, and ensure our government will impose a moratorium on new licenses for dirty, dangerous and expensive nuclear power plants, and no more secrecy over our nuclear legacy.

Please act now and urge your local politicians and media to support this stand so we can build a safer future for generations of South Africans.

Thanks for taking action. And please also consider making a donation to C.A.N.E. today. It is the only group in South Africa that focuses solely on preventing a nuclear future! Your support will help us build a grassroots movement to close dangerous nuclear plants and create a safe energy future for our children. Your donation will also make it possible for a team to dedicate their time and effort to increase pressure on government and the media, and keep you informed and our website going.

Thank you for working with us for a nuclear-free world.

TOKYO—Over the last several days, evidence has emerged indicating that the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was far more dire than previously recognized. The main evidence is extensive—rather than partial—melting of the nuclear fuel in three reactors in the hours after the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. Despite that bad news, however, today plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Co. pledged it would still meet the target set 17 April to stabilize the situation by January 2012 so 100,000 residents evacuated from around the plant can return to their homes and the decade-long process of demolishing the reactors can get started.

At first, analysts from Tokyo Electric and the government believed there was only limited damage to the fuel cores. But over the last week, a combination of robotic and human inspections has led to the conclusion that the fuel assemblies in units 1, 2, and 3 were completely exposed to the air for from over 6 hours to over 14 hours and that melting was extensive if not complete. Much of the fuel is now likely at the bottom of the reactor pressure vessels.

Despite extensive melting of the fuel, “we do not believe there is massive damage to the reactor pressure vessel,” Sakae Muto, Tokyo Electric’s chief nuclear officer told reporters this evening. Last week workers found that an estimated 3000 tons of water has leaked from the unit 1 containment vessel into a basement. In its 17 April roadmap, Tokyo Electric envisioned flooding the containment vessel and building a new cooling system to lower the temperature of the core. But the containment vessel now appears to be too leaky for that scheme to work. Instead they will collect water from the basement, purify it, and inject it back into the reactor pressure vessel, from where it will leak back into the basement. It is simpler than a new cooling system, but it will also require additional measures to watch for and counter leaks of contaminated water into the environment, Muto said. They may still build new cooling systems to supplement or replace the water injection scheme.

The 17 April roadmap for containing radiation also called for wrapping the wrecked buildings in tentlike structures of polyester sheets supported on a steel framework. That part of the work is proceeding as planned.

At the same press briefing, Goshi Hosono, a member of the Japanese parliament and a special advisor to the Prime Minister Naoto Kan on the crisis, said the government had decided to establish a mechanism to track the radiation doses and manage the long-term health care of the hundreds of workers battling to bring the crippled reactors under control. “This is not only in the interests of Tokyo Electric and the government but of all the people of Japan,” he said.

Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/05/utility-fukushima-cores-more.html?etoc&elq=c26607bbddba4088b40dc249cc7d3ab7

A nuclear forum is being held in South Africa on the 19th of May 2011 at Emperor’s Palace, Johannesburg, aimed at once again promoting nuclear energy in South Africa. As always these “forums” are not for free and are designed that way in order to keep out NGO’s and community driven organisations who simply do not have the funds to attend them. To give you an idea the cost of attending is R2850.00 per person which most NGO’s will not be able to afford, simple as that.

What happens with all these events is that 99% of the attendees are already pro nuclear so one wonders what’s the fricking point??

If the nuclear industry really wants to enter into debate with the South African public WHICH THEY DO NOT, they would make attendance for NGO’s and community driven organisations FREE but they DO NOT want to debate anything. They have an agenda and they will stick with it no matter what. In 5 years we have never been able to get anyone inside the highly secretive South African Nuclear Industry to debate anything, they cannot even answer the simplest of questions posed to them.

What is most annoying is an email promoting this event which was circulated by the company managing the event, namely Siyenza Managament (Pty) Ltd. In this email the author one Mabel Modipa spits out the biggest bunch of bogus unscientific garbage we’ve seen yet.

The email reads as follows:

Africa Needs Nuclear Power

In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident, resulting from the recent massive Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and following the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in the former Soviet Union, there has been much public debate internationally concerning nuclear power.

Much of the information projected to the public is misguided and inaccurate which leads to a public fear which in turn affects the formulation of government policy internationally. This in turn affects the costs of construction of nuclear power stations because, at times, unrealistic requirements are put in place, which then tend to drive costs up.  The mystique surrounding the subject of nuclear power tends to confuse matters further, in the public mind.  A confused public cannot make informed energy decisions relating to nuclear power.

In Fukushima province the first person to die as a result of the Fukushima nuclear incident has just been reported.  He was a 64 year old farmer from Sukagama, 65km from the reactor.  He hanged himself because the authorities would not let him sell his produce.  To receive any meaningful radiation dose from his spinage a person would have to eat many tons of it, which would be impossible.  It is sad that misguided policy caused his death.

Issues of nuclear construction costs and public perceptions of nuclear power will be discussed at the forthcoming nuclear power conference; Nuclear Forum 3, on 19 May 2011 at Emperor’s Palace, Johannesburg.

The conference will be opened by the Minister of Energy, The Hon Dipuo Peters.

A lot of debate around the use of nuclear as an alternate energy source has been debated this week at the Africa World Economic Forum in Cape Town.  South Africa will be taking the lead in Africa, with the proposed implementation of nuclear as a reliable source of power for the country.  This will no doubt raise the nuclear debate in the rest of the African continent.

ENDS
5 May 2011
Issued by: Siyenza Management
+27 11 463 9184

Mike Kantey, the chairperson of the National Coalition Against Nuclear Energy duly responded to Miss Modipa with the following response.

Dear Mabel

As the National Chairperson of the Coalition Against Nuclear Energy (see www.cane.org.za) and on behalf of the African Uranium Alliance, I take the strongest objection to the unscientific and emotional language employed in your press release appended below.

If this is the quality of business “intelligence” that is sold at high expense to political, investment, and business leaders in Africa, may Heaven help us over the next century.

Not only does the recently Integrated Resource Plan (IRP2010) for South Africa make it abundantly clear at Table 18 on page 43 that a non-nuclear future is perfectly and affordably obtainable, but the respected International Atomic Energy Agency (the IAEA) declared the Fukushima Dai-ichi accident at its highest level of INES-7, equivalent to the worst accident ever at Chernobyl.

To trivialise and minimise this horrendous accident as your misguided “press release” appears to do makes a mockery of those Japanese citizens within a 20-km radius who have been forced to evacuate their lands and their homes, probably forever, and the risk to all those who are forced to consume foodstuffs and liquids with traces of Strontium-90 and Cesium-137. Unlike your ill-informed and disgraceful mockery of an old man’s death by suicide (an understandable response in Japanese society), as well as your simple ignorance of the basic rules of English spelling (“spinach” not “spinage”, which is what you appear to be practising), the smallest, micro-quantity of Cesium-137 or Strontium-90 will be sufficient to trigger a cancer or genetic defect, once it has been inhaled or swallowed.

I trust that your conference will not be another exercise in pulling radioactive wool over your monied classes, but an honest assessment of what really is in the best interests of the African masses.

Sincerely

Mike Kantey
National Chairperson
Coalition Against Nuclear Energy
www.cane.org.za

Source: http://www.environment.co.za

In the fall of 2007, workers at the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois were using a wire brush to clean a badly corroded steel pipe — one in a series that circulate cooling water to essential emergency equipment — when something unexpected happened: the brush poked through.

The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs.

The plant’s owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick — less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness — would be good enough.

Though no radioactive material was released, safety experts say that if enough pipes had ruptured during a reactor accident, the result could easily have been a nuclear catastrophe at a plant just 100 miles west of Chicago.

Exelon’s risky decisions occurred under the noses of on-site inspectors from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. No documented inspection of the pipes was made by anyone from the N.R.C. for at least the eight years preceding the leak, and the agency also failed to notice that Exelon kept lowering the acceptable standard, according to a subsequent investigation by the commission’s inspector general.

Exelon’s penalty? A reprimand for two low-level violations — a tepid response all too common at the N.R.C., said George A. Mulley Jr., a former investigator with the inspector general’s office who led the Byron inquiry. “They always say, ‘Oh, but nothing happened,’ ” Mr. Mulley said. “Well, sooner or later, our luck — you know, we’re going to end up rolling craps.”

Critics have long painted the commission as well-intentioned but weak and compliant, and incapable of keeping close tabs on an industry to which it remains closely tied. The concerns have greater urgency because of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, which many experts say they believe was caused as much by lax government oversight as by a natural disaster.

The Byron pipe leak is just one recent example of the agency’s shortcomings, critics say. It has also taken nearly 30 years for the commission to get effective fireproofing installed in plants after an accident in Alabama. The N.R.C.’s decision to back down in a standoff with the operator of an Ohio plant a decade ago meant that a potentially dangerous hole went undetected for months. And the number of civil penalties paid by licensees has plummeted nearly 80 percent since the late 1990s — a reflection, critics say, of the commission’s inclination to avoid ruffling the feathers of the nuclear industry and its Washington lobbyists.

Although the agency says plants are operating more safely today than they were at the dawn of the nuclear industry, when shutdowns were common, safety experts, Congressional critics and even the agency’s own internal monitors say the N.R.C. is prone to dither when companies complain that its proposed actions would cost time or money. The promise of lucrative industry work after officials leave the commission probably doesn’t help, critics say, pointing to dozens over the years who have taken jobs with nuclear power companies and lobbying firms.

Now, as most of the country’s 104 aging reactors are applying for, and receiving, 20-year extensions from the N.R.C on their original 40-year licenses, reform advocates say a thorough review of the system is urgently needed.

The agency’s shortcomings are especially vexing because Congress created it in the mid-1970s to separate the government’s roles as safety regulator and promoter of nuclear energy — an inherent conflict that dogged its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission.

“It wasn’t much of a change,” said Peter A. Bradford, a former N.R.C. commissioner who now teaches at Vermont Law School. “The N.R.C. inherited the regulatory staff and adopted the rules and regulations of the A.E.C. intact.”

Mr. Bradford said the nuclear industry had implicitly or explicitly supported every nomination to the commission until Gregory B. Jaczko’s in 2005. Mr. Jaczko, who was elevated to chairman by President Obama in 2009, had previously worked for both Representative Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat and longtime critic of the nuclear industry, and Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and current Senate majority leader who sought to block a nuclear waste repository in his state.

Mr. Jaczko acknowledges that the agency needs to move faster on some safety issues. But he defends its record. “I certainly feel very strongly that this is an independent regulator that will make what it thinks are the right decisions when it comes to safety,” he said. “There will be people who will agree, and some people who will disagree. That’s part of the process.”

For all the agency’s shortcomings as a regulator, even the most vocal critics acknowledge that it should not be compared to the Minerals Management Service, the scandal-plagued agency that oversaw the oil and gas industry and was reorganized by Mr. Obama after the BP oil spill last year.

Still, David Lochbaum, a frequent critic of the N.R.C. who recently worked as a reactor technology instructor there, said the agency too often rolled the dice on safety. “The only difference between Byron and Fukushima is luck,” he said.

Full article at this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/business/energy-environment/08nrc.html?_r=1&emc=eta1