Thoughts from the NRC Leadership:

More from the 

NRC Regulatory Information Conference

In my last blog, I focused on one session held at the NRC Regulatory Information Conference (RIC)--the session on the 25th anniversary of the Principles of Good Regulation.  I focused on that because, of course, the subject was near and dear to my heart.  However, I did not want to leave the subject of the RIC without reporting on a little more of that conference. 

I think some of the remarks made by the leadership of NRC--the Chairman, the other Commissioners, and the EDO--also deserve mention.  For brevity, I will just summarize portions of their presentations.  Their complete remarks, as well as videos of their presentations, are available on the NRC website. 

The RIC opened with a speech by Chairman Stephen Burns.  One focus of his presentation was a discussion of risk.  He noted the changing public attitudes toward risk that have led, over the years, to requirements for things like seat belts in private automobiles and bicycle helmets for recreational bike riders, and to concerns over processed foods.  While acknowledging the increasing sensitivity to risk, he also cautioned against treating all risks alike, quoting Justice Breyer as saying that treating all risks as equal is like the boy who cried wolf.  He pointed out that the general public rates nuclear as the #1 risk, while experts put it at #20 out of a list of 30 risks, well below car accidents, guns, smoking, and food additives.  

The next speaker was the NRC Executive Director for Operations Victor McCree.  Interestingly (to me, at least), both the Chairman and the EDO are long-time NRC employees, both having joined NRC in the 1980s, which is also the time I joined the NRC.  Vic talked about two issues that I've worked on over the course of my career, the Principles of Good Regulation and Knowledge Management (KM).  I actually got involved in KM after I left NRC, but while working in this area, first at the Department of Energy and later, at the OECD/Nuclear Energy Agency, I communicated frequently with NRC staff, who had developed some very advanced KM tools.  Vic noted all the significant challenges the nuclear industry and the NRC are facing--post-Fukushima changes, decommissioning, license renewal from 60 to 80 years, licensing advanced and small modular reactors, and economic challenges the industry is facing.  He notes that all these things challenge KM.  I would observe that they also make it all the more important.

The next session featured two Commissioners, Kristine Svinicki and Bill Ostendorff, and the newest Commissioner, Jeff Baran, spoke the next morning.  This was Commissioner Ostendorff's last speech as an NRC Commissioner before his term expires at the end of June, so several of the Commissioners used the opportunity to particularly thank him for his contributions to the NRC during his time there.  While this was, perhaps, not unexpected, what was most interesting was some of the detail of what the Commissioners said.  In particular, several of them explicitly acknowledged the differences of opinion among the Commissioners.  They did not present that as a negative.  Rather, they indicated that they had learned from each other.  Most interestingly, Commissioner Svinicki even noted she had a couple of differences with with Commissioner Ostendorff (even though both of them are Republicans).  Commissioner Baran noted that, while he and Commissioner Ostendorff have disagreed on some things, they have agreed a lot, too.  And that they have "good, respectful discussions...often finding ground on a constructive way forward." 

Beyond that, each of them reflected on issues and themes of particular interest to them.  Commissioner Svinicki addressed some issues of organizational culture, noting that organizational culture can change more slowly than people or processes, but that some consistency is a good thing.  In fact, she prefers the word "adaptation" to change.  Picking up the theme of differences of opinion with other Commissioners, she also commented on the role of dissent versus majority opinion. 

Commissioner Ostendorff spoke a lot about accountability, and how necessary it is for trust.  He gave NRC, both the Commissioners and the staff, high marks for a sense of accountability, and he gave industry high marks as well.  He also summarized the principles guiding the post-Fukushima activities:  clear priorities based on safety importance, integrated decision making (incorporating cost-benefit considerations for changes exceeding the base requirement of adequate protection, and mitigation for beyond design basis issues), and regulating in the open.  He noted the number of public meetings (about 300) and votes (about 25) on Fukushima issues alone. 

Commissioner Baran also addressed some of the post-Fukushima efforts, discussing his votes on several issues such as severe accident management guidelines and filtered vents, and his rationale for his views.  He also discussed the additional reviews needed for the Tier 2 and Tier 3 post-Fukushima measures that are still under review in the NRC.  He also noted there are sometimes qualitative factors that have to be considered, noting that some post-Fukushima actions were based more on qualitative factors than on cost-benefit analysis, and citing the importance of things like enforceability and public confidence.  Finally, he noted the need for the NRC to give more attention to the plants shutting down to minimize the need to grant exemptions.

Several of these speakers also addressed internal NRC activities such as Project AIM, a current initiative for the NRC to right-size itself in light of current and expected needs.  

Many of these remarks by the leadership reflected issues that are important for the NRC at the present time, and that were reflected in one way or another in many of the technical sessions that took place during the rest of the RIC. 

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Principles of Good Regulation--25th Anniversary:

NRC Celebrates 25 Years of the 

Principles of Good Regulation

On January 19, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission launched what they characterize as a year of celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Principles of Good Regulation.  The first event was an employee seminar on the history and evolution of the Principles.  I was very pleased and proud to have been asked to be a part of that event.

I had wanted to report on this seminar earlier, but Mother Nature (the Snowzilla that hit the Washington, DC area a few days later) caused me to move up my vacation plans.  I escaped the blizzard in time, but the things I'd planned to do the remainder of that week got put off until now.

I have previously discussed the thinking behind the NRC Principles of Good Regulation and will not repeat that here.  I will focus instead primarily on what was discussed at this event.

NRC dates the effective beginning of the Principles of Good Regulation to the publication of the Principles in the Agency's Five Year Plan for 1991-1995 and the dissemination of the Principles to all NRC staff in a memorandum from the Chairman of NRC at the time, Kenneth M. Carr, on January 17, 1991.  The Principles have become very important to the Agency in the last 25 years, and therefore, the NRC has apparently decided to do a number of things this year to recognize the role of the Principles and to set the scene for their future.

The first of these events was the January 19 staff seminar.  It was held in the Rockville, MD headquarters of the NRC, but was broadcast to all the NRC regional offices.  (I will also note that it was held on the 41th anniversary of the day NRC started--January 19, 1975.)   There are plans for several other events and initiatives to be held this year focusing on the Principles.  For example, at the upcoming NRC Regulatory Information Conference (RIC), there will be a panel discussion on the Principles.

The seminar brought together a number of people who had been at the NRC when the Principles were developed, as well as some who have been involved with the Principles in more recent years.  The current NRC Chairman, Steven Burns, the current head of the NRC Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, Michael Weber, and the current Executive Director for Operations, Victor McCree, were all on the NRC staff at the time the Principles were promulgated.  Mike Weber and Vic McCree each made opening remarks.  Mike had been a technical assistant in Chairman Carr's office in 1991, so was heavily involved in the "birth" of the Principles.  Vic McCree noted how the Principles later led to a staff-initiated statement of values a few years later.  Commissioner Ostendorff, who has been one of the more recent champions of the Principles, made opening remarks as well, focusing on how he has tried to promote this concept to regulators in other countries.

The main speakers were former Commissioner Kenneth C. Rogers, myself, and the current NRC historian, Thomas Wellock.  The three of us tried to detail how the concept for the Principles developed and evolved. 

The idea for the Principles came from Kenneth C. Rogers, who was a Commissioner at the time.  While many people contributed to the Principles, Commissioner Rogers had assigned me the task of gathering and synthesizing inputs to the document.  The two of us reconstructed for the NRC audience some of the details of that effort:  his discussions with the other Commissioners, my interactions with their assistants and with senior NRC management, initial skepticism in some quarters and our efforts to incorporate suggestions that helped bring everyone aboard, the attempt to draw from previous statements and documents, the process for identifying and narrowing the list of potential principles to a reasonable set, and the decisions on what order to put the principles in and what language to use to explain and clarify them.

Tom Wellock then tried to give some historical perspective to the Principles.  (He abbreviated them PGR, which is probably a good idea.  And while I'm mentioning good ideas, I noticed that, although I always painstakingly try to put them in the order we initially used--independence, openness, efficiency, clarity, and reliability--I have seen the acronym ICORE used, which probably makes them a whole lot easier to remember!)  He confirmed what we always thought--that as far as he has been able to find, NRC's Principles were the first of their kind.  However, he noted that he has found a number of other statements of regulatory principles that were created after NRC's, including in the UK, Ireland, the EU, and IAEA.  He also put the initiative in a broader historical perspective--pointing to the 1960s, when more regulation was often viewed as a good thing (he cited Nader's initiatives), to the deregulatory efforts of the 1980s.   Most interestingly, he pointed to antecedents for some of the principles we used--words like independent, open and reliable began popping up in NRC documents in the 1980s. 

Of course, the true measure of the value of something like the Principles is in their impact, and that is much harder to assess.  The explanation of several of the Principles suggests the difficulty.  Each of these Principles is important, but there is always a balance to be struck.  Independence should not mean isolation.  Efficiency should not force NRC staff to act so quickly that they miss something.  Therefore, the goal is to minimize delay as much as is reasonably possible.  Reliability should not mean that regulations must be cast in stone.  Rather, the goal should be to make sure that changes in regulations are justifiable.

I have certainly seen times when NRC has been criticized for falling short on its adherence to the Principles of Good Regulation.  Some of this criticism may have been colored by the viewpoints and positions of the critics.  But even someone without an ax to grind might find fault at times in some of NRC actions.  After all, the Principles are a very ambitious set of rules to follow, and require a continual balance between opposing objectives.  What I think is encouraging is that, after performing this balancing act for 25 years, the NRC has made a conscious decision that this is still a valid standard of behavior to set for themselves, and has committed to continuing to try to hold themselves to that standard. 

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