Word: nrc
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Discretionary enforcement was out of hand," says NRC acting Inspector General Leo Norton, who investigates agency wrongdoing but has no power to punish. "We shouldn't have regulations on the books and then ignore or wink at them...
...comes back to money. "When a safety issue is too expensive for the industry, the NRC pencils it away," says Stephen Comley, executive director of a whistle-blower support group called We the People, which has brought many agency failures to light. "If the NRC enforced all its rules, some of the plants we've studied couldn't compete economically...
...rare point of agreement with activists, the nuclear industry also says regulations threaten to drive some plants out of business, but it argues that many NRC rules boost costs without enhancing safety. "The regulatory system hasn't kept pace with advances in technology," says Steve Unglesbee, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's p.r. unit. "Industrywide, our safety record is improving. But NRC creates so many layers of regulation that every plant is virtually assured of being in noncompliance with something...
...NRC suggested as much in a 1985 agency directive on "enforcement discretion," which allowed the agency to set aside hundreds of its own safety regulations. Since 1990, Millstone has received 15 such waivers--more than any other nuclear station. In November, Jackson scaled back the policy, but she says this never endangered public safety. Others disagree...
...them to produce the documents, and they could not. Galatis sensed trouble when, in later talks, "they began denying that the first discussions had taken place." In June 1992 he spelled out the problem in a memo, calling the fuel pool a license violation and an "unreviewed safety question"--NRC lingo for a major regulatory headache-and adding other concerns he had found, such as the fact that some of the pool's cooling pipes weren't designed to withstand an earthquake, as they were required to do. Northeast sat on the memo for three months, until Galatis filed...