White House Wants Reactor Operators to Self-Regulate

Trump Deregulation Frenzy Endangers Health & Safety

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2019

Note: This segment is excerpted from a far longer piece by Emily Atkin in The New Republic for April 5, 2019.

[On April 2, 2019] … the Senate Environment and Public Works committee held an oversight hearing for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) … in part, to discuss a new safety regulation designed to protect [US] nuclear reactors from earthquake and flooding events, like the one that caused the 2011 [triple reactor] disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi [station] in Japan.…

The draft version of the rule, released by the NRC in 2016, required all nuclear [reactor] owners to do two things: re-assess all flood and earthquake risks, [and] then implement new safety measures taking the re-assessment into account. But in January 2019, with Trump appointees making up a majority of the commission, [the NRC] approved a final version of the rule making the safety measures voluntary. Nuclear [reactor operators], in other words, will still have to do new risk assessments—but now they can choose whether they want to prepare for those risks or not.

The nuclear industry is also pushing the NRC to cut down on safety inspections and rely instead on [reactor owners and operators] to police themselves. The NRC “is listening” to this advice, the Associated Press reported last month. “Annie Caputo, a former nuclear-energy lobbyist now serving as one of four [NRC] members appointed by President Trump, told an industry meeting this week that she was ‘open to self-assessments’ by [reactor] operators, who are proposing that self-reporting by operators take the place of some NRC inspections.” …

There’s obvious appeal to self-regulation. It’s extremely costly to the taxpayer to ensure that industries aren’t hurting or killing Americans. …

But time and again, industries have proven that they will skimp on safety and cheat the rules if the government has made clear that it’s not watching. Sometimes that causes millions of Americans to lose their jobs and homes. Sometimes it causes thousands of people to get sick. And sometimes it causes hundreds to die. Trump is doing everything in his power to increase the chance of all of the above.

—Atkin is a Staff Writer for The New Republic.