Nuclear Inspectors’ May be Limited on U.S. Review, Markey Says

Bloomberg: Nuclear Inspectors’ May be Limited on U.S. Review, Markey Says
U.S. nuclear inspectors examining domestic power plants amid a reactor crisis in Japan may keep some findings secret, which might undermine confidence in the agency’s work, Representative Edward Markey said.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing how the reactors would cope if struck by a natural disaster. The 90-day review was triggered when Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant in Japan was crippled by fires, explosions and radiation leaks after a magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

NRC inspectors are examining U.S. reactors’ ability to withstand disasters that “have already been contemplated” as well as those that are worse than expected, Markey said today in a letter to agency Chairman Gregory Jaczko.

The inspectors have been told to limit their public findings to assessing safety measures for anticipated events, Markey said, without identifying the source for the information. The potential impact of disasters that exceed a reactor’s design “would be entered into a private NRC database and kept secret,” Markey said.

“These limitations, if true, severely undermine my confidence” in the NRC’s safety review, Markey said.

The agency “always documents any inspection findings of importance, although reports dealing with security-related information are not made public,” Scott Burnell, an NRC spokesman, said in an e-mail. The agency’s review will include open meetings “and its results will be publicly available,” he said.