Nuclear Regulatory Commission seeks input on whether to open up

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a meeting in Lynchburg on Wednesday to receive public comments about whether it should start telling people more about events that are now kept secure and secret at plants that produce nuclear fuel and electric power.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, security matters at NRC-licensed plants have been kept under a blanket. The only security issues discussed publicly by the NRC have been incidents that were divulged unofficially — such as guards sleeping on duty inside a plant, or someone taking a gun through a gate.

Lynchburg was the third city to have a public-comment opportunity about the agency’s intentions to partly lift its security veil. The first two public meetings were held near Raleigh, N.C., and Chicago. The final one will occur at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md.

The NRC staff plans to report its recommendations for new openness standards to the agency’s five commissioners by the end of this year, said Paul Harris of the NRC’s Atlanta office.

The public won’t see those recommendations, Harris said, and any changes that are made will come slowly and only with approval of other agencies including the FBI, Homeland Security, Coast Guard, and Office of Naval Reactors.

“We are not going to release information that will help an adversary plan an attack,” Harris assured the B&W and Areva representatives.

Only five people attended Wednesday’s meeting — four of them employees of Babcock & Wilcox Co. or Areva — and none commented on NRC proposals to once again disclose some basic details after security incidents occur.

At the NRC’s first two meetings on possible new disclosure standards, only the Chicago meeting produced much public input, NRC staffers said. That interest was attributed to public concern over an Illinois power plant’s delayed report that it had leaked radioactive water 10 years ago.

The leak at the Chicago-area plant was a safety issue, not a security-breach matter, and the NRC says it’s already somewhat open to the public with its reports about safety violations. The agency eventually discloses them on its Web site and in reports to Congress.

NRC investigations of security-related incidents such as malfunctioning gates and broken fences have not been reported on its Web site, and not even to Congress in much detail. If a security incident were to occur at a fuel-processing facility such as the B&W and Areva operations in Lynchburg, the NRC’s current practices make it unlikely the incident would become public knowledge, Harris said.

Although the NRC staff hasn’t said what it plans to recommend, some of the matters it is considering are listed on its Web site as possible ways to increase the public’s trust in the agency’s oversight of the nuclear industry.

One possible change would mean more public meetings would be held if a licensed facility such as a power plant were having an unusual number of performance problems, the NRC said.

Another possibility would be to include a brief description and significance of issues cited by inspectors when the NRC makes its annual public report to Congress about power reactors and fuel-cycle facilities.

In addition, the agency could put some of its security-inspection procedures and inspection manuals on its Web site.

The NRC also was hoping for suggestions about how soon after an incident occurs, and is corrected, that it should tell the public that the event happened.

It also wanted to know the preferred method of informing the public, such as through a public meeting or a redacted inspection report on the NRC Web site.