Editor's Page
What is nuclear safety? Victor Gilinsky is a commissioner on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He recently spoke at Brown University on what has been happening to nuclear reactor regulations since the accident at the Three Mile Island plant. Here, verbatim, is part of what he had to say. It might be useful to take a brief look at the status of nuclear power today and the role it plays in solving our energy problems. That role is more limited than was foreseen a decade ago, or even in 1976, but it is nevertheless important to our energy choices. The 70 nuclear plants now in operation provide about 13% of the nation's total electric energy consumption. Electric energy represents about a quarter of the primary energy supply, and 13% of that is a modest contribution. Yet having a choice between coal and nuclear plants adds a desirable fuel flexibility in meeting future electrical demand. The alternative, which is to rely almost exclusively on coal for new plants, would put us in a worse fix. In addition to nuclear plants now in operation, there are about 90 more in varying stages of construction. Several are close to completion and their owners are anxious to load fuel. A large investment is involved. Yet for at least several months, all licensing activity will have to be put on ice while the regulatory staff goes about the business of reinforcing the safety of plants in operation. Our interest in this energy source tended to overpower safety concerns in the past; nevertheless, it is a legitimate interest and should not be left out of the safety equation. If I am correct in saying we are going to put safety first, how are we to know where to stop? What are we to set as a standard for safety to guide the regulators? It is a question both philosophical and political, economic and technical, and somehow we have to find an answer. We shrink from making measurements in terms of an acceptable number of deaths per year. Yet we must have some kind of overall standard or goal; without it each nuclear safety problem is unique, each calls for a hand-wringing return to square one. The technicians need a goal and they can't develop one themselves, nor is that their responsibility. Let me quote a note to me from a senior member of the NRC staff. "Above all, we need a mandate. Are plants to keep operating? How safe must they be? What is needed, in a broad way, to make them acceptable? These are social decisions, to be made by the commission and its successors, the President, and Congress. The NRC staff has a contribution to make . . . the present indistinct safety rationale awaits clarification to provide the needed basis for our job. There is a big job to do and the staff needs direction and inspiration from our nation's and agency's leaders to help us get on with it and do it well. I believe further that doing it well is our best and only way to provide for the public health and safety." We are confronted with this legitimate plea for a broad standard of safety because the reordering of priorities between safety and licensing has left a vacuum which must be filled. What we have been using in place of a standard for safety was an answer: The answer was provided by the Rasmussen Reactor Safety Study, which was taken to say, in effect, there was little to worry about, and by the political imperative of allowing plants to continue in operation, willy-nilly. Why does this question arise here when it does not in automobile or airline safety, where we also lack an explicit safety goal? It is because we have a significant statistical sample for making estimates of the safety of airplanes—anyone can look it up in the world almanac. This is not true for nuclear reactors: 500 reactor-years of experience are not sufficient to provide a significant estimate of the probability of large accidents. It is therefore much more difficult to relate nuclear regulatory requirements to practical safety performance than for the other technologies with which we have had more experience. We are now navigating without any fixed point of reference. Our senior staff man is right—we need to provide a safety mandate. The present safety rationale is indistinct and it does await clarification. That's our next big job. •
Views expressed on this page are those of the author only and not necessarily those of ACS
Jan. 7, 1980C&EN
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