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Political overtones at NRC concern former commissioner

Hannah Northey, E&E reporter

May 27, 2011

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A former regulator and nuclear pioneer with more than 50 years of experience in the field worries that politics and personal ambition may be infiltrating policy decisions at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Forrest Remick, 80, earned one of the first operating licenses and directed one of the first licensed nuclear reactors at a university in the United States. The Pennsylvania native helped deploy civilian nuclear power throughout the United States and abroad by training operators and even advised NRC on how to design plants and safety standards.

Also a former Republican commissioner at NRC, Remick has skillfully straddled the worlds of science and policy.

Although he has since retired, Remick said his decades in the field have given him insight on the play of politics within NRC. And while politics are mainly estranged from the commission's day-to-day functions, he said they have the potential to seep into decisions made by the presidentially designated chair of the commission who sometimes is swayed by personal ambition.

As a commissioner, he witnessed such maneuvering when a chairman attempted to address Congressional oversight hearings without the participation of other NRC commissioners. Remick said he and his fellow commissioners quashed that attempt.

These days, his major concern is that history may be repeating itself. Remick pointed to politics underlying decisions from NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, a former staffer for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), to shutter Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump. Reid also is an outspoken opponent of the Yucca project.

Remick also disagreed with the chairman's use a rare "emergency" status at NRC on March 11 due to fears that a tsunami would hit the West Coast following the earthquake in Japan.

The emergency status has not been used since the 2001 terrorist attacks and could transfer certain decisionmaking processes to the chairman under Section 3 of the Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1980. To Remick, the decision indicated Jaczko wanted to act alone and without input from other commissioners.

"He did declare an emergency, and I don't think he had good reason from what I know," Remick said.

Jaczko has repeatedly said that such authority is inherent to his chairmanship and that it allowed him to respond decisively to the Japanese crisis. But at least one current commissioner was not notified for at least a month and has concerns about how Jaczko is using the authority (Greenwire, April 29).

Remick also has concerns about the chairman's recommendation in March that Americans within 50 miles of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in Japan be evacuated. NRC only makes people evacuate 10 miles from reactors damaged in the United States, and Jaczko's recommendation opposed a 12-mile evacuation that Japanese officials were enforcing.

Notably, the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards -- which Remick at one time chaired -- grilled NRC last month on why Jaczko recommended a 50-mile evacuation around the Fukushima plant, but commission staff were unable to say who vetted the chairman's decision (E&ENews PM, April 7).

"I thought that was a mistake because I wondered what did the Japanese authorities think. I believe when you're in another country, you follow their authorities not the United States'," Remick said. "And I wondered what it did to the people of Japan hearing that their government is recommending one thing and the United States is recommending another."

The chairman has said his recommendation, which also raised eyebrows among House Republicans, was based on a staff recommendation and was a "conservative" call to safeguard Americans in Japan.

A technical grounding

In contrast to the political career paths of some current commission members, Remick's road to NRC was grounded in a technical training program launched in the 1950s.

The U.S. nuclear industry -- and Remick's career -- came to life with President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1953 "Atoms for Peace" speech in New York City before the U.N. General Assembly.

Eisenhower promised the world the United States would share declassified nuclear information for peaceful uses. That prompted the federal government to establish the country's first school for operating nuclear reactors at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where Remick graduated one of 19 government fellowship awardees.

He earned one of the country's first senior reactor operator licenses from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1956. That school at Oak Ridge unleashed a flood of nuclear information into the U.S. industry and universities that was previously classified, Remick said, placing him squarely on the front lines for deploying and using what would lead to a new industry in the United States.

"It was a one-year, kind of around-the-clock, seven-days-a-week, 50-week program to transfer this information," Remick said.

It was not long before Pennsylvania State University asked Remick to help operate one of the first research reactors licensed at a university. He then taught reactor physics to foreign scientists and engineers at the International School of Nuclear Science and Engineering, which the university administered for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

"It is the first licensed and longest licensed reactor in the United States, and therefore probably the world," Remick said of the reactor, which today is called the Breazeale nuclear reactor. "It still operates."

Remick moved into the regulatory world in 1963 when he began consulting the Atomic Energy Commission on reactor operator licensing. AEC was abolished in 1974 and succeeded by NRC to oversee civilian nuclear power. In 1965, Remick joined the International Atomic Energy Agency where he spent two years in Austria training operators to again fulfill Eisenhower's goals of providing technical assistance to other countries developing nuclear power.

Remick repeatedly moved into roles that would set the pace and safety standards for modern-day reactors and technology. In 1981, he joined NRC as a staff member to advise the commission on policy matters, develop safety goals for reactors and policies for the storage of nuclear waste.

While he wore a number of regulatory hats, Remick said his time spent as a member of NRC's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards from 1982 to 1986 may have had some of the largest impacts on the nuclear industry to date. The independent panel, created under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, advises NRC on reactor safety, radiation and license applications.

Remick, who was vice chairman of the panel from 1987 to 1988 and chairman in 1989, was one of the panel's part-time federal workers with high levels of expertise in areas of nuclear engineering, chemistry, metallurgy and various types of engineering. Such knowledge was crucial in the wake of the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, in which the reactor exploded and sent nuclear fallout over much of Europe and forced evacuations throughout Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia.

"Especially in the early days, there were many early technical decisions that had to be based on engineering knowledge ... and judgment, because the experiences weren't there, the technology was new," Remick said.

One of the major decisions came in 1989 when Remick was chairman of the panel, and NRC was reviewing reactor designs proposed by General Electric Co. and General Atomics that did not include a containment vessel, the structure that contains radioactive releases during explosions or emergencies.

At the time, few new reactor applications were coming forward because of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as well as cost overruns for developers and lack of electricity demand, Remick remembered. Even so, the committee opposed the design during meetings with the companies, and members were "basically trying to tell them 'no way,'" Remick said.

Although the designs were not up for final approval before NRC, the companies would have eventually been required to request the agency's blessing and "the committee would have to advise the commission one way or the other before the commission could issue a construction permit or something like that," Remick said.

Today, the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards continues to play a crucial role in advising NRC on technical safety matters and must approve a host of NRC decisions. The committee's ability to study important issues in depth and require more research and analysis on the part of the commissioners has reminded Remick over the years how important the body is -- especially when it comes to ensuring nuclear power is used appropriately.

"The committee pretty much essentially has free reign to look into almost anything of a technical matter that it wishes to and has general support of Congress and so forth," Remick said. "It's a very valuable committee."

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