OPINION: Democratic Party Nuclear Energy Policy Lurches from Woe to Woe. It Needs to Change.  

Even before the Japanese accident, ten years of strenuous federal subsidy and licensing shortcuts had produced neither a new reactor nor a license to build one.  High costs and cheaper alternatives crumpled a 2008 bubble of more than 30 new reactors to four (at two sites) being actively pursued.  Those four depend on Congress shifting billions in financial risk from investors to taxpayers through loan guarantees amounting to $100 per American family per project.

Post-Fukushima administration leadership has amounted to Alfred E. Neuman’s “What, me worry?”  All 104 U.S. reactors will be reviewed in 90 days.  More loan guarantees will issue. No reason to delay permits.  Nuclear power “can’t be taken off the table”, whatever that means.     

C’mon guys.  A series of explosions and other events considered too unlikely to guard against just destroyed one percent of the world’s nuclear capacity in four days on nationwide television.   Benign winds and the fact that three reactors weren’t operating have prevented a far worse calamity. 

Dubious spent fuel pool location and protection are likely contributors to the ongoing radiation releases, clearly the worst since Chernobyl.  A few years ago, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission refused to enhance U.S. spent fuel pool protections.  One of its members leveled insults at the report questioning spent fuel pool safety.  The NRC staff was ordered to “produce a hard hitting critique…that sort of undermines the study deeply”. 

The staff followed orders.  But it’s not the study that is undermined by those smoldering Japanese spent fuel pools.  It’s the NRC culture that preferred lashing out at its critics to taking them seriously, especially when doing so would require the nuclear industry to spend money.

Was this an isolated case?  Not hardly.  After the NRC delayed closing the Davis Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, for inspection, the reactor vessel was shown to have a significant rust hole that left only a thin stainless steel liner holding in the cooling water. The NRC Inspector General concluded that the delay “was driven in large part by a desire to lessen the financial impact”.  The NRC staff official in charge was nominated by the Commissioners for the highest federal bonus.

A couple of years earlier Senator Pete Domenici, an ardent nuclear industry proponent, boasted of persuading the NRC to reverse its "adversarial attitude" by threatening a 33% budget cut during a meeting with the chair.

For 20 years now, ideology and campaign finance have weakened public protection of many sorts.   President Obama seemed to recognize this when he campaigned against excessive nuclear industry influence at the NRC.  His appointees are not implicated in the aforementioned episodes.  But what a strange time to keep silent about this unfinished business.

Here are some ingredients of a sensible nuclear policy that reflects the promises of candidate Obama and the concerns of the American people.    

• Give real priority to learning and applying the lessons of Fukushima.  The learning process took 18 months after the lesser accident at Three Mile Island, during which no new licenses were issued.  It is likely to take at least as long this time.
• Forget further subsidies during this review. Restrict any subsequent subsidies rigorously to “a few first mover reactors” as an MIT study recommended in 2003.  A group of no more than six will be plenty to see whether new reactors are capable of producing economically competitive electricity.  Since they aren’t, the experiment should end there.
• Support advanced reactor designs only through research programs until real promise of improved safety and economics is demonstrated.
• Acknowledge that new nuclear power has a lot to prove.  Stop treating it as if it were a proven success.  
• If Democratic support for new reactors is to be bait for Republican support for energy efficiency and renewable technologies, stop giving away the store without getting anything back.  Every Democratic nuclear moonshine is greeted by further Republican cuts in support for genuinely clean energy.  As Casey Stengel said upon taking over the New York Mets, “Can’t anyone here play this game?”

Peter A. Bradford is a former commissioner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and chair of the New York and Maine utility regulatory commissions.  He teachesNuclear Power and Public Policy at Vermont Law School and is a member of the board of the Union of Concerned Scientists.