On March 11 of 2011 the Great Tohoku Earthquake [9.0] occurred off the coast of northeastern Japan, and caused a 40-meter tidal wave that inundated the coastal areas killing as many as 20,000 people and wiping entire villages off the map. The wave also overtopped the known to be inadequate seawall enclosing the Pacific Ocean 'harbor' at the 6-reactor Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station, destroying the emergency diesel generators that had kicked in when the quake caused the grid to crash. These were powering the residual heat removal systems in oceanfront units 1, 2 and 3. All of which had been operating at or near 100% power when the quake occurred.
The resulting triple meltdowns, melt-throughs and subsequent exploding reactor buildings at those three units and the #4 reactor building caused the world's worst nuclear disaster (so far), still ongoing more than three and a half years later.
Response to the natural disasters (quake and tsunami) and the nuclear disaster was immediate and worldwide. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC] and its then-chairman Gregory Jaczko began coordinating communications among their technical divisions and various experts at DOE facilities across the country. Jaczko set up an emergency Operations Center at NRC headquarters in DC, he and the high level staff spent many hours routing communications, gathering data, reporting assessments and simulations, etc. over the days and weeks that followed.
It wasn't long before Jaczko, who was appointed by Obama in May of 2009 and was notable for having been Harry Reid's point man for opposing the proposed high level waste repository at Yucca Mountain - i.e., he's a physicist, not an industry hack - found himself the target of organized back-biting from the four other commissioners. The four took it public before the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee in a singularly ugly display, and Jaczko resigned in May of 2012. He is now a member of the Congressional Advisory Panel on the Nuclear Security Enterprise. For whatever that's worth.
In July of 2012 Obama nominated Allison Macfarlane to the chairmanship, opting not to elevate any of the four other commissioners to the position. Macfarlane isn't an industry hack any more than Jaczko was. She's a geologist, and before her confirmation was an associate professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University, and expert on issues of nuclear waste. In that capacity she served on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future from 2010 to 2012, created by the Obama Administration to make recommendations for dealing with high-level waste. Her term as NRC Chairman extends to June 30, 2018 (6-year term).
Alas, Macfarlane hasn't found the atmosphere at the NRC to be any more welcoming than Jaczko did, and after just over two years has announced her resignation as of January 1st to go back to academia. Specifically, she will become the director of George Washington University's Center for International Science and Technology Policy. In her email to NRC staff, Macfarlane wrote...
"I came to the Commission with the mission of righting the ship after a tumultuous period for the Commission, and ensuring that the agency implemented lessons learned from the tragic accident at Fukushima Daiichi, so that the American people can be confident that such an accident will never take place here.
With these key objectives accomplished, I am now returning to academia."
[My bolding]
Now, that sounds awfully nice, but as everyone in the NRC knows (and this was sent to them, remember),
not a single one of the 12 recommendations of the NRC's Fukushima Task Force, established by order of Congress, has been implemented. Nor are they ever likely to be implemented, and everyone in the NRC knows that, too.
Worse, members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee know it too, and some are not the least bit happy about it. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) was "incensed," and took it out on Macfarlane and the four other commissioners at a June 4th, 2014 meeting. Video here.
Reading the transcript of the June 4, 2014 EPW [meeting] the NRC, it would seem, is working against the American people and a Chernobyl-plus event is just a simple accident away from contaminating vast swaths of this country.
Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) questioned Macfarlane about unescorted Chinese nationals being brought in by Westinghouse for "on the job training" at their plants, particularly in light of recent indictment of five members of the Chinese military on charges of hacking into US companies' systems - including theft of nuclear reactor trade secrets from... Westinghouse! Clearly, the industry is running the joint.
In fact, this has pretty much always been so. Not only has the industry NOT implemented a single recommendation from the Fukushima Task Force, it has been busy-busy since the world's worst nuclear disaster began weakening nuclear safety laws, limits and rules as fast as it possibly can. They have demanded that evacuation standards be eliminated or relaxed, and got the EPA to increase the "allowable" amount of radiation a member of the public can be exposed to during a nuclear power plant 'event' by 26,000%.
The NRC, like some other agencies of government, does not actually have the power to make nuclear plant owner/operators do anything they don't want to do. Ultimately, the only power they do have is to grant or withdraw licensing. The NRC never has and never will pull anybody's operating license for not following its recommendations. Macfarlane is now intimately familiar with that situation, and has decided she'd have a much more satisfying career someplace other than at the NRC. And she's right.
Bottom line is that we are no safer or more secure today from oopses at our local badly-engineered and shoddily-run nukes than we were on March 11, 2011. Or April 26, 1986. Or March 28, 1979. They know what the risks are of running filthy, unsafe reactors. And they are not required to shoulder any of those risks, thanks to Price-Anderson. There is no point in trying to 'fix' what's wrong with nuclear electrical generation, because what's most wrong is what Gregory Jaczko pointed out shortly after he left the NRC...
Once you turn them on, you cannot simply turn them off.
Everything else is just band aids on an open wound. They'll ride these cash cows into the dirt (or all the way to China - jk), then they'll walk away and leave us with the mess as well as the health effects and dead zones.