Today we released our critique of key recommendations by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) near-term task force in response to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear accident earlier this year.
Three of the five NRC commissioners have now voted to not put its own task force recommendations on the fast track, arguing that the NRC needs more information to proceed.
However, if the NRC balks at implementing new safeguards in a reasonable time frame on the grounds that it doesn’t have enough information about what happened in Japan, then the agency also doesn’t have enough information to relicense operating reactors or license new ones. If the NRC commissioners need more time to sort out the lessons of Fukushima, there should be a moratorium on relicensing old reactors and licensing new ones until they do.
On July 13, we released our own set of recommendations to the NRC, taking a much broader approach.