The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) enforces safety regulations at U.S. nuclear power plants. Since 2010, the UCS has analyzed the NRC performance every year, highlighting both positive and negative safety trends and have found that NRC enforcement of safety regulations could be more timely and consistent. UCS findings
match those of the NRC own internal assessments, as well as of independent agents such as the NRC Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO). Seldom does an internal or external evaluation conclude that a reactor incident or unsafe condition stemmed from a lack of regulations. Like UCS, these evaluators instead find that the NRC untimely and/or inconsistent enforcement of existing regulations was a factor.
Encouragingly, 2014 contained fewer near misses at U.S. nuclear power plants than any prior year UCS have reviewed, with only nine safety and security incidents prompting investigation (compared to 10 in 2013, and 14 the year before). However, the NRC continued to enforce a number of regulations inconsistently, and masked many of those inconsistencies by improperly hiding information from public inquiry. Poor treatment of several whistleblowers also highlighted an internal safety culture that needs improving.
In 2014, the NRC responded 9 so-called near misses, defined as events that increased the risk of reactor core damage by at least 10 times. Both the number of near misses and their severity have decreased in recent years, 2014 had the fewest near misses of any year since this series began, and all of 2014 near misses were of relative low severity. The UCS near miss label for these events has been unexpectedly controversial. The NRC terms some of these events as accident sequence precursors - terms of art rather than plain-English communication. UCS support using the near miss label and point to the online reporting system maintained by firefighters, albeit fearmongering to the public.
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