In response to Japan’s earthquake/tsunami-triggered nuclear power plant crisis, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has launched a two-pronged review of the safety of U.S. nuclear plants, and state regulators in California and Arizona sought reviews of their plants.

The NRC established a task force of experts to conduct both short- and long-term analyses of lessons learned from Japan. Made up of current senior NRC managers and former experts associated with the federal regulatory panel, the task force reports will be made public, the NRC said.

NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said it is “essential” to examine available information from Japan to understand the implications for the United States’ fleet of nuclear power plants.

The task force review is designed to make permanent NRC regulation changes, assuming it is determined that they are needed. The NRC commissioners indicated they would like the task force to start this part of its review within 90 days, and a report with recommended changes within six months, a commission spokesperson said.

The NRC also decided to revise its upcoming meetings and briefings to focus on responding to the unfolding events in Japan. Open meetings on the subject will be held April 14 and 28, and meetings on the task force’s 30- and 60-day responses will be held May 3 and June 16, respectively.

The task force is mandated with making interim reports on its short-term examination in the next 30, 60 and 90 days. NRC technical staff provided the five-member commission with a 90-minute briefing last Monday as a first step. NRC staff have concluded that the United States and its territories will avoid any harmful radiation levels as a result of the ongoing events at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant that was damaged by the quake and tsunami.

NRC inspectors now posted in every U.S. nuclear power plant will help support the task force’s short-term efforts, supplemented as necessary by experts from the NRC regional and headquarters offices.

“We will perform a systematic and methodical review to see if there are changes that should be made to our programs and regulations to ensure protection of public health and safety,” Jaczko said.

The task force’s work in the next six months will “help determine if any additional NRC responses, such as orders requiring immediate action by U.S. plants, are called for, prior to completing an in-depth investigation of the information from Japan,” NRC Executive Director Bill Borchardt said. A revised NRC meeting schedule to accommodate the upcoming Japan review will be posted on the commission’s website.

California’s two major coastal nuclear generating plants also are receiving increased scrutiny from elected and regulatory officials. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last week delayed a scheduled April hearing in its processing of PG&E’s pending request to pursue a license extension for its Diablo Canyon plant, which sits along the central California coast near San Luis Obispo.

And in Arizona the state regulatory commission has called a special meeting for Tuesday “to discuss the safety of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station and the future of nuclear energy in the United States in the wake of the Japan disaster.”

Vulnerability to earthquakes in California has been a concern ever since the state’s two nuclear plants — Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s (PG&E) Diablo Canyon plant and Southern California Edison Co.’s (SCE) San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) — began operating in the 1970s.

Both of California’s U.S. senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, sent a letter to the NRC last week calling for “thorough inspections” for both SONGS and Diablo Canyon to evaluate their safety and emergency preparedness in light of the fact that both plants are located near quake faults. The two plants combined produce more than 4,500 MW, or nearly 15% of the state’s power supplies. California state Sen. Sam Blakeslee also has questioned whether PG&E’s pending NRC application to extend Diablo Canyon’s operations beyond the 2020s should be allowed to proceed.

While SCE has not made an application to extend SONGS licenses beyond their 2022 expiration, before the recent Japanese disaster it was assumed that the utility eventually would seek the relicensing. Both SONGS and Diablo Canyon have completed the total replacement of their steam generators at a collective cost of about $1.5 billion, and this work was viewed as a prelude to seeking license extensions.

SCE noted that since the Japanese disaster, “SCE executives have been in daily contact with U.S. regulatory officials and others within the nuclear power industry to assess developments in Japan and how they might relate to U.S. nuclear plant operations,” a utility spokesperson told NGI. “[We] continue to study what it would take to renew our license, but our focus right now is on the operations of SONGS to ensure protecting the health and safety of the public and plant employees.”

Separately, a Japan-U.S. partnership to build two added nuclear power generation units (3 and 4) at the South Texas Project (STP) announced last week that they were putting on hold most permitting and development work to allow time for the NRC to sort through the lessons from the unfolding Japan nuclear plant situation. Nuclear Innovation North America LLC (NINA), a joint development by NRG Energy Inc. and Toshiba Corp., will limit its ongoing work to securing federal loan guarantees that are critical to the project moving forward.

NINA Chairman and NRG CEO David Crane said the “best course of action in this immediate period of uncertainty is to minimize project spend[ing], continue with those activities we can control and wait until there is more information upon which we can base our long-term decisions.”

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