Resources & Stats

July 2011

The nuclear industry’s ingrained culture of safety is reinforced by stringent and independent government regulation. Virtually every aspect of a nuclear energy facility is subject to government regulation and scrutiny—its design, where it is built, how it is built, how it is operated, how it handles used nuclear fuel, how it plans for emergencies and how it will be shut down at the end of its useful life.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the principal government regulator of nuclear energy, including the 104 commercial reactors. It has a staff of about 4,000 and a budget of about $1 billion a year. In addition to evaluating and approving facility designs and inspecting nuclear energy facilities daily, the NRC licenses the people who operate a facility’s reactor; inspects both routine operations and unusual events; penalizes any violations of federal regulations; investigates allegations of wrongdoing; and continuously assesses a plant’s performance and safety.

• Independent NRC inspectors work at each nuclear energy facility and have unfettered access to plant data and employees.
• The inspectors have the authority to shut down facilities they believe are unsafe and to order changes in operations.
• Existing plants are subject to thorough reviews and approvals as part of the relicensing process.
• The regulatory regime is transparent, with direct citizen involvement at every major milestone in establishing the design, selecting a location and granting a plant operating license.

Additionally, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), a safety watchdog created by the industry after the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, establishes extraordinary performance objectives and criteria, based on its own inspection of nuclear facilities. INPO thoroughly evaluates every U.S. energy facility every two years, on average, and deploys training teams to provide assistance to companies in specific areas identified as needing improvement during an evaluation.

The special White House commission that looked into the Deepwater Horizon accident cited the nuclear industry’s approach through INPO as the model for self-regulation.

Aside from NRC and industry self-regulation, nuclear energy facilities must also comply with other regulations, such as emergency preparedness plans that are approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and environmental regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency. Plant owners also interact with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, among other federal agencies. Nuclear energy facilities may also be subject to regulation by state public utility commissions and to local land use requirements.