Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator

Gregory B. Jaczko

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781476755786
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A shocking exposé from the most powerful insider in nuclear regulation about how the nuclear energy industry endangers our lives—and why Congress does nothing to stop it. Gregory Jaczko had never heard of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission when he arrived in Washington like a modern-day Mr. Smith. But, thanks to the determination of a powerful senator, he would soon find himself at the agency's helm. A Birkenstocks-wearing physics PhD, Jaczko was unlike any chairman the agency had ever seen: he was driven by a passion for technology and a concern for public safety, with no ties to the industry and no agenda other than to ensure that his agency made the world a safer place.And so Jaczko witnessed what outsiders like him were never meant to see—an agency overpowered by the industry it was meant to regulate and a political system determined to keep it that way. After an emergency trip to Japan to help oversee the frantic response to the horrifying nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2011, and witnessing the American nuclear industry's refusal to make the changes he considered necessary to prevent an equally catastrophic event from occurring here, Jaczko started saying aloud what no one else had dared. Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator is a wake-up call to the dangers of lobbying, the importance of governmental regulation, and the failures of congressional oversight. But it is also a classic tale of an idealist on a mission whose misadventures in Washington are astounding, absurd, and sometimes even funny—and Jaczko tells the story with humor, self-deprecation, and, yes, occasional bursts of outrage. Above all, Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator is a tale of confronting the truth about one of the most pressing public safety and environmental issues of our time: nuclear power will never be safe.

CHAPTER 1

Dr. Jaczko Goes to Washington

Born in 1970, I discovered the TV program Cosmos at a young age, which led to my fascination with physics. What other discipline could take a complex thing like the movement of the Apollo moon lander and describe it in a few mathematical expressions? But halfway through my five years of work toward a physics doctorate, I began to feel that the abstract world of theoretical particle physics was too removed from the real world. I wanted to use science to improve the world. And I thought there was no better place for doing that than Washington, DC.

Becoming a “sharp-elbowed political player,” as one magazine later described me, was not a goal of mine. In fact after I moved to Washington, my mother took every opportunity to tell friends, colleagues, and members of Congress that I’d once sworn I would never have a job that made me wear a suit.

My ticket to Washington came in the form of a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For one year, alongside dozens of other scientists and engineers, I would serve as free labor for a member of Congress. So just weeks after defending my dissertation and receiving my PhD, I gave away my car and moved to an apartment in Washington that I’d rented sight unseen. It was August 1999.

My first task was to find a congressional office that would take me. Many politicians liked the idea of hiring a highly educated employee who cost nothing more than a desk, a phone, and a computer. But not everyone was willing to take a fellow. While we fellows knew a lot about some very specific branch of science or technology, many of us knew nothing about Congress and how it worked. That was certainly true of me. As a physics and philosophy major in college, I had had little time for classes in American government. Most of what I remembered about the federal government came from the Schoolhouse Rock! cartoons I watched as a kid.

I landed in the office of Congressman Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. Mah-key, as his thick Boston accent sounded to my ear, was an ardent nuclear arms control expert and a passionate advocate for nuclear power plant safety. One of his first spontaneous requests for my help involved that October’s Pakistani military coup and its potential impact on the Senate’s impending vote on whether to ratify the United Nations’ Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Only a few weeks into my job as a congressional staffer, I was told Markey wanted to talk about the coming vote on the House floor. He asked me to write him a one-minute speech.

It had been nearly a decade since I had attempted to write anything other than dry academic papers. But knowing that Ed Markey was a funny, entertaining speaker, I knew I needed a vivid image that would bring this complex issue to life. I quickly punched out the perfect speech with the perfect metaphor: a rodeo rider on the wild bull of nuclear proliferation. With all the pride of a novice, I dashed across the office to put the speech in front of Markey’s chief of staff. And then I learned, the hard way, the most basic lesson of politics: it’s all local. Markey represented the dense, middle-income urban areas surrounding Boston. There were no rodeos in his district. It was the home of the Red Sox, not dirt rings with bucking bulls and leather-chapped cowboys.

Markey didn’t use my speech, although in his remarks he did use the image of a bull in a slightly different way—a gesture that softened my embarrassment. I was disappointed to have struck out on my first policy statement, but I knew my tenure in his office was going to be valuable for me—and for Congressman Markey too, I hoped. Not only would I get the chance to make a difference in the world—the very reason I left academic physics—but I was going to learn from one of the best legislators in Congress. In the end, Markey and his staff taught me the strategies and tactics that were most effective in Washington, with a special focus on nuclear power issues and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

After eighteen months, when it was time to find a permanent job, I learned that a prominent senator was looking for a scientist staffer to help him fight another nuclear power battle. The legislator was Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Democratic Whip at the time.

In March 2001, I joined Senator Reid’s staff after that brief meeting in his office to help him fight the Yucca Mountain project, a proposed nuclear power waste disposal site outside Las Vegas. Two years later the first of what would be several commissioner vacancies opened on the NRC. Given the role the agency played in reviewing the safety of Yucca Mountain, and the importance of that issue to the senator, Reid wanted a say in who would fill those positions. He turned to me to help identify candidates for the job.

As I dutifully started to discuss possibilities with the senator in yet another career-changing meeting in his office, he asked whether I would like to be on the commission.

“Sure,” I said. And as with most conversations with Senator Reid, that was the end of the meeting. Little did I know that my nomination would be the cause of a headline-making, two-year political showdown.

• • •

The next step in my nomination, beyond excitedly telling my parents, was to wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. Nominees to commission positions become hostages for leverage in the U.S. Senate, as the confirmation process creates the opportunity for senators to fulfill other related—or unrelated—goals by placing a hold on a nomination until they get what they want. In my case, the confirmation process took two years.

Up until that point, I had been a surrogate for Senator Reid and for Congressman Markey, with very little record of my own. Since both of these legislators had been antagonists of the nuclear power industry for decades, I was guilty by association. With little to go on, the industry had to assume the worst: that my bosses’ views were my views. That triggered relentless opposition from the industry and its standard-bearers in the U.S. Senate. The holds kept coming.

While I had certainly been a strong advocate for the positions Markey and Reid had taken on their respective nuclear safety issues, before my nomination I had not formed my own views about nuclear power. Technically trained, I appreciated the scientific prowess that brought the country a fleet of over a hundred nuclear reactors. But through my experience working on Capitol Hill, I had become skeptical of the ability of the nuclear power industry to properly balance its fiscal responsibility to shareholders with the demands of public safety. I was basically a nuclear power moderate: intrigued by the technology but cautious of the potential harm.

I have no doubt that had I publicly professed strong support for nuclear power and vowed to ensure the NRC did not overregulate the industry, I would have been more easily confirmed. Such a statement may have lost me the support of vocal nuclear safety advocates, but they were few in number and inured to the commission’s tacitly helping the industry. Instead, I pledged to assess facts and make independent decisions, stopping short of specific pro-industry promises. The blunt message I would get over the next two years of Senate stalling was that honesty and integrity mean nothing if you are perceived to be critical of nuclear power.

Frustrated with the two years of obstruction, Reid decided to place holds on every nominee waiting to pass through the Senate’s approval process—more than three hundred people—until I was confirmed. But even this muscular action—which made for great headlines in Nevada, where Reid was seen as fighting for the interests of the state—was not enough. There was one hold on my nomination he could not get released, that of Pete Domenici. The New Mexico senator was known as “Saint Pete” among nuclear proponents because of his prolific and unflinching support of the nuclear energy and nuclear weapons industries. In the mid-1990s he had made a very simple threat to the NRC: Reduce your intrusiveness by adopting more industry-friendly approaches to regulation, or your budget will be slashed. His efforts are still whispered about in the corridors of the agency’s buildings in Rockville, Maryland, a ghostly memory referred to as “the near-death experience.”

In a final push to win my confirmation, Reid set up a meeting between Domenici and me. I walked into the meeting prepared to defend my opposition to Yucca Mountain on Senator Reid’s behalf, but when I sat down with Senator Domenici, I learned his reasons for opposing my nomination were much broader than I’d expected. He feared I would become a vocal critic of the nuclear power industry, a “mouthpiece” for antinuclear groups, as he put it. He believed that if left to its own devices, the NRC and its staff of experts would impose regulations that would destroy the nuclear power industry.

Based on the unwritten traditions of the confirmation process, senators tolerated their colleagues’ holds for a certain period of time. This allowed them time to extract concessions from nominees they did not like but kept the government functioning. It was rare in those days for a commissioner to fail to be confirmed. But even after meeting with me, Domenici refused to lift his hold.

Reid did not like to lose, and so he found another way to get me onto the NRC. He convinced President George W. Bush to bypass the usual confirmation process and place me on the commission using the president’s power to make appointments while Congress was in recess. The one caveat: I would be able to serve for only eighteen months unless I was formally confirmed. To save the senators who had opposed my nomination from political embarrassment, I also had to agree to recuse myself from decisions involving Yucca Mountain for one year. This was a meaningless commitment—no substantive Yucca Mountain issues were scheduled to come before the commission in my first year—but I understood it was an important symbolic act.

And so, after two long years of political tug-of-war, Reid prevailed and I became a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, leaving the legislative branch of government for the executive.

• • •

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission oversees all the commercial nuclear power plants in the United States. It is part of the family of government agencies known as independent regulatory commissions, almost all of which are known better, if they are known at all, by their acronyms: FCC, FTC, SEC, and so on. All of the commissions have a significant, if quite specific, impact on our lives as Americans.

While they regulate different industries in distinct professional fields, the independent regulatory commissions have similar structures. They are usually led by a board with five members, each of whom must be confirmed by the Senate. To ensure that each commission has, at least in theory, a diversity of views, no more than three of its members can belong to any one political party. Usually this leads to three Democrats and two Republicans or two Democrats and three Republicans. Each commissioner serves a term of five years and the terms are staggered, so one member leaves the commission every year as a new one is seated.

These agencies are designed to be independent of but not isolated from the president, whose power comes from the fact that the president chooses each board’s chair. This chair wields tremendous authority, usually serving as the chief executive of the agency itself, which at NRC when I chaired it means having executive responsibility for nearly four thousand staff members and a budget of over $1 billion. Congress, however, has even greater control than the president over the independent regulatory commissions, because it oversees and funds them.

Because these regulatory commissions wield enormous power over industries like telecommunications, commercial banking, investment, and electricity, the commissioners are often the subject of intense fighting in Washington, as I learned firsthand. In the case of the NRC, powerful electric utilities strongly influence the choice of commissioners, as they depend on allies on the board for their livelihood; no nuclear power plant can operate without the agency’s approval. For the past several years, this has meant that the NRC’s board has been made up primarily of industry-backing commissioners. Prospective commissioners who might make safety a priority—or even dare to oppose nuclear power—don’t survive the Senate confirmation process. My association with Markey and Reid would lead many in the industry to believe that I was one of the few antinuclear people to make it onto the commission in recent years.

• • •

On my first day at the NRC, my only official act was to take an oath to carry out my job faithfully; my girlfriend and later wife, Leigh Ann, held the Bible, and my family and friends watched with pride. But as I would soon learn, a host of rumors about me had already started spreading among NRC civil servants. Among the more amusing was the story that my first official act was to fire my entire staff. I did not. It was also said that a new Hummer parked in the agency’s garage belonged to me. It did not. I rode public transit to the office or biked.

The NRC staffers I knew shared a dedication to the agency’s core mission: protecting people and the environment from the hazards of radiation, especially from nuclear power plants. They also shared a quiet love for the NRC’s Rockville headquarters. Rockville is a suburb, a strip-mall satellite of the capital, removed from the hectic political battles of Washington. For the most part, the people who made up the NRC thought of themselves as physically and mentally distanced from the political forces that shaped so many of the federal government’s decisions. They weren’t, though. They just felt separate, which in my mind was a good thing. A mixture of safety idealists, nuclear technology enthusiasts, and political climbers all trying to find the right answer in a mess of conflicting and uncertain possibilities, they faced an extremely challenging assignment as they engaged with the companies that owned, operated, manufactured, supported, and designed nuclear power plants.

It was in these jargon-filled direct engagements that the staff seemed most comfortable. Something was either safe or it wasn’t; the numbers would tell. But these well-intentioned technical wizards sometimes had a hard time finding the right words to communicate this to the people who lived near the nation’s nuclear plants. For this reason, the agency sometimes came across as a collection of uncaring, robotic bureaucrats. I knew the staff was anything but, and I was determined to make this clear to the outside world.

That being said, it was also true that those who wanted to climb the ladder to senior management had to become closely (arguably too closely) acquainted with the agency’s most significant associates: the companies that compose the nuclear industry.

Although people talk about the nuclear power industry as if it were a monolith, nuclear power is produced by many different companies in many different sectors of the economy. Some of their names are familiar: General Electric, Westinghouse, Toshiba. Most of them make products, plants, and services that create all types of electricity, not just from nuclear power, using a combination of traditional and renewable energy resources.

What all of these disparate electricity producers, suppliers, and distributors have in common is membership in the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying organization representing the industry’s interests. NEI has the unenviable task of corralling these powerful companies, each with its own goals. But when it comes to influencing laws and regulations, NEI members have a history of acting as one. This solidarity gives them tremendous influence with Congress.

NEI also has a huge impact on the decisions of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; this is where member companies recoup their million-dollar membership fees. Killing regulations, or even modifying them slightly, can produce savings of millions of dollars per year in operating costs, equipment purchases, and technical analysis. With millions to spend and a unified message, NEI shapes every NRC regulation, guidance, and policy. In some instances, NEI works through formal channels, commenting on documents produced for the public. In others, it exerts its power through informal meetings with commissioners. In any given month, I could be visited by as many representatives of the industry as I would be by public interest groups across my entire seven and a half years on the commission.

A typical visit from a representative of NEI or a utility company would start at the middle manager level and end with the commissioners. That way, if NEI heard troubling news from midlevel staff, they could raise the issue with one or more friendly commissioners, and actions would be taken. I saw this happen all the time, even though staff members were repeatedly told to not take direction from commissioners or industry executives. The commission’s role was merely to set policy through formal votes; only the chairman had the authority to carry out that policy. Having five bosses telling some staffer what to do often led to chaos and paralysis. But if the industry’s goal was to prevent regulation, then chaos and paralysis were a plus. This was one of the many problems caused by the industry’s influence over the agency. As a commissioner, there was little I could do to correct any of them. But after four years on the commission, my opportunity came when Barack Obama became the president of the United States.

Obama’s election created massive upheaval in Washington. Thousands of jobs would change from Republican hands to Democratic. Tradition dictated that a Democratic president would choose a Democrat to serve as chairman of the NRC, either a new commissioner to fill a vacancy or an existing commissioner. At the time of Obama’s election, I was the only Democratic commissioner; the Senate was waiting on the outcome of the election to fill the vacancies. Fortunately for me, Senator Reid was not intimidated by the nuclear industry proponents’ efforts to stop me from being named chairman, but it took even him—by that time the Senate majority leader—over six months to get his way.

Still, before Obama could officially name me chairman, Reid told me I would need to meet with Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff. I was told little about the purpose of the meeting, but I assumed Rahm would want to hear about my vision for the agency and what I planned to accomplish. I dutifully dusted off my memos about the improvements to nuclear safety that needed to be made, and within a day I was on my way to the White House.

As I passed through the many black gates that regulate access to the grounds, I went over the most important points that I wanted to discuss: the agency needed to focus on a number of unresolved safety issues; the agency had to be more aggressive in dealing with the industry; the agency should undo the damage caused by my predecessor’s heavy focus on industry protection. I remembered hearing Senator Obama’s words on the radio one day during the presidential race, criticizing his opponent’s economic policies as “a philosophy that says even commonsense regulations are unnecessary and unwise.” F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Dr. Jaczko Goes to Washington
• Chapter 2: Forget and Repeat: A Brief but Necessary History of Accidents
• Chapter 3: The Burning Issue: The Battle to Prevent Nuclear Fires
• Chapter 4: Nevada Roulette: Ending the Yucca Mountain Charade
• Chapter 5: Accidents Do Happen: The Tragedy of Fukushima
• Chapter 6: Visiting Tokyo: Crises Reveal Human Beings at Their Best
• Chapter 7: Tsunamis in the Heartland: A Scenario for an American Fukushima
• Chapter 8: Fukushima Effects: The Fight over Essential Industry Reforms
• Chapter 9: Express Lane: The Nuclear Industry Licensing Juggernaut
• Chapter 10: Cleanup Is Forever: Visiting Fukushima
• Chapter 11: Going Nuclear: Confrontation over the Building of New Atomic Plants
• Chapter 12: Out of Time: My Departure from the Agency and the Future of Nuclear Power
• Appendix: A Peek at the Science of Nuclear Reactors
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright