At every opportunity, Gregory Jaczko hammers home the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s No. 1 goal.
On March 11, 2011, Japan’s nuclear power industry was shaken to its core by a 9.0 magnitude quake followed by a massive tsunami. The 45-plus-foot wave swamped the six reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi plant about 130 miles North of Tokyo.
In the weeks following Japan’s double catastrophe, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko became the Obama administration’s nuclear point man, explaining, reassuring, and reiterating one message: The safety of U.S. reactors is the NRC’s singular focus.
At a March 16 hearing before two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees, Jaczko, 40, a physicist turned congressional aide turned nuclear regulator, patiently fielded questions from the wary representatives of a concerned America. If it was the tsunami that did the real damage in Japan, then what about a tornado here? Or terrorists? Or hurricanes? Blackouts? Or what about a quake like the one “that hit San Francisco in 1906?”
Again and again, Jaczko offered variations on a few themes: It’s too early to speculate on what happened in Japan. All the plants we’ve licensed and those we are reviewing meet strict site specific standards for earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and, since September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. We determine the largest earthquake likely to occur and how much it will shake a reactor, and then we require the plant to be able to withstand that and a little bit more.
At the March 16 hearing, Jaczko illustrated his point by pointing to a glass of water on the table in front of him and saying, “If you think of this as the nuclear power plant . . . when you talk about the magnitude of the earthquake, it would be like me hitting the table with my fist. Something like that.” Banging the witness table. “And you’ll see it makes the glass over here vibrate.”
“What we actually measure, and we design our nuclear power plants around, is that shaking of the power plant,” Jaczko explained. “So the actual impact depends on where I hit in relation to the glass. A large earthquake that’s very far away, may not have the same impact on a site as an earthquake that’s maybe a little bit less, but much closer, so something like that,” Jaczko said striking again, less forcefully, nearer the glass.
And, as he has at almost every public appearance since March 11, Jaczko repeated a promise: The NRC’s review of events in Japan will be “systematic and methodical” and any new lessons will be applied to U.S. reactors.
Focus on Safety
In February, Gregory Jaczko’s job looked different. A 362,000-square-foot building rising rapidly outside his office window mirrored the recent surge in the NRC’s staff and workload. Over the past three years the agency has received 13 license applications for 22 new reactors, with another five applications on hold or under review. The workforce, now 4,000-strong, has grown by a third since 2005. At present, the 3,000-person headquarters staff is scattered across the Maryland suburbs near Washington, D.C., a symptom of growing pains. The new building will enable the agency to assemble them in one place.
The growth has been explosive for an agency that, prior to 2007, hadn’t seen a license application for a new reactor since 1979, the year Unit 2 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, near Harrisburg, Pa., suffered a partial meltdown. After 25 years frozen in time, the nuclear power industry had finally begun to thaw as Americans’ antipathy toward reactors melted under the heat of rising energy costs and dependence on foreign suppliers. The NRC had staffed up and was buzzing. In his first State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called for “a new generation of safe, clean, nuclear power plants.”
Speaking in his Rockville, Md., office in February, Jaczko said his main focus was creating a stable environment in which NRC’s workers can remain intent on the agency’s key mission without being shaken by outside forces. “One of the bigger challenges we have is to continue to ensure that we keep our focus on safety despite some of the external challenges,” he said, referring at the time to pressures to speed up safety reviews and licensing of new reactors. “Making sure that we continue to allow the staff to do their job and to do it in a way as free from those external pressures as possible is one of the bigger challenges,” he said. “That, if anything, is the thing that keeps me up at night.”
NRC regulates every aspect of nuclear energy production, from the mining of nuclear materials and approval of new reactor designs to the review and approval of licenses to build and operate nuclear power plants and the disposal of spent nuclear fuel. Its rules are designed to protect the public and nuclear energy workers against radiation hazards from industries that use those materials.
The agency is responsible for ensuring the continued safety of 104 aging U.S. nuclear power reactors, the most in any country, 101 of which have been in service for more than 20 years. 1 Nuclear plants produce 20 percent of U.S. electricity. The oldest, Oyster Creek in New Jersey, powered up in 1969, and has the same design as those at the imperiled plant in Japan. Most recently, the nearly 40-year-old Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, with another reactor of the same design, was granted an operating extension. The NRC announced a 20-year renewal on March 10; it was finalized on March 21.
Jaczko must balance shifting and competing expectations. Notwithstanding the sharp influx of new license applications and a streamlined application-review process, some lawmakers have pressed the NRC to approve licenses even more quickly, while opponents of nuclear energy are pushing to slow the rollout of new reactors. Approvals can take up to four years.
Science and Politics
Jaczko was sworn in as a commissioner in January 2005. At the time, he predicted that the NRC might get one or two license applications for new reactors during his tenure, he recalls. A number of factors combined to generate far more, chief among them the 2005 Energy Policy Act enacted in response to energy price hikes and growing dependence on foreign oil. The law included tax credits, loan guarantees, and regulatory delay compensation to encourage the building of commercial nuclear power plants.
After serving on the commission for three years, Jaczko was designated chairman in May 2009 by President Obama. His term runs through June 30, 2013. As chairman, Jaczko touches almost everything that the NRC does. He leads the five presidentially appointed commissioners in setting agency policy, and he oversees the workforce. He is the official spokesman and the “authority for all NRC functions pertaining to a potential emergency involving an NRC licensee,” roles assigned to the chairman in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.
In its October 1979 report, 2 the presidential investigatory commission on TMI, as the country’s worst nuclear incident is known by NRC’s staff, recommended “organizational and procedural changes designed to make the new agency truly effective in assuring the safety of nuclear power plants.”
The result was the retooled management structure in place today. Under it, the chairman sets the agenda for the commission, which decides issues by a simple majority vote. By law, the commission cannot seat more than three members of a political party at one time, a dynamic that results in “very passionate disagreements,” says Jaczko. “I think that’s a good and healthy thing. If Congress wanted us all to agree on the commission, they would have just put one of us over here, not five.”
Moreover, each commissioner, including the chairman, gets a single vote, making it impossible for any one commissioner to dictate outcomes. “I don’t worry too much about whether I win or lose votes,” Jaczko says. “I’ve tried to create an environment in which the commission can have good discussions.. . . What matters is that the commission makes good decisions.”
Having earned a doctorate in physics before serving on Capitol Hill, Jaczko combines technical and scientific acumen with practical political experience. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Jaczko learned “to think critically and analyze problems in a fact-based way,” he says. Yet he wasn’t destined for a career of pure science. He became involved in the graduate employees union and discovered an interest in policy and governance. Uniting the two passions, Jaczko became a fellow in an American Association for the Advancement of Science program that helped people with science backgrounds get positions on Capitol Hill.
Jaczko initially worked for Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., as a Congressional Science Fellow. He subsequently worked for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., first, as science policy advisor and advisor to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and later, as director of appropriations. “I was very fortunate to work for two very different but incredibly effective legislators,” Jaczko says. “I saw how they were able to work with their colleagues. . . . They showed me the ways to approach issues and how to deal with challenges.”
‘Powerful Motivator’
Jaczko’s management philosophy emphasizes safety, transparency, efficiency and people. He endeavors to continually renew a “culture of safety,” he says, to keep everyone focused on NRC’s overriding priority. The safety mission pervades everything, Jaczko says, all the way down to mail delivery.
Jaczko was deeply involved in the NRC’s effort to make nuclear reactors less vulnerable to air strikes and terrorism, requiring them to always have on hand equipment to deal with severe fires and explosions. And he headed up an NRC initiative to develop a safety culture policy that seeks to measure and regulate prevailing attitudes, values and practices at nuclear facilities to diminish the chances of an accident.
Within NRC, safety informs the way the agency views and talks about itself. The agency doesn’t define itself in terms of activities—overseeing regulatory compliance, reviewing licenses, training safety inspectors. It focuses instead on human health and safety to keep its staff energized.
“The people here come to work to make sure that the American people stay safe,” says Jaczko. “That is a very powerful motivator and a very powerful driver.”
In 2008, 2009 and 2010, the NRC has been the top-ranked agency in “The Best Places to Work in Federal Government” report published by the Partnership for Public Service and Washington’s American University. NRC ranked highest in strategic management, effective leadership, work-life balance and the fit between mission employees’ skills. “We have a lot of inherent advantages,” Jaczko says. “We listen to the employees. We try and make changes based on what we hear.”
When a recent in-house survey revealed that employees who weren’t directly involved in mission-related activities felt less connected to the agency, leaders moved to reconnect with them, says Jaczko. The safety of Americans, he says, relies as much on the people who procure computer systems and keep the phones working as it does on the people who inspect nuclear reactors.
“We really went out and emphasized the importance of those non-direct mission functions that are just as important to public health and safety as the people who have their engineering degrees,” Jaczko says. “Everybody here has a responsibility for safety. Everybody is part of the team and a part of the family.”
Human Factors
To a large degree, NRC’s success hinges on attracting, motivating and retaining top-shelf talent. Following Three Mile Island, it became clear that the regulators as well as plant operators had focused too little attention on the human factor.
“Human performance is such an important piece for safe operation,” Jaczko said during an October 2010 presentation at The Brookings Institution in Washington. “In examining the events leading up to really the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear industry, the administration at the time and the Congress recognized really two fundamental issues: One, that the NRC’s regulatory failures had really been part of the contributing factor to that accident. And that two, some of those failures were really rooted ultimately in the agency’s institution, the structure and the foundation of the agency itself,” Jaczko continued. “Effective regulation involves more than just the right scientific and technical data. It also involves having the right kind of management structure and the management system in place.”
Thus, Jaczko says, NRC strives to get the right people in the right jobs and to provide the training they need to function at a high level. It employs a skilled workforce with expertise in chemistry, nuclear physics, engineering and law. During the recent staff expansion, the agency enlisted people from industry, the Defense Department and colleges and universities to groom potential employees.
NRC’s regulatory duties—including oversight of reactor equipment and those who operate it—must evolve with the industry. For example, new reactors will come equipped with digital control rooms “that create new challenges for us,” Jaczko says. In response, NRC is developing protocols for inspecting new digital tools and for ensuring “the right kind of training for the operators.”
“A digital control system may be handling a lot of issues on its own, versus the old system where the operators had to take a lot of specific and direct actions. It means you have to change how you go about training someone,” Jaczko says. “How do you know if somebody is prepared to deal with an incident if they’re using a mouse as opposed to overseeing or manipulating valves and pumps? It’s a very different way to train and to ensure competency.”
Even as technology changes, the value of institutional knowledge remains high. But NRC’s deep reserves of in-house knowledge have been drained in recent years by the retirement of NRC veterans who joined during the boom years of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, nearly half the workforce has been at the agency five years or less. To prevent the brain drain from becoming a knowledge drain, NRC put in place a rigorous knowledge-transfer program to capture collective wisdom before it walked out the door.
For example, NRC has developed an enterprise social networking tool on its intranet to enable employees to collaborate and share information. It supports blogs, video posting, collaboration on documents and networking. It can transform online discussions into written documents for storage and search. NRC also has shot video interviews with workers who are leaving the agency and with subject matter experts to capture their knowledge and experience. The NRC staff uses the social networking tool to gain access to expertise, conduct and receive mentoring and engage with other employees.
Open and Transparent
The NRC strives to communicate openly with both the industry it oversees and the citizens it answers to, according to Jaczko and other NRC officials. They say open dialogue is a safety protocol. So NRC puts reams of information, “good, bad and ugly,” on its public Web site, says Eliot Brenner, the director of the Office of Public Affairs, including safety reviews and other data, excluding proprietary information, about every operating and proposed nuclear reactor in the United States. The new licensing process provides opportunities for public participation throughout rather than only at the end as in the past.
Strong public involvement strengthens public policy, Jaczko says. On his watch, the agency has developed a blog for disseminating technical information to the public in a form that lay readers can digest. Jaczko says the NRC embraced the administration’s open government initiative.
“Given the controversies over nuclear power, it’s really incumbent upon us to be an open and transparent agency,” Jaczko says. “That’s a legacy that this agency has had for a long time, and it’s certainly been something that’s been important to me personally.”
He has bucked tradition by suggesting that the five-member commission might operate more transparently. At present, members vote on policy issues and other matters by paper ballot. Results of those votes are revealed only after a majority of commissioners has prevailed.
“It would be more transparent if we were making our decisions in actual real-time voting sessions. It would be a change for the agency, but it’s something I certainly think would enhance openness and transparency,” Jaczko says. “It’s something I will continue to discuss with my colleagues.”
‘No. 1 Priority’
The agency’s proposed fiscal 2012 budget seeks $1.04 billion, a decrease of $28.7 million below fiscal 2010. The decline reflects a projected decline in licensing applications, according to a NRC news release. Most of the requested funds—$800.8 million—would be designated for nuclear reactor safety. “The new challenges in front of us are happening in the context of an expectation that we will do it more efficiently and effectively than we’ve ever done it,” Jaczko says. “I’m pleased to say that the agency is in a good position to do that. We have very good people here who are constantly looking to do things better and finding ways to improve.”
Jaczko holds that federal agencies can be models of efficiency and effectiveness. Regulators, such as NRC, have to be, he says. One need look no further than the Gulf oil spill, the financial debacle on Wall Street or the recent mine disaster in West Virginia to grasp the consequences of ineffective regulation, he says.
“With our limited resources, we don’t want to be chasing things that just aren’t that important from a safety perspective,” the chairman says. “We want to make sure we are focused on those things that have the most impact and the most importance to safety.”
Jaczko is overseeing a streamlining of reactor licensing and increasing opportunities for public input. Under a two-stage process the NRC had used for years, utilities could secure a license to build a new reactor at a cost of billions of dollars, only to fail to get a license to operate it because safety concerns weren’t adequately considered early on. Now the agency has expanded public participation throughout the licensing process, rather than reserving it to the end, so safety issues surface earlier.
The agency also has begun using alternative resolution to handle issues, ranging from contract disputes to discussions with licensees about how to handle enforcement actions, without resorting to civil penalties and other punitive measures.
NRC is benchmarking administrative functions, such as procurement, against the best practices of other federal agencies. “To make our internal processes a little more effective, a little more strategic. . . we’re working to incorporate [those strategies] here,” Jaczko says. “When we’re spending taxpayer money, we want to do that in the most effective way possible.”
Other federal organizations are tapping NRC’s expertise, particularly in safety and interaction with industry and the public, Jaczko says. Foreign governments seeking to develop or expand nuclear energy programs frequently also look to the NRC. A former NRC senior manager, for example, heads the nuclear regulatory agency of the United Arab Emirates, which is building a nuclear power program from scratch. And now, 11 NRC staffers are in Tokyo, assisting an increasingly desperate effort to stanch the release of radioactivity and ward off a meltdown at the crumbling and increasingly unstable Daiichi plant. But even amidst the urgency, Jaczko still intends to keep the NRC focused on Job 1.
“Our No. 1 priority will continue to be the safety and security of the existing [U.S. reactor] fleet. So we don’t intend to take resources away from that activity to help staff this effort to analyze what happened in Japan,” he assured interviewers on C-SPAN’s “Newsmaker’s” program on March 20.
This satellite view shows the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant after a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami
that hit the northeast coast of Japan on March 11, 2011.
John Pulley is a veteran journalist in the Washington, D.C., area and founder of The Pulley Group, an editorial services agency.
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