NRC Celebrates A Milestone — 40 Years of Safety and Service

NRC Celebrates A Milestone — 40 Years of Safety and Service

1 Comment Posted by Moderator on January 16, 2015

Tom Wellock
NRC Historian
It’s been 40 years since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission began operations on January 19, 1975. To be sure, the agency inherited a mixed legacy from its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC had established an approach to reactor safety still used today, but critics claimed it worked too closely with the nuclear industry to promote nuclear power. As a new agency, the NRC had to demonstrate that it would be an unbiased, independent regulator.
Over the years, domestic and international events have challenged the NRC to define what independence meant. A new video on the NRC’s YouTube channel shows us how, in the early years, the essential elements of the NRC’s character were developed and remains today. For example, as the video shows, between 1975 and 1979, the NRC dealt with a major fire at the Brown’s Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama,  a controversial request to export uranium to India, staff dissent over reactor safety, and tough questioning of its research conclusions regarding the probabilities of nuclear accidents.
From these experiences, the NRC learned that being an independent safety regulator took more than legislation. It meant cultivating a diverse staff, seeking out dissent and heeding critics. Safety research needed to be conducted free of perceived bias, and it learned the limits within which a regulatory agency may act under the United States’ constitutional separation of powers.
All these lessons have proven to be an asset for the NRC when it dealt with its greatest crisis — the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island; and in learning lessons from watershed nuclear events at both Chernobyl and Fukushima. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch the video.