Government

Boxer Presses NRC Chief About Post-Fukushima Recommendations

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wants the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to move to implement a NRC task force's safety recommendations for U.S. reactors in the wake of the March 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi accident in Japan.

Boxer said at a June 4 committee hearing that it was "scandalous" that none of the 12 recommendations the task force issued in July 2011 had been carried out yet at U.S. nuclear powerplants.

She said NRC has completed its actions on four of the 12 task-force items, including power-blackout mitigation; installing spent-fuel pool instrumentation; and requiring emergency-response plans to cover long blackouts and accidents at multiple reactors.

NRC Chairman Allison Mac- farlane said the agency "continues to make significant progress" in addressing post-Fukushima lessons learned. She said most of the top-priority actions NRC plans in response to the task-force report "are on track to be completed before the end of 2016."

As ENR's former Washington Bureau Chief, Tom Ichniowski wrote about the federal government since the George H.W. Bush administration, and covered at least five major highway bills. A recognized expert on government policy on infrastructure and regulation, Tom is also a Baltimore native and Orioles fan who grew up rooting for Brooks and Frank Robinson. He is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, where he once used “unrelentless” in a headline.

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