ROCKVILLE, Md. -- Nuclear safety experts have no official definition of it. They don't know how to measure it. But they desperately want it at each of the nation's 103 commercial nuclear plants.
That's the odd status of an idea called "safety culture," the topic of an unusual session this week of the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's safety advisory board.
The Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards summoned experts to a meeting Thursday at the commission's headquarters in Rockville to help it decide whether to recommend that the agency begin regulating the culture of nuclear power plants.
It would be an upheaval in government regulatory philosophy, with the NRC moving beyond setting rules for mechanical and electrical systems and venturing into the realm of management attitudes, leadership styles, even corporate ethical values.
"We have no insight into the safety culture of the utilities," noted committee member Stephen L. Rosen. "Safety culture" means the collection of characteristics and attitudes found in nuclear power plant owners and employees that reinforces a high priority on safety.
"We need some mechanism for NRC to remove toxic leadership," suggested David Collins, an engineering analyst at the Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Connecticut, noting that overbearing executives can diminish plant safety.
Like several other speakers and committee members, Collins expressed reservations about attempting to enact extensive safety culture regulations. Existing regulations could get the same result, they said, if fully enforced by the NRC.
The NRC has long been reluctant to regulate prevailing attitudes and ideas at nuclear power plants and, in the 1980s, even forbid use of the term "safety culture," said Thomas E. Murley, a former NRC regional administrator who helped pioneer the idea. "At long last, safety culture is back from the graveyard of forbidden lexicon in this country," he noted at the workshop.
FirstEnergy Corp.'s Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station exhumed the idea. Investigators identified a defective safety culture at the northwest Ohio plant as a major reason for the incident that has kept Davis Besse shut down for almost two years. A leak of corrosive water, which plant managers overlooked for years while skimping on maintenance, ate a 4-by-5 inch hole into the reactor vessel head. The vessel head is a key safety system that keeps nuclear fuel and radioactive water inside the reactor.
"The principle causes of Davis-Besse were cultural," noted Jack Grobe, who heads a special NRC panel overseeing improvements at Davis-Besse.
"I think this area is very critical," he said, suggesting that other nuclear power plants may have similar problems.
Lew Meyers, FirstEnergy chief executive officer, told the committee that safety culture improvements are among numerous changes being made at the facility as it heads toward a projected August restart.
Michael Woods can be reached at mwoods@nationalpress.com or 1-202-662-7072.
