90% of Nuclear Regulators Sent Home Due To Shutdown

An anonymous reader writes "More than 90% of nuclear regulators are being sent home due to the Federal Government shutdown, as the agency announced today that it was out of funds. Without Congressional appropriations, the nuclear watchdog closes its doors for what appears to be the first time in U.S. history. CNN reports that while a skeleton crew remains to monitor the nation's 100 nuclear reactors, regulatory efforts to prevent a Fukushima-like incident in the United States have ceased."

Comments

What could possibly go wrong?

[TWiTfan]

The idea that anything bad could happen is just crazy talk. This is the United States!

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[icebike]

Having a bunch of bureaucrats sitting around doing nothing but shuffling papers provides no additional safety.
Sending them home provides no less safety.

The article and the summary would suggest everyone walked away from the control room, or at the very least, that the plant operators will now start drilling through the containment walls to roast hot dogs, or sell all the fuel to Iranians on the black market. More Scare tactics.

Everyone in the lapdog press is running around crying Oh No'es but NOTHING bad is happening.
The country is once again reminded how useless most layers of government really are.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Very little as apparently the article thinks the NRC is responsible for foiling terrorist plots to go after nuclear reactors.

Personally, I'm more worried about increased negligence from operators without somebody breathing down their necks than I am about terrorists.

(The most recent example, luckily nonnuclear, being the juxtaposition between the marathon bombers and the West Fertilizer company. Kill three people with a backpack full of explosives and all of greater Boston goes full tactical on you. Blow up 500,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, killing 15 and leveling a good portion of the nearby town? Eh, we try to avoid burdensome regulations here in Texas...)

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[Dzimas]

Unusual events are more common than you think. I remember being on call and receiving a weekend call, because a nuclear facility's environmental monitoring system was "acting up" and monitoring reports were including impossible errors. That sort of stuff can usually be traced back to a data entry or automated import error -- accidentally flagging the data as gigabecquerels instead of terabecquerels, and so on. It's usually a simple issue that can be identified in a couple of minutes, and there's some good natured banter with the tech on the other end while we figure out what's going on.

This time around, there appeared to be no mistakes - - there were inexplicably high radiation levels in an improbable location. Things get pretty serious at that point, and there's a very specific timeline for notifying regulators and taking remedial action. In this case, they verified the readings and determined what had gone wrong within hours. You can't simply fix the fault and continue on as normal, though. There was contamination outside the facility that needed to be addressed according to steps that the federal regulators deemed sufficient, and on an acceptable timeline. In the current shutdown, I'm not sure how well that process would work -- you need a fairly experienced team to work out the most effective remediation solution that balances cost, environmental impact and public safety. There's also the issue that if a regulatory specialist is conducting a site inspection, they aren't available for other work.

Unsafe Under 30 Days?

[ScottCooperDotNet]

If your nuclear systems become unsafe in under 30 days, are they really safe at all?

Some people are confused about why the lapse of appropriations is affecting the NRC when we collect fees for 90 percent of our budget. The bottom line is this: the NRC is not funded directly by the fees we collect. Fees collected by the NRC must be deposited in the U.S. Treasury, and the Congress provides us an appropriation.

Sounds like the NRC should be funded solely by fees paid by the companies they regulate.

10% staffed...

[malakai]

Another way to look at this, is that the NRC determined it only needs 10% of it's work force for 'essential' operations. Makes me wonder why we pay for the other 90%.

Also, it's amazing to go through the list of government services and see which shutdown and which remain open. Often the ones remaining open work off of 'user' fees. For example, certain meat packing plants pay for food and safety inspectors being on site. Passport fees will keep most passport operations flowing.

One wonders why that power plan companies don't simply pay the NRC directly, like food inspectors.

This fee system seems like an elegant way to run a business....

Re:October 17th Conspiracy Theorists Welcome!

[rahvin112]

If the debt ceiling is not raised we will default. That puts it on the table. If a single bill goes unpaid we are defaulting. It doesn't matter if it's a bond or a social security check. The market will treat it the same and it's going to be catastrophic. We run the risk of a collapse of the entire world economy (which is predicated on the stability of the US bond market).

Treasury has no way (without rewriting their entire software that controls the payment system) to sort payments by type. They would have to sort manually and with millions of payments due every single day it would take thousands of people to sort them all and pay only one type.

People that are downplaying default don't know what the fuck they are talking about. You want an example of default, refer to Argentina. They defaulted almost a decade ago and they STILL can't borrow money. Every single thing they import must be paid for with hard currency extracted from products they sell to other nations. Much like Venezuela they have shortages, business can't get parts and a whole host of problems that would make living there hellish. The US has a import/export deficit of several hundred billion dollars a month. That means all that stops, nothing will be imported without a corresponding export of equal value. Do you have any idea how much that would impact the world economy let alone the US economy? It would lead to a recession that would be WORSE than 2008. In fact we probably wouldn't recover from it without a big fucking world war again.

Maybe I'm being paranoid but you are seriously playing down severe risks. If we default (meaning we don't pay a bill when required) we are looking at a severe recession with high double digit unemployment that will make the last few years of 12% unemployment look like a picnic.