"All Deliberate Speed for Nuclear Reforms?"

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is moving forward on recommendations made by an internal task force studying the Fukushima Daiichi triple meltdown. But it is not moving quite the way its chairman wanted."



"The task force prepared its report in 90 days and presented it on July 12. The chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, said his five-member commission should decide within the 90 days following that date how to handle the recommendations. But three of his fellow commissioners disagreed.

On Friday, the commission announced a revised plan. The most sweeping recommendation of the task force, to rewrite the commission’s rules to integrate various categories of requirements and recommendations into a single coherent structure, will have to wait. The commission’s staff will study that recommendation and produce a report within 18 months that provides options on how to achieve that, under an agreement of the five commissioners.

The rest will move somewhat faster. By Sept. 9, nearly 60 days after the report was issued, the commission’s staff is now to produce a paper on the other 11 recommendations, specifying which of those “should be implemented without unnecessary delay.” The staff should hold public meetings to discuss those recommendations, the commission said.

Then, by Oct. 3, the staff should produce a paper that sets priorities for the 11 recommendations, it said."

Matthew L. Wald reports for the New York Times' Green blog August 19, 2011.

Source: Green (NYT), 08/22/2011