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RIC Roundup

By Eric McErlain
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's 17th annual Regulatory Information Conference is taking place in the Washington suburbs this week, and it's an important event on the industry calendar, as it gives both the Commission and the nuclear energy industry a chance to share a common forum on a wide vareity of issues.

Today, NEI President and CEO Skip Bowman spoke at an NEI-sponsored luncheon on the topic of the need for regulatory stability:

But this commitment to safety-focused, performance-based regulation leading to realistic conservatism needs to move beyond the reactor oversight process and be codified in regulatory space. It must move beyond strong statements by today’s strong leaders and be codified into regulation.

So much of the progress made to date has been driven by the leadership of this commission and today’s staff, but it seems sometimes to be based on verbal statements of policy.

Since operators, regulators and other stakeholders agree that this approach best achieves our separate responsibilities and leads to our common goals, we should cast them in stone and bring them down from the mountain.

That means we need to codify a safety-focused, performance-based approach to the agency’s entire span of regulatory responsibility. This approach should be conservative, yet realistic.


Click here for the remarks of NRC Chairman Nils Diaz, and here for the remarks of Commissioner Jeffrey Merrifield from the opening day of the conference.

For more, visit the NEI Speech Archive, or click here for the NRC counterpart.

UPDATE: Click here for the conference program which contains links to most of the presentations.

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