person:faces safety

  • New Nuclear Commission Chief Faces Safety Questions - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/us/new-nuclear-commission-chief-faces-waste-storage-questions.html?_r=1

    as a member of a blue-ribbon commission appointed to explore alternatives to Yucca Mountain, [Dr. Macfarlane] argued for changes in the process used to choose a site. (Congress chose Yucca Mountain over the objections of Nevada, which later gained enough political and legal muscle to fight it off.)

    While Dr. Macfarlane was upbeat about the long-term prospects for nuclear waste, she took a somewhat harsher tone on the industry’s evaluation of earthquake risk. The old approach, which involved building a plan to withstand the strongest earthquake a site has ever had, will not do, she said.

    Sometimes engineers do not understand geology and approach it as a static body of knowledge, she said.

    “As a geologist, I also know that geological knowledge is constantly changing,” she said. For example, she said, geologists did not think there could be a mega-earthquake off the east coast of Japan until the Indian Ocean earthquake off Indonesia in December 2004, which also produced a devastating tsunami.

    (...)

    On another front, Dr. Macfarlane said she had instructed her staff to “use more transparent language.”

    “People who live near a nuclear facility should be able to read the documents that the N.R.C. produces,” she said. “That will certainly give them more confidence of our ability to regulate safety.”

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