[SCADASEC] NRC Proposes to increase openness on security info

[Bob Radvanovsky]

NRC PROPOSES TO INCREASE OPENNESS ON SECURITY INFO

Rather unexpectedly, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is asking for
public comment on whether and how it should disclose more information
to the public on the security of nuclear power plants and other
facilities.

"We view nuclear regulation as the public's business and believe it
should be transacted as openly and candidly as possible," said NRC
Executive Director of Operations Bill Borchardt.

Among other things, the NRC wants to know what currently undisclosed
information members of the public would like to have released: "What
specific details would increase your level of satisfaction in our
regulatory oversight of licensed facilities?"

The NRC published a request for comment in the Federal Register on July
29, along with related background material.  

     http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2008/07/nrc072908.html

It is practically a law of bureaucratic physics that government
agencies do not spontaneously seek to become more transparent and
accountable absent some significant change in personnel or other
triggering event.

According to David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union
of Concerned Scientists, the triggering event in this case was
congressional outrage at the NRC's concealment of a major "nuclear
safety event" in 2006 at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in Erwin,
Tennessee.

In that case, approximately 35 liters of highly enriched uranium
solution leaked and spilled, creating the possibility of a criticality
accident, i.e. an uncontrolled chain reaction.  Yet "NRC failed to
notify the public or Congress for 13 months regarding this serious
incident," complained Rep. John Dingell in a July 3, 2007 letter to NRC
Chairman Dale E. Klein.

"We call on NRC to make every effort to withhold from public view only
those documents that contain security sensitive information, and
restore to the public all other documents that have been withheld....,"
Rep. Dingell wrote last year.

     http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/nrc/dingell070307.pdf

The current NRC request for public comment on ways to increase
openness, Mr. Lochbaum told Secrecy News, "is the agency's bureaucratic
effort to extricate themselves from the hole they dug."

In 2003 congressional testimony, Mr. Lochbaum described the NRC's past
refusal to engage with outside experts and public interest
organizations on security policy.

"The net effect of the agency's actions is to exclude the public from
intervening on security issues in specific licensing cases and also to
exclude the public from participating, even in the limited capacity of
merely expressing concerns, in security policy discussions," Mr.
Lochbaum testified at that time.

   http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/jump.jsp?origID=pdf-1008