Power Play
By Katherine McIntire Peters kpeters@govexec.com Government Executive July 16, 2007
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn't licensed a new reactor in threE decades. That's about to change in a big way.
When Dale Klein left his job managing nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs at the Defense Department to become chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in July 2006, he had a singular worry: "I was afraid I would find a culture averse to making decisions," he says. NRC is about to take on a new high-stakes mission in nuclear power production, vastly changed since the 1960s and early 1970s, when the bulk of the nation's fleet of 104 nuclear reactors was designed. It's been nearly 30 years since the agency issued a license to build a nuclear reactor, but over the next three years, power industry executives plan to seek licenses to build at least 30 new reactors.
Klein, a nuclear engineer and scholar who spent most of his career in the University of Texas System before joining the Bush administration, says his worry was misplaced. Decision-making capacity at the agency, which in recent years has issued dozens of license renewals and requests for power upgrades, is robust, he says. Instead, he finds himself most concerned about atrophied business systems and seemingly mundane management issues - a severe space shortage as the agency recruits hundreds of new employees to handle the new licensing mission, a dependence on obsolete computer software for agency operations, and a billing and payroll system so antiquated that no vendor will maintain it.
Those management challenges co-incide with tremendous change at the agency responsible for licensing and regulating civilian uses of nuclear materials to protect public health, safety, security and the environment. It was a demanding enough mission even before utilities began informing NRC in recent years that they were planning to apply for dozens of new licenses to build and operate nuclear reactors. In anticipation of the new applications, which will start trickling in later this year and build over the next few years, the agency has begun staffing a new inspection office in Atlanta (most of the applications will be for plants in the South). And in January, it stood up a new directorate at its Rockville, Md., headquarters, the Office of New Reactors.
The hiring challenge is significant. The agency expects to grow from about 3,100 employees last year to more than 4,000 by 2010. For the most part, these will not be simple positions to fill, but rather highly skilled scientists, engineers and others with specialized knowledge and technical expertise - at a time when industry is looking to recruit many of the same skills. A study by the Government Accountability Office released in January found that about 16 percent of NRC employees are eligible to retire, a figure that will grow to 33 percent by 2010.
http://www.governmentexecutive.com/features/0707-15/0707-15s3.htm
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