Too Much or Too Little Regulation?

According to a piece in today's New York Times, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the industry it was created to regulate are shooting dice with the public's safety and sooner or later they are going to get craps. [Click on this post's title for a link to the article.]

A few days ago I heard on NPR that Vermont Yankee, a nuclear plant that was cited for leaks of radioactive tritium into the soil and groundwater, will probably remain open despite the state legislature's vote not to renew its license. Evidently the NRC's rubber-stamp approval of the license renewal (one day before the earthquake and tsunami caused Japan's nuclear crisis) supercedes state and local action. The matter will probably be decided in the federal courts. (Gee, I wonder how the corporation friendly Roberts' Court will rule if the suit reaches that far.)

The article lists incident after incident in which the industry overruled or bullied the regulatory agency into accepting questionable fixes and untested materials in aging American plants. These plants are OLD. Many of them share design flaws with those currently out of control in Japan. They should be subject to more and stricter oversight now, not less.

In the meantime, our U. S. Congress is targeting the budgets and actual existence of all the regulatory agencies - pulling their teeth so to speak - on the pretense of pursuing a "job friendly" agenda. This is not about producing jobs. It is about serving their corporate constituency. How did that constituency become more powerful and acquire more rights than the citizens in our democracy?And what has it done with that power? It has cheated its shareholders, exported our jobs overseas, polluted our environment, destroyed our economic diversity and is dismantling our middle class.

Corporations are amoral. Corporate decisions are made on a risk/reward basis that considers profit and loss of money, usually with a short-term horizon. Loss of human life or damage to the environment are looked upon as necessary collateral damange. A society that does not regulate corporate entities will be destroyed by them.

When are our national, state and local governments going to recognize this? There are many ticking time bombs out there. Our aging, poorly maintained nuclear power plants are not the least among them.