Washington Office: 1707 H Street NW Suite 600 x Washington DC 20006-3919 x 202-223-6133 x FAX: 202-223-6162

Cambridge Headquarters: Two Brattle Square x Cambridge MA 02238-9105 x 617-547-5552 x FAX: 617-864-9405

California Office: 2397 Shattuck Avenue Suite 203 x Berkeley CA 94704-1567 x 510-843-1872 x FAX: 510-843-3785

April 18, 2008

Robert Gramm

Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, Mail Stop 011A11

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Washington, DC 20555-0001

SUBJECT: COMMENTS ON NRC SAFETY CULTURE PROCESS CHANGES

Dear Mr Gramm:

Yesterday’s public meeting was extremely helpful to me in understanding the nature of and reason for 

proposed changes to the NRC’s safety culture process. I appreciate the NRC staff taking the time to meet 

with external stakeholders and solicit comments and questions about the proposals. I also greatly 

appreciate that Nathan Sanfilippo of the NRC staff distributed electronic copies of the draft documents to 

be discussed during the public meeting about a week in advance. This information enabled me to make a 

more informed decision about whether to attend the public meeting and then to be better prepared to more 

meaningfully participate during the meeting. 

I provided a few comments during yesterday’s meeting. Attached are my full comments, including those 

made yesterday and supplemented by a few others. 

Overall, I remain convinced that the NRC is on the right track with its safety culture process and that the 

proposed changes represent a minor mid-course correction warranted at this point based on information 

developed since the safety culture process was instituted.

Sincerely,

David Lochbaum

Director, Nuclear Safety Project

Attachment: Comments on NRC Safety Culture Process Changes
COMMENTS ON NRC SAFETY CULTURE PROCESS CHANGES

Comment No. Document Comment

1 Cross-cutting Issue Review 

Effort

PV-6 recommended that IP 95003 be revised to permit the 

NRC to verify a licensee’s root cause investigation in lieu 

of the NRC performing a separate root cause evaluation. 

UCS feels it is extremely important to maintain the 

equivalent amount of publicly available information when 

NRC credits a licensee effort to replace or reduce the 

scope of an NRC effort. 

In this case, the proposed change would replace or reduce 

the level of effort of a root cause evaluation performed by 

the NRC. The licensee’s root cause evaluation should be

placed on the docket and thus made publicly available 

since it forms the basis for the NRC’s reduced effort. 

It is not acceptable for the NRC inspectors to review the 

licensee’s non-docketed root cause evaluation and provide 

a brief summary of it in a publicly available NRC 

inspection report.

2 Cross-cutting Issue Review 

Effort

PV-8 recommended that NRC should consider developing 

a standardized safety culture assessment process.

UCS feels it is beneficial for the NRC to communicate as 

clearly as possible its expectations to its licensees, 

including attributes of an acceptable safety culture 

assessment process.

In this case, the NRC could achieve that communication 

goal by endorsing an industry procedure or guidance 

document. 

However, the NRC should be extremely cautious not to 

discard the immense value from diverse methodology 

along the pathway to standardization. For example, the 

industry often submits topical reports describing 

methodology it proposes to apply in meeting NRC’s welldefined ECCS objectives. In reviewing the topical reports, 

the NRC staff employs equally valid but diverse 

computational methods to verify that the proposed 

methodology is acceptable. 

Likewise, better safety culture assessments will be 

achieved when the licensee employs a NRC-accepted 

method to achieve results that are then verified by the 

NRC using different methods than when NRC merely replows the same ground covered by the licensee.

3 Cross-cutting Issue Review PV-13 recommends assessing precursors as part of the 
April 18, 2008

Page 3 of 5

Comment No. Document Comment

Effort baseline inspection program. 

UCS shares the concerns expressed by Fred Mashburn of 

TVA and other industry representatives during yesterday’s 

meeting. The lure of the leading indicator that will prevent 

all substantive performance problems is quite strong, but 

that role is reserved for industry and industry’s agents 

(i.e., INPO) and not a regulator. The regulator’s role 

should be focused on the least-lagging indicators rather 

than leading indicators.

4 Cross-cutting Issue Review 

Effort

PV-15 recommended that consideration be given to staff 

the NRC resident inspectors at three unit sites at N + 1 

rather than N.

UCS feels this recommendation is overly narrow and 

misses the true opportunity. In 1999, the NRC changed its 

resident inspector staffing policy from N + 1 to N. Since 

that change, failure of the NRC staff to abide by the new 

N staffing policy was identified as a contributing factor to 

the Davis-Besse debacle. Now, even adhering to the N 

policy has been identified as a potential contributing 

factor at Palo Verde. This situation begs loudly for a 

broad review of the N vs. N + 1 policy, not a narrow oneoff band-aid fix at the very few three unit sites.

5 Cross-cutting Issue Review 

Effort

PV-17 recommended that the NRC add one FTE per 

region to aid the initial and continuing training needs of 

the NRC inspection staff.

UCS feels that safety culture skills are not intuitive and 

require development. This recommendation seems fully 

justified.

One way to implement this recommendation, or a way to 

supplement it, would be to view the 95003 inspections as 

training opportunities. On page 64 of the draft revision to 

the 95003 inspection procedure, the NRC staff states “For 

planning purposes, the ROP budgets 3000 hours 

(distributed among the four regions) to conduct one 95003 

inspection per year.” UCS recognizes that this statement is 

neither a commitment to perform one 95003 inspection 

annually nor a constraint to perform only one 95003 

inspection. But it reflects the NRC’s expectation that, on 

average, only one 95003 inspection per year will be 

required across the country. All things being equal, this 

expectation translates into each of the four NRC regions 

“hosting” a 95003 inspection once every four years. Ths 

frequency is less often than all other inspections 

performed within the three-year cycle of the reactor 

oversight process. In industry parlance, the 95003 
April 18, 2008

Page 4 of 5

Comment No. Document Comment

inspection is thus an “infrequently performed evolution.”

Returning to PV-17 from this lengthy preamble, there may 

be justifiable value in each 95003 inspection including 

observers from the other regions. The 95003 inspection 

team will very likely include working members from the 

other regions. But those members may not be in the region 

or have other jobs within the region four years later when 

that region hosts a 95003 inspection. If each 95003 

inspection team included observers (e.g., junior staffers 

with no assignments other than to acquire an 

understanding of the process), the regions could be better 

positioned to assemble the team when it’s their turn. 

With respect to PV-17, the one FTE per year for the 

training needs of the inspection staff might cover on-thejob observation training during 95003 inspections.

6 Draft Manual Chapter 

0305

Will the proposed safety culture process changes apply to 

the entire site organization? In other words, are security 

officers included or excluded? 

UCS feels that the safety culture process changes must 

apply to the entire site rather than the entire site minus the 

security force.

7 Draft Inspection Procedure 

95003

On page 2, the NRC proposes a change to enable the 

95003 inspection team to delay decision-making on the 

significance of findings made by the team.

UCS strongly feels it is entirely wrong for the NRC to 

adopt a cheap “operator work-around” to delay reaching a 

final determination on the significance of inspector 

findings. SDP timeliness has long been a major fault of 

the ROP and the NRC should be seeking ways to improve 

rather than further delay SDP timing. 

If the 95003 experience at Palo Verde indicated that the 

team members had more work than time to perform it, the 

right answer is to add staff until the team can complete its 

work in the allotted time. Depriving the public of timely 

notification of finding significance is the wrong way to 

resolve this problem.

It seems illogical to develop a “work-around” for the 

95003 inspection team findings that is not necessary for 

baseline, 95001, and 95002 inspections. The 95003 

inspection is higher profile in terms of public monitoring 

and deserves comparable – not reduced – timeliness.
April 18, 2008

Page 5 of 5

Comment No. Document Comment

8 Draft Inspection Procedure 

95003

On page 15, the NRC proposes that the team obtain 

information from licensee safety culture assessments 

conducted within the past 5 years. 

UCS feels that, because the ROP is framed on a three-year 

cycle, information older than three years must be shown to 

be relevant before it is assumed to be so.

In this case, the NRC team should obtain safety culture 

information within the past 3 years. Good or bad, safety 

culture information from five years ago is as irrelevant to 

today’s situation as the reactor’s Action Matrix column 

placement from five years ago.

9 Slides – “Meeting on Draft 

Enhancements to Reactor 

Oversight Process Safety 

Culture Guidance with 

ROP Task Force”

The last bullet on slide 45 involves the NRC’s proposal to 

provide additional guidance on documenting in inspection 

reports when findings are no assigned cross-cutting 

aspects. During the meeting, NRC staff explained that 

their current thinking is to provide a one-line sentence in 

the inspection reports to the effect that the finding was 

determined not to have cross-cutting aspects, with no 

mention of the underlying analysis or justification.

UCS feels very strongly that ALL regulatory decisions 

should be documented along with the bases for those 

decisions. 

In this case, the NRC inspection reports must contain at 

least brief discussions of why the NRC labeled certain 

findings as having cross-cutting aspects and did not assign 

aspects to seemingly similar findings. UCS is not 

suggesting that the NRC is wrong. Far from it – UCS 

believes that, with few exceptions, the NRC staff gets it 

right. The NRC staff evaluates findings and, based on a 

variety of factors, determines that some have cross-cutting 

aspects while others do not. All we advocate is 

documenting that decision-making process in Cliff Notes 

rather than encyclopedic style.