I also believe that, in hindsight, we will appreciate the effort associated with this change, because we will recognize clearly our own increased effectiveness and excellence. As commonly understood, safety means freedom from exposure to danger, or protection from harm. In a practical sense, an activity is deemed to be safe if the perceived risks are judged to be acceptable. In the context of NRC regulation, safety means avoiding undue risk or, stated another way, providing reasonable assurance of adequate protection for the public in connection with the use of source, byproduct and special nuclear materials. The definition of compliance is much simpler.
Compliance simply means meeting applicable regulatory requirements.
Safety is the fundamental regulatory objective, and compliance with NRC requirements plays a fundamental role in giving the NRC confidence that safety is being maintained. In the context of risk-informed regulation, compliance can play a very important role in ensuring that key assumptions used in underlying risk and engineering analyses remain valid. Adequate protection is presumptively assured by compliance with NRC requirements. Circumstances may arise, however, where new information reveals, for example, that an unforeseen hazard exists or that there is a substantially greater potential for a known hazard to occur. In such situations, the NRC has the statutory authority to require licensee action above and beyond existing regulations to maintain the level of protection necessary to avoid undue risk to public health and safety.