[Lamplighter]

Two views of government oversight and regulation...

Bloomberg News
Brian Wingfield
March 10, 2012

Post-Fukushima U.S. Nuclear Reactor Rules Questioned Over Cost, Adequacy

The first rules for U.S. reactors imposed in response to last year’s nuclear disaster in Japan
are fueling a debate over the adequacy and cost of the measures.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission yesterday approved three
orders to improve safety at the nation’s 104 operating reactors,
issued following a triple meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant,
which occurred a year ago this weekend.

While the NRC’s orders “are necessary to address the major gaps in the nuclear power safety net,”
they “do not go far enough,” Jim Riccio, a nuclear-energy analyst in Washington
for anti-nuclear group Greenpeace USA, said in an e-mail.

The rules include a requirement for nuclear plants owned by companies
such as Exelon Corp. (EXC) and Entergy Corp. (ETR) to have a plan to indefinitely survive blackouts.
Reactor owners also must have adequate instruments to monitor spent-fuel cooling pools.
Another order calls for older reactors with General Electric Co (GE).-design
containment structures similar to those that failed at Fukushima to have sturdier venting systems
to prevent damage to reactor cores.
<snip>

“We need the NRC to be an industry watchdog, not an industry lapdog,”
Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts,
the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee,
said in a statement yesterday.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8300-503544_1...4.html?tag=hdr
CBS News
Sarah B. Boxer
March 9, 2012

Romney: Regulators should make "friends" with business

JACKSON, Miss. - Campaigning in the Deep South,
where he faces tough opposition from more conservative rivals for the GOP nomination,
Mitt Romney is promoting an anti-government regulation theme and
a vision of a new environment in which regulators "see businesses
and enterprises of all kinds as their friends."<snip>

Under a Romney administration, regulations would be "updated and modernized and streamlined," he said, and,
"I want regulators to see businesses and enterprises of all kinds as their friends,
and to encourage them and to move them along."

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