Government's Sustainability Moment - CGI Initiative for Collaborative ...

grasp the consequences of ineffective regulation, hesays.“With our limited resources, we don’t want to bechasing things that just aren’t that important from asafety perspective,” the chairman says. “We want tomake sure we are focused on those things that havethe most impact and the most importance to safety.”Jaczko is overseeing a streamlining of reactor licensingand increasing opportunities for public input.Under a two-stage process the NRC had used foryears, utilities could secure a license to build a newreactor at a cost of billions of dollars, only to fail toget a license to operate it because safety concernsweren’t adequately considered early on. Now theagency has expanded public participation throughoutthe licensing process, rather than reserving it to theend, so safety issues surface earlier.The agency also has begun using alternative resolutionto handle issues, ranging from contract disputesto discussions with licensees about how to handle enforcementactions, without resorting to civil penaltiesand other punitive measures.NRC is benchmarking administrative functions,such as procurement, against the best practices ofother federal agencies. “To make our internal processesa little more effective, a little more strategic. . . we’re working to incorporate [those strategies]here,” Jaczko says. “When we’re spending taxpayermoney, we want to do that in the most effective waypossible.”Other federal organizations are tapping NRC’s expertise,particularly in safety and interaction with industryand the public, Jaczko says. Foreign governmentsseeking to develop or expand nuclear energyprograms frequently also look to the NRC. A formerNRC senior manager, for example, heads the nuclearregulatory agency of the United Arab Emirates, whichis building a nuclear power program from scratch.And now, 11 NRC staffers are in Tokyo, assisting anincreasingly desperate effort to stanch the release ofradioactivity and ward off a meltdown at the crumblingand increasingly unstable Daiichi plant. But evenamidst the urgency, Jaczko still intends to keep theNRC focused on Job 1.“Our No. 1 priority will continue to be the safetyand security of the existing [U.S. reactor] fleet. So wedon’t intend to take resources away from that activityto help staff this effort to analyze what happened inJapan,” he assured interviewers on C-SPAN’s “Newsmaker’s”program on March 20.JOHN Pulley is a veteran journalist in the Washington,D.C., area and founder of The Pulley Group, aneditorial services agency.This satellite view shows the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant after a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunamithat hit the northeast coast of Japan on March 11, 2011.PHOTO BY DIGITALGLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGESS P R I N G 2 0 11 | COLL ABOR ATIVEGOV.ORG/LE AD | Leadership 29