Though Nuclear Crisis Continues, IAEA Can’t Force Safety Overhaul

On Monday, September 12, an incinerator explosion at a French nuclear waste processing center killed one, injured four, and created just enough nuclear news to edge this week’s other nuclear story right out of the headlines.

The explosion, which is reported not to have caused any leak of radiation, was at a facility that reprocesses used nuclear reactor fuel in order to create a more toxic, less stable form of fuel commonly known as “mixed oxide” or MOX. MOX, which is a tasty blend of uranium and plutonium, was in at least some of the rods in some of the reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi facility when it suffered catastrophic failures after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami–and the presence of MOX fuel made the fallout from explosions at the Japanese plant more dangerous as a result. (More dangerous than already extremely dangerous might seem like a trivial addendum, but it is of note if for no other reason than the manufacture and use of MOX fuel is what nuclear power proponents think of when they call it a “renewable resource.”)

And it was the Fukushima disaster that brought diplomats, nuclear scientists, and government regulators to the negotiating table in Vienna for this week’s annual meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency. At issue, a June proposal by IAEA chief Yukia Amano that the world’s nuclear nations respond to the Japanese crisis with tougher safety regulations and mandatory inspections.

The proposal–which included a one-year deadline for new safety standards and an 18-month window for stress tests on all reactors–had the backing of large nuclear power-generating nations such as Canada, Germany, and Australia, as well as many non-nuclear nations across the globe, but that support and the ongoing disaster in Japan were not enough to overcome sustained, behind-the-scenes efforts to derail this plan. When the IAEA finally took up a draft resolution on Tuesday, it contained no timelines, deadlines or mandatory inspections. Instead, IAEA safety checks, peer reviews, and other moves to ensure nuclear safety may be taken up “upon request” of the nuclear state in question.

Which parties were behind the near-total neutering of the IAEA proposal? Who was responsible for reassuring the global nuclear power industry that virtually no lessons would be learned from the continuing crisis in Japan? It should be no surprise to find traditional foes of nuclear oversight such as Russia, China, Pakistan, and India (along with Argentina) pushing hard against the IAEA. And, given Barack Obama’s very public proclamations of support for nuclear power within days of the Japanese quake, it should probably also not surprise anyone to find the United States right there with them:

[T]he United States was also comfortable with the decision to strip the plan of language entrusting the agency with more clout that was present in earlier drafts and leaving oversight to governments, national safety authorities and power companies. . . .

And now, courtesy of the same AP story, the comic relief:

Such a stance reflects Washington’s strong belief in domestic regulatory bodies having full control of nuclear safety.

The Associated Press, which deserves immense credit for this summer’s exposé on the cozy relationship government regulators have with the nuclear industry it is supposed to police, clearly didn’t give this story the same level of effort (click through for the amusing use of the word “establish” in the penultimate paragraph). . . or maybe it did, and is just bad at communicating the sarcasm. As documented in the months since the start of the Fukushima crisis, a small collection of too-weak recommendations from a Nuclear Regulatory Commission task force is now dying a slow death thanks to lobbying from the nuclear industry, and the NRC commissioners and elected officials receptive to it.

This week’s physical explosion might have taken place in southern France, but the shot that needs to be heard around the world is the IAEA firing blanks, thanks in part to the concerted efforts of a United States government in the grip of a dangerous but powerful industry. At the same time a relative non-event like the Solyndra bankruptcy seems to be growing scandalous legs thanks to obsessive media attention, the real Obama administration scandal is its addiction to old, expensive, dangerous, and non-renewable forms of energy. (See here, too, a very interesting piece tying America’s decline to dwindling petroleum supplies.) That this “The business of America is business-as-usual” story has not made headlines is, itself, probably not news, but what can–and likely will someday–happen because the US government is adamant that Fukushima changes nothing will not be so easy to ignore.