Wanted to actually implement safety lessons learned from Fukushima.
Wanted to stop pouring money into a waste storage facility that the people of Nevada refuse to allow to open.

What an insensitive prick. He had no grasp of the fact that as an NRC Commissioner, his basic duty is to protect and serve the profits of the nuclear industry.

Good riddance.

You must admit that it's possible for a supervisor to be 100% correct in all of his professional decisions, but still be an unacceptable person to fill a role. Abuse of subordinates, dishonesty, harassment, abuse of power (that he didn't have), etc... are all reasons to go.


Again, the IG was reportedly almost done with another report on his "leadership" (sic). It's doubtful that it had anything to do with whether he was more "pro-safety" than other commissioners. Do you really think it's a coincidence?

But Hey! Just think of the mint he's going to make when he turns "whistleblower"!

What an insensitive prick. He had no grasp of the fact that as an NRC Commissioner, his basic duty is to protect and serve the profits of the nuclear industry.

Good riddance.

Anyone appointed to serve at the pleasure of the President has a basic duty to do so in an honorable way.

He failed and it justifiably cost him his job.

It's dishonest to attempt to spin his ouster as an industry effort to get rid of him. To the extent it was anything like that, he was the one stupid enough to load the gun and give them the trigger. Surely we can find someone who will protect and serve the public and also not embarrass the President and party?

That's what a nuclear industry lobbyist said back in January 2008, long before Obama was elected.
Looks like they finally succedded.

It's a win all around (except for Markey of course).

Surely we can find someone who can do the job without the dishonesty and abuse?

Even though they have a better regulatory mandate, they are arguably worse than Japan's NISA. They have been given sweeping powers with absolutely no one looking over their shoulders - not the public, not Congress, not the Courts, not the States. And given the complete ownership of the Commissioners by the industry, means the nuclear industry has almost a completely free hand to do whatever they want.

When just basic caution is intolerable in even a pronuclear Commissioner, you'd better start worrying.

The NRC deserves better than Jaczko.

From:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/05/21/why-jaczko-leaving-the-nrc-is-good-for-america/

Much of the U.S. government’s strength has rested with the fact that we tend to want technically competent people in charge of technically challenging agencies. So it is with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United States Geological Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Thus, the leaders of these organizations usually were chosen from among their ranks, people who moved up through the organization and knew the important issues of those fields. Since the 1980’s, however, many of these leaders have been political appointments that have undermined their group’s effectiveness. Most recently such an appointment was Chairman Jaczko of the NRC.

The NRC shouldn't be a political football

In the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, the NRC was strengthened to withstand much of the political and industry pressure that existed prior to 1979, and has mandated reforms and requirements that have cost the industry plenty, more than any other energy sector. The attempt by the Lt Governor of Pennsylvania to interfere in the control room of Three Mile Island, and which made the accident worse, was one of the drivers for a strong NRC. Now, even the President has no jurisdiction in the control room during an emergency. Too bad the Soviet Union didn’t have an NRC when a political heavyweight in Chernobyl’s control room caused that disaster against the protests of the nuclear engineers.

The politicians have their place; and the scientists / engineers have theirs.

PamW

However, the allusion to politics at Chernobyl has me a bit befuddled. What is the writer of the Forbes piece talking about? Who was the "political heavyweight in Chernobyl's control room?"

There's no doubt at all that the ill-advised test that led to disaster at Chernobyl was run in a manner that displayed a failure to understand the dynamics of the reactor. But everything I've been able to find trying to make sense of this throwaway line in an opinion piece suggests that the problem wasn't politics (in the usual sense) trumping engineers, but having engineers with one kind of expertise (electrical) running a test whose safe conduct required a different kind of expertise (reactor operation), exacerbated by details like a late start and a change in operator shifts. So on one hand there politics was involved in the way it frequently is whenever a "technological imperative" (in this case, to get the test done against some artificial deadline) comes into play; but on the other hand, it's not political in the sense that there was any kind of political struggle in the USSR that hinged in a meaningful way on whether or not the ill-fated test happened on schedule, or even happened at all.

I'm also curious as to exactly what Lt. Governor Scranton allegedly did to "interfere" in the control room at TMI. As far as I've been able to tell, all he did was visit the site and get annoyed when he learned that the utility had done some venting resulting in releases of radioactivity - an understandable annoyance after he'd given a press conference announcing there had been no releases, based on what he'd been told.

If memory serves, and it's been a long time; I recall something about Scanton having the operators stop the dumping of the contents of some low-level waste tanks. The operators were actually attempting to clear some space in the tanks to hold higher activity material. The idea was to dump some really low-level waste to the environment, and the space cleared could be used to hold higher level waste.

By stopping the dumping, when the higher level waste had to be dealt with, there was no room in the tanks; so the higher level stuff is what got dumped to the environment instead of the lower level stuff. It was short-sighted. It would have been better to take a smaller hit up front in order to avoid a bigger hit later. By attempting not to dump anything at all; it made the matter worse.

I don't recall the specifics of what political interference exacerbated the Chernobyl accident. However, in the Soviet system even the smallest deviation from plans was looked upon as sabotage. With the delay due to the Kiev load dispatcher, and the build-up of Xenon due to the Xenon transient; the latter made worse by the former; it would have taken a courageous reactor operator to call off the test due to circumstances. Such was the nature of the Soviet system.

PamW