REVISION OF THE FUEL CYCLE FACILITY OVERSIGHT PROGRAM

In mid-1999, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) started an initiative for substantially revising its regulatory oversight program for fuel cycle facilities. This initiative resulted from the staff’s fundamental reviews of its regulatory program, as part of the “reinventing government” process, and consideration of lessons learned from several NRC initiatives for improving regulatory oversight processes, including improvement of the reactor oversight program. The initiative will also consider lessons learned from the Tokai criticality accident to ensure that the new oversight process will be no less effective than the existing NRC regulatory program in identifying and correcting problems. The goals of the revised oversight program are to foster strengthened facility corrective action processes (problem identification, characterization, and resolution); provide objective indications of acceptable and changing licensee performance; increase stakeholder confidence in NRC; increase regulatory effectiveness and efficiency; and reduce unnecessary regulatory burden. Although the NRC is working with stakeholders to develop the revised process, the NRC anticipates that the fuel cycle oversight process will be revised to use: 1) a more risk/performance-based approach to focus on the more significant risks at fuel facilities; 2) more objective safety and safeguards performance indicators (PIs) with accompanying performance thresholds; and 3) NRC baseline inspections. The PIs together with inspection findings are intended to provide an objective and reliable basis to determine if a fuel facility is safe and special nuclear material is sufficiently safeguarded and provide early indications of declining performance. A licensee performance assessment process will integrate information from PIs and safety/safeguards inspection findings. This will facilitate clear and predictable regulatory decisions such as determining overall safety/safeguards performance and identifying needed changes in Agency regulatory emphasis. Comporting changes in the inspection findings significance determination process, licensee performance assessment process, and regulatory action (including enforcement) process are also under consideration.