“The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is routinely waiving fire rule violations at nearly half the nation’s 104 commercial reactors, even though fire presents one of the chief hazards at nuclear plants.” is the beginning of a recent report from www.propublica.org. It is timely given the situation in New Mexico.

The article continues, “The policy, the result of a series of little-noticed decisions in recent years, is meant to encourage nuclear companies to remedy longstanding fire safety problems. But critics say it is leaving decades-old fire hazards in place as the NRC fails to enforce its own rules.

“Fires present a special risk to nuclear plants because they can knock out cables that control-room operators need to safely cool down a reactor. The explosions [2] and fires [2] at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant have shown what can happen when operators can’t activate pumps, valves and other equipment needed to prevent damage to the radioactive core. [Read the entire article here.] 

Editor’s Note on Our Investigation Into Fire Risks at Nuclear Power Plants by Stephen Engelberg

 The publication of our story on the threat posed by fire to nuclear power plants [1] offers readers a rare opportunity. Two excellent journalists, working independently of each other, have produced a detailed investigative story on the same subject.

Susan Q. Stranahan, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter working for the Center for Public Integrity [2], and John Sullivan, a former New York Times reporter working for ProPublica, both conclude that regulators are not doing enough to safeguard the plants against fire.

At ProPublica, we began asking questions about this issue long before the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant. The response from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can only be characterized as hostile. Spokesmen for the agency repeatedly rejected any suggestion that they were allowing fire hazards to persist at the nation’s nuclear plants.

Last September, Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Eliot Brenner sent an email in response to our written questions. It said the “fire safety program leadership” had asked him “to relay their conviction that the time devoted to ProPublica’s two years of questions has taken staff away from performing mission critical safety activities on behalf of the public.”

In my more than three decades of covering the federal government, I have never seen such a response to legitimate questions about a crucial issue.

I invite readers, elected officials, and political leaders of the Obama administration to read our story and Ms. Shanahan’s [3] to judge whether the NRC is adequately addressing fire safety.