An international comparison of the impact of safety regulation on LWR performance

Abstract

During the decade 1975-1984, the US nuclear power industry achieved a lower level of reactor performance than that realized in many other Western nations. Previous work suggested that international differences in safety regulation account for much of the discrepancy. US annual regulatory losses averaged over 10% during the ten-year study period. The present investigation compares nuclear safety regulation in France, Sweden, and Switzerland with that in the United States 1) to determine whether greater regulatory stringency was indeed responsible for poorer US plant performance, and 2) to examine key international differences in the the division and coordination of responsibility between safety regulators and nuclear utilities for recognizing and solving technical problems.

Analysis of the US data revealed that, on average, over 90% of US regulatory outages were attributed to one of the following: technical specification limiting conditions of operation or NRCrequired inspections or NRC-required modifications. It was found that the European nations experienced the same variety of technical problems seen in the United States. Furthermore, the scope and stringency of European and US safety regulation are comparable. It was found that inconsistencies in outage reporting practices account for much of the discrepancy in regulatory loss between the United States and the other nations. Therefore, it is concluded that safety regulation is not the primary cause of differences in reactor performance observed between the United States and other nations.