In January 2006, UCS and a coalition of organizations across the United States petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to order its licensees to provide information regarding the source of radioactively contaminated water at their facilities along with the methods used to monitor those sources for leakage. This petition was in response to an adverse trend in the frequency and magnitude of events involving undetected leaks of radioactively contaminated water into the ground from NRC-licensed facilities.

On June 28, 2006, the NRC informed UCS and our co-petitioners of its intention not to require licensees to provide the information sought. Instead, the NRC claimed the nuclear industry had promised to provide similar information to the NRC.

On July 20, 2006, UCS submitted formal comments to the NRC on behalf of the coalition opposing the NRC's intentions. Chief among our reasons was that the nuclear industry had provided the NRC and public with only a sketchy outline of the nature of the information it promised to provide. The scant detail makes it impossible for the NRC or our coalition to determine if the promised information would match the information requested under the petition. Our secondary objection was that the promised information would be provided to the NRC voluntarily and failure by any NRC licensee to submit the information would only incur a potential breach of contract between that licensee and the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group. The petition sought to have licensees provide the information to the NRC under order, with failure to provide complete and accurate information in response to the orders being a violation of federal regulations. Our formal comments to the NRC included a listing of 10 times in the past decade where the NRC sanctioned its licensees for having violated these federal regulations by providing the agency with incomplete and/or inaccurate information. The industry's poor track record in this area provides the NRC with a very weak foundation for expecting that the information it obtains from voluntary, non-regulated submittals will be complete and accurate.

UCS and the coalition urged the NRC not to accept—essentially sight unseen—a vague, unenforceable industry promise as a substitute for the solid information requested in our petition. We urged the NRC to grant our petition so as to provide the agency and the public the information needed to assure that no member of the public is downstream or downhill from an uncontrolled, unmonitored leak of radioactively contaminated water from an NRC-licensed facility.