The Safety Regulation of U.S. Nuclear Power Plants: Violations, Inspections, and Abnormal Occurrences

Data from more than 1,000 inspections to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission form the basis for an investigation into the nature of safety regulation at U.S.commercial nuclear reactors. Poisson (and binary choice) models of the rate of occurrence of violations during each inspection period are specified and are extended to control for nondetection and for the possibility that violations persist from one inspection to the next. These models are used to study the factors associated with noncompliance, relative rankings of plants according to propensity to violate, the variation in detection rates among NRC inspectors, and the relationship between undetected violations and abnormal occurrences.