Regulatory Transactions

From: Courrier-PostOnline.com

LACEY — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has agreed with environmentalists to review its regulations concerning General Electric Mark 1 reactors, which is the type used at the Oyster Creek Generating Station in the township.

An NRC safety panel posted notice on its Federal Register website Monday accepting a request by three environmental groups and includes 8,000 petitioners, to review whether approvals by the agency issued in 1989; concerning reactor venting systems at General Electric Mark I reactors should be revoked.

The reactor is also the same type that was in operation at the Fukushima, Japan, nuclear power plant which suffered a meltdown and fire last March.

From: OMB Watch

Last week, Congressional Republicans slipped provisions into a payroll tax bill that would try to force the President to make an early decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project. Under the bill, President Obama would face a 60-day deadline to rule on the project, which has not yet received the legally required economic, environmental and safety reviews.

Though Congressional Republicans claim the project would create jobs, the Keystone XL is not the job-creation panacea it’s being made out to be. In fact, the Keystone project could actually cost taxpayers jobs.

The Credit Union National Association (CUNA) is calling on the Obama administration to issue an executive order that would create a moratorium on federal financial regulation in order to protect smaller financial institutions against “regulatory burdens that are not required by statute or necessitated by serious, material, quantifiable and well-documented safety and soundness concerns.”

In a letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), CUNA President and CEO Bill Cheney said that a regulatory moratorium would allow regulators to study the impact of their current rules on the nation’s smaller financial institutions. Cheney also asked the OMB to create an Office of Regulatory Burden Monitoring, which would determine the burden that new regulations would have on smaller lenders.

EPA proposed a rule in July that would change the definition of solid waste under RCRA to require more stringent regulation for certain materials to be recycled. This proposal has several flaws: (1) EPA does not have the authority to regulate materials that are not solid wastes, and many of the materials covered by the rule are not wastes at all, (2) the proposal would not reduce future “damage cases”, which is what EPA says it is trying to do with the rule, and (3) the proposal would negatively impact legitimate recycling activities. All of this raises the question: Why is EPA against recycling?