No. S-97-05
"A PHYSICIST'S PATH: FROM MULTIPERIPHERAL MODELS
AND SUPERLATTICES TO THE
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION"
BY
DR. SHIRLEY ANN JACKSON
CHAIRMAN, U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
BEFORE THE
NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF BLACK PHYSICS STUDENTS
AT
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
FEBRUARY 28, 1997
INTRODUCTION
It is a great honor to be invited here to address this 1997 National Conference of Black
Physics students. It gives me
great pleasure to look out on a room filled with 250 African-American faculty and students, gathered together to talk about
their own present and future careers in physics. To see you and
to interact with you is particularly gratifying given the recent
College Fund report (Washington Post, 2/27/97, p. A22) on
the status of African-Americans in American higher education.
That report, in addition to revealing a huge gender gap in
college attendance and college graduation among African-Americans, shows how much African-Americans lag the majority in
receipt of bachelor's degrees (21% white for ages 25-60 vs 14%
Black). In addition, the choice of studies for African-Americans
is not in the sciences. At the graduate level, Black men tend to
study education and Black women tend to concentrate in public
administration. Only three percent of the recipients of
doctorates are Black, and only five percent of university
faculties are Black. It goes without saying then that I am very
pleased -- as a physicist, an African-American, an MIT alumna and
MIT Life Trustee -- to be here with you tonight.
The letter of invitation asked me to address the track of my
career to this point, and to talk about my responsibilities in my present position, as Chairman of the United States Nuclear
Regulatory Commission.
CAREER EXPERIENCES
I would like to start by talking about my schooling, because that
is where all our careers have their beginnings. I was born in
Washington, D.C., and entered public school there just three
years before the Supreme Court's epochal decision in Brown v.
Board of Education.
It is hard to overstate the impact of that decision on the
generation of African-Americans who were of school age in 1954.
We had all grown up with segregation as a fact of life. We
needed no court to tell us that it was morally wrong; we already
knew that. But the Brown decision was the official declaration
that segregation was also legally wrong: indeed, that it was
repugnant to the Constitution.
The practical effects of Brown, in terms of changing the
composition of the various public schools I myself attended, were
interesting. Initially, the schools were integrated by law, but
later became de facto re-segregated, as the racial composition of
school-age children in Washington, DC, changed to being
increasingly African-American. The moral and psychological
effects, however, were enormous. ...
If discrimination was wrong in the schools, then logically it
could not be right in any other aspect of American life. Even
children, then, could sense that great changes were in the
making; that the door of opportunity would be open a little wider
for us than it had been for earlier generations; and that
accordingly, we had all the more reason to "aim for the stars,"
which had always been my father's advice to me.
There was a second event in that period that helped to shape my
school career. In 1957, the country was shaken by the news that
the Soviet Union had beaten us into space by putting the first
earth satellite into orbit. At the time, Sputnik seemed to
suggest that the Soviets had surged ahead of us in science and
technology, and that the American educational system was to
blame. The result was that money poured into the schools to
improve the quality of education in mathematics and the sciences,
and there was a great deal of encouragement to students to pursue
careers in these areas.
I also would like to say something about the instruction we
received in the public schools of that era. Our teachers were
demanding -- extremely demanding. They felt they had to be.
They had experienced both discrimination and the Great
Depression, and they were determined that we would acquire the
knowledge and skills to enable us to compete successfully in the
job market, even in economic hard times. Our teachers' attitude was that if we were going to succeed in life, we would have to be
not only as good as the next person, but probably even better.
Therefore, they asked for excellence -- nothing less -- and they
had no tolerance for excuses for second-rate performance.
That, then, was my schooling: rigorous, achievement-oriented
teaching, in the era of opportunity opened by the Brown decision,
with the special impetus given to scientific education by
Sputnik. For some of us, it was a very fortunate combination.
In my case, I graduated from Roosevelt High School in Washington,
D.C. as valedictorian, and entered MIT as a freshman in the fall
of 1964. There were 43 women and five African-Americans in an
entering class of 900 that year. The number of African-American
women was two. That compares with 451 women and 76 African-Americans, including 27 women, in this year's entering class of
around 1100.
A friend of mine (Dr. Jennifer Rudd) and I were the first
African-American women to graduate from MIT, in 1968. She went
to medical school and is now a physician. I remained at MIT as a
graduate student and received my Ph.D in theoretical elementary
particle physics in 1973. I am happy to say that since that day,
a number of African-American women have been awarded doctorates
by MIT, but at that time, it was a first.
From 1973 to 1974, and again from 1975 to 1976, I was a research
associate in the Theoretical Physics Department of the Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The year
in between was spent as a visiting scientist in the Theoretical
Division of the European Organization for Nuclear Research in
Geneva, Switzerland. In both places, my work related to
theoretical particle physics.
In 1976, I joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New
Jersey, and for the next 15 years, conducted research in
theoretical physics, solid state and quantum physics, and optical
physics. The principal focus of my work was condensed matter
theory specializing in the electronic and optical properties of
low-dimensional systems. I worked on transition metal
dichalcogenides; the electronic and optical properties of
electrons on the surface of liquid helium films; and the
electronic and optical properties of semi-magnetic semiconductor
strained-layer superlattices. In 1986, I was elected a Fellow of
the American Physical Society for my research accomplishments.
In 1991, I joined Rutgers University as a Professor of Physics,
while remaining a consultant to AT&T Bell Laboratories in
semiconductor theory. That same year, I was elected a Fellow of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In my scientific
career I have had the opportunity to travel extensively, both in
the U.S. and abroad, to participate in conferences, and to
lecture, including at the NATO Advanced Study Institute in Antwerp, Belgium, on "Polarons and Excitons in Polar
Semiconductors and Ionic Crystals," in 1983, and the Bouchet
Conference in Accra, Ghana in 1990. In New Jersey, I had a
number of concurrent professional involvements. I served on the
New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology under three
Governors, Thomas Kean, Jim Florio and Christine Todd Whitman. I
also was appointed to the Department of Energy's Advisory Board
Task Force on Alternative Futures for the DOE Multipurpose
National Laboratories, and to the Boards of Directors of several
corporations. There were other appointments as well; I do not
want to list them all, because I think you understand my point,
which is to say how far, and in what varied directions, a degree
in physics can take you.
In late 1994, President Clinton nominated me to the U.S. Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, and stated his intention to name me as
Chairman. After confirmation by the U.S. Senate, I took office
as a Commissioner in May of 1995, and assumed the Chairmanship
two months later.
As some of you may know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
is the independent regulatory agency that is responsible, among
other things, for ensuring the safety of the nation's 110 nuclear
power plants. The NRC's charter encompasses many other kinds of
nuclear uses as well, including, for example, industrial
radiography, nuclear medicine, and licensing the nation's first-of-a-kind high-level waste repository.
Originally, all aspects of nuclear energy, military and civilian,
were the responsibility of the Atomic Energy Commission, which
was founded in 1946. The NRC was created in 1975, after Congress
decided that the nuclear power industry had reached a point where
the same agency should not be promoting the use of nuclear energy
and regulating its use. The AEC was abolished. The promotional
and developmental duties were given to what is now the Department
of Energy, and the NRC was given an exclusively regulatory
mandate.
Having served at the NRC for almost two years, I can say that its
duties are extraordinarily interesting and also multifaceted.
One might imagine that nothing could be more exclusively
technical than the task of ensuring the safety of nuclear power
plants: setting and enforcing standards, inspecting to ensure
compliance, and taking corrective action when needed. In
reality, however, many disciplines are involved in the NRC's
activities. Ours is an agency where technology, law, economics,
public policy, national security, and sometimes even foreign
policy considerations intersect.
REGULATORY ISSUES
Economic Deregulation of the Electric Utility Industry
Let me give you a few real-world examples of the intersection of
various policy, financial, and technical issues, beginning with
the regulation of nuclear power plants. For many decades,
America's electric utilities have enjoyed monopoly status in
their service areas. They have been regulated by state public
utility commissions, which has guaranteed them a fixed rate of
return each year, on a given asset base and has allowed them to
pass on their prudent business expenses to the consumers of
electricity. As a result, the economic performance of these
utilities was so predictable and dependable that their stocks and
bonds were known as "widows and orphans" securities -- the
epitome of safe, conservative investments.
The guarantee of funding meant that if a utility decided to build
a nuclear power plant, the NRC did not have to be concerned, once
the plant received its license, about the utility's financial
condition. The agency could be confident that there would be
enough money for the utility to operate the nuclear plant safely,
and then to decommission it properly -- that is, take it out of
service and clean up the site -- when its useful life was over.
In 1992, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which
gave to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) certain
authority to initiate competition in the various parts of the
energy business. Recent initiatives at the state and Federal
levels have set into motion a process by which we will soon see
true competition in the generation of electric power. Just as
consumers can now choose their long-distance telephone service
provider, they soon will be able to choose their supplier of
electric power.
Let us consider the implications of this. The changes associated
with economic deregulation and restructuring of the electric
utility industry have operational, economic, and ownership
aspects that are important to the NRC. Of course, the NRC is not
an economic or rate regulator, but we long have recognized the
challenges posed to the nuclear power industry by a changing
business environment and by fiscal stringency. They include
internal restructuring; ownership changes, including mergers; and
a continual effort by utilities to control and reduce costs.
These structural changes and economic uncertainties are driven by
regulatory and market forces that will determine how, and in what
form, nuclear electric generators will survive in an unregulated,
or less regulated, world. The role of the NRC is not to dictate
what changes should occur or into what form electric utilities
restructure. Our focus is on ensuring that, as the business
environment changes, economic pressures do not erode nuclear safety. That means that nuclear electric generators must
continue to maintain high safety standards, with sufficient
attention and resources devoted to nuclear operations, and with
decommissioning funding secure.
I should interject at this point that it is not the NRC's mandate
to ensure the economic viability of nuclear power or to
jeopardize it, only to ensure that whenever nuclear power is
used, it is used safely, and that, when a nuclear plant is
shutdown, there is adequate funding to ensure that it can be
decommissioned safely. The question now facing the NRC is what
deregulation will mean for how we go about meeting these safety
objectives. For example, what level of assurance does the NRC
have that a particular utility will spend the money required for
adequate maintenance and for necessary safety upgrades? What
changes do we have to make in our inspection program and other
evaluation processes to ensure that we stay ahead of any
potential degradation in safety at a plant, so that we can detect
adverse trends and correct them. If a nuclear utility is
involved in a merger or acquisition, what will the change in
ownership mean for the way the plant is operated?
The NRC traditionally has relied on its inspection and plant
assessment programs to identify any adverse trends in safety
performance. Based on inspection program results, plant
performance reviews, and other evaluative mechanisms, the NRC can
take action it deems appropriate to protect public health and
safety. In the current economic environment, if new business
arrangements, competition, or economic constraints result in any
impairment of safety, it is imperative that our assessment
mechanisms detect such problems early.
The Commission has asked the staff to examine measures to
identify plants where economic stress may be impacting safety.
The NRC has approved for public comment a paper entitled,
"Establishing and Maintaining a Safety Conscious Work
Environment." The paper includes as "evidence of an emerging
adverse trend" the following example: "cost-cutting measures at
the expense of safety considerations."
As I indicated earlier, as electric utility industry deregulation
proceeds, the NRC needs to ensure that adequate decommissioning
funding is available, whether nuclear plants operate to the end
of their license terms or shut down prematurely. Moreover, since
deregulation may change the economic umbrella for some licensees,
the NRC may need to monitor their financial qualifications more
closely.
In the Fall of 1995, I initiated a reevaluation of NRC policy
regarding decommissioning funding. The NRC issued an advance
notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPR) in April 1996, seeking
additional information on electric utility restructuring. The ANPR also explained that some additional decommissioning funding
assurance might be needed for those power reactor licensees no
longer subject to rate regulation by FERC or the State regulatory
commissions.
We also are examining potential changes in reporting requirements
with respect to decommissioning funding.
In short, the NRC is being presented with a host of new
challenges, just as a result of utility deregulation, which
involve far more than technological issues. A single change in
the law -- one that on its face has nothing to do with nuclear
regulation -- can have major ramifications for the way we go
about ensuring the safety of the public.
High-Level Radioactive Waste
One of the critical issues relating to nuclear power, in this
country and worldwide, is the permanent disposal of high-level
waste, including spent fuel.
Nuclear waste disposal is both a technical issue and one of
public policy. We have seen decades of delay in achieving a
demonstrated, workable facility for the permanent disposal of
nuclear wastes, and this has had a significant negative effect on
public attitudes toward nuclear power. Meanwhile, the volume of
spent fuel stored at nuclear plant sites has continued to mount.
Based on what we know today, the NRC believes that safe deep
geologic disposal of high level nuclear waste, including spent
fuel, is feasible, at least in principle. By law, the U.S.
Department of Energy is the responsible Federal agency for
designing, developing, and constructing a geologic repository for
high-level radioactive waste. DOE has the responsibility to
accept spent fuel from commercial power reactors, and high-level
radioactive waste from the defense program, and to dispose of
that material in a geologic repository. The Nuclear Regulatory
Commission has the responsibility of licensing the geologic
disposal facility before spent fuel or high-level waste can be
accepted at such a repository for disposal.
It will be up to the NRC to determine, once we receive an
application from DOE, whether its specific plans for a repository
are satisfactory. It is hard to think of another issue with
comparably long-term implications. By long-term, I mean a period
measured not just in centuries but in millennia.
In the meantime, some utilities are running out of space to store
spent fuel at their nuclear plants. To address that problem,
there are bills now before the Congress under which an interim
centralized storage facility would be constructed, also to be licensed by the NRC. This would mean additional responsibilities
for the NRC, to license not only such a storage facility, but
also certain transportation aspects of the spent fuel movement,
including the casks in which the fuel is moved and stored.
EXTERNAL REGULATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
One potential change for the NRC is the external regulation of
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear activities. This issue
has been identified in our agency-wide Strategic Assessment and
Rebaselining as a direction-setting issue for the agency, because
of its potential effect on the future operation of the NRC.
In 1995, the DOE created an Advisory Committee on External
Regulation. In its December 1995 report, the Committee
recommended that DOE nuclear facilities be regulated externally,
and named the NRC and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board
as the two potential safety regulators. Last month, Secretary of
Energy O'Leary announced that the administration would introduce
legislation to give the NRC the responsibility for the regulation
of nearly all DOE nuclear facilities, phased in over a ten-year
period. This would place such DOE facilities as the Brookhaven,
Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories under NRC regulatory
authority.
Many questions remain to be answered and many issues, both legal
and technical, must be resolved about NRC oversight of DOE
nuclear facilities. In considering this issue as part of the
agency-wide Strategic Assessment and Rebaselining, the Commission
is factoring in former Energy Secretary O'Leary's recent
announcement and the public comments received on the DOE external
regulation direction-setting issue. Those comments
overwhelmingly favor NRC oversight of DOE nuclear facilities.
This might seem to take us back to the beginning of time, i.e.,
to the old Atomic Energy Commission. This is not quite so --
this time. We would be the external regulator of DOE, not co-joined in a single agency.
NATIONAL SECURITY AND FOREIGN POLICY
I mentioned that the NRC's duties include questions of national
security and foreign policy. Let me explain. As I am sure you
know, a major concern for more than two decades has been the
possibility that if a nation is eager enough to have nuclear
weapons, it will extract the plutonium from spent nuclear fuel
and use it to construct a nuclear device. For that reason, there
is a system of international safeguards, administered by the
International Atomic Energy Agency, designed to ensure that
exports of nuclear fuel and facilities go only to nations willing
to accept, among other things, inspection of their facilities.
To ensure that U.S. exports of nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel
do not contribute, directly or indirectly, to the proliferation
of nuclear weapons, Congress gave the NRC the duty of reviewing
all such export proposals and deciding whether they are
compatible with U.S. security interests. The law includes a
number of specific criteria relating to non-proliferation. If a
proposed export has the support of the Executive Branch, it comes
to the NRC for review, and if the NRC approves, the export goes
forward. If the NRC votes to disapprove, however, the issue is
sent to the Congress, which has sixty days in which to vote to
block the export. Unless it acts within that period, the
Executive Branch view prevails, and the export proceeds.
What that means is that even if the President has decided that a
particular export is in the best interests of the United States,
we the NRC Commissioners -- all Presidential appointees -- still
have the duty of making our own judgment about whether it will
serve the national interest, and of bringing that judgment before
the Congress, as set forth in the law. That is no small
responsibility.
Let me describe another issue with both domestic and
international implications. The Department of Energy has a large
quantity of surplus nuclear materials from its weapons program.
Those materials include plutonium. What should be done with it?
Should it be treated as high level waste and disposed of in a
repository, or should it be mixed with uranium and used as fuel
in nuclear reactors? From the standpoint of maximizing usable
resources, the latter course sounds attractive, but for almost
two decades, it has been U.S. policy that the dangers of a
plutonium fuel cycle are too great -- because of the risk of
nuclear proliferation and terrorism -- to justify recycling.
Some have called for a re-examination of that policy. But what
about U.S. and Russian surplus weapons-grade plutonium? In
December 1996, DOE released its plan for excess weapons plutonium
disposition, which involves a two-track strategy of vitrification
(mixing plutonium with glass, then disposing of it as high-level
radioactive waste), and mixing plutonium with uranium to create
mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) for use in commercial nuclear reactors. I
do not propose to address all these questions tonight, but only
to give you an idea of the kinds of issues we face. Any
recycling of plutonium in this country, or any use of recycled or
excess weapons plutonium in fuel for commercial reactors, would
require NRC approval.
I might add that the downfall of Communism brought a variety of
additional responsibilities to the NRC. For one thing, there are
a number of newly independent countries that inherited Soviet-built nuclear power plants. Those nations are mindful not only
of the design and operational problems that led to the Chernobyl
disaster, but also of the inadequate regulation of nuclear energy
in the former Soviet Union. Accordingly, these newly independent states are looking to the United States for advice in setting up
regulatory bodies of their own, modeled on the NRC. We have been
and continue to provide such assistance to these countries, using
funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.
AID) and other sources to strengthen both the authority and
capabilities of their regulatory bodies.
The inadequacies of nuclear regulation in the former Soviet Union
have heightened awareness, not just in the U.S., but around the
world, of how important it is that regulators have the authority,
independence, and resources to do their job. Toward that goal, I
have proposed the formation of an international body of nuclear
regulators to focus specifically on the regulatory agenda. This
past January, I was host to the initial meeting of a working
group of seven nations -- France, Germany, Spain, Canada, Japan,
the United Kingdom, and the U.S. -- to plan for the establishment
of a permanent organization.
As some of you may know, one of the potential legacies of
Chernobyl has been a large number of cancers, especially in
children. We have been helping Ukraine and Belarus as they
monitor their children's health, and carry out various childhood
thyroid cancer and leukemia protocols. In fact, we are jointly
involved in studies in these countries with the National Cancer
Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy.
In the last several years, there have been twice-yearly meetings
between Vice President Albert Gore and Russian Prime Minister
Viktor Chernomyrdin to discuss a range of issues of common
interest. These include the safety of Russian reactors, the
development of new generating stations to replace potentially
dangerous old nuclear plants taken out of service, and, as I
mentioned, the disposition of plutonium from dismantled weapons.
The Secretary of Energy and I have been a participants in those
meetings.
CONCLUSION
You may ask, does a background in physics prepare you for all
this? I would answer: indeed it does, and very well. There is
one thing that all of us who have ever taken physics examinations
have in common. We are problem- solvers. We have been trained
not to procrastinate, or to lose our composure, or to evade the
hard issues, but to analyze and to work through each problem
presented in a straightforward, matter-of-fact, professional way,
and then move on to the next one. Successful students of physics
thus acquire an intellectual and personal discipline that will
serve them all their lives, and not only as physicists.
It is because of that training that one of my first initiatives
upon becoming Chairman of the NRC was to establish (as I have
alluded to earlier in my remarks this evening) what we have called a "Strategic Assessment and Rebaselining." This is a
process in which we examine the agency's work from the ground up,
taking a fresh look at what we do and how we do it. If there are
programs that need to be added, or eliminated, or altered, this
is an opportunity to address these questions without
preconceptions. It is an exercise in problem-solving: we know
that we have a particular mission to fulfill, and by a systematic
analysis, we determine the optimum means of accomplishing it.
Before I close, I would like to talk briefly about the employment
opportunities for graduates with doctorates in physics.
Typically, there have been three principal career paths: the
academic route -- aiming toward a tenured faculty position in a
university, the private sector, and government. The academic
path is one many of you already know something about. Within the
private sector, the possibilities are quite diverse. There is
research and development, of the kind that organizations like
AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Lucent Technologies) conduct; there
is also corporate management. As you may know, some physicists
have wound up working on Wall Street, where their analytical and
modeling abilities have made them valuable for their ability to
understand the complexities of financial markets.
I wish I could tell you that a doctorate in physics is a ready
stepping-stone to an agency head or a senior policy job in the
Federal Government, but that is not generally the case. Often,
but not always, these positions are filled by lawyers, social
scientists, business executives, and political figures.
Nonetheless, physicists have had and continue to have stimulating
and significant roles in the Federal Government. Any number of
physicists have found -- in laboratories operated by the
Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, NASA, and other
technical agencies -- the combination of technically challenging
work and the opportunity to serve the public. The President's
Science Advisor and Head of the Office of Science and Technology
Policy (OSTP) is a physicist. Physicists lead some of the
Department of Energy national laboratories. I myself have found
great personal fulfillment both in the private and the academic
sectors; but knowing that one is working for one's country, for
one's fellow citizens, provides a special and unique
satisfaction. It is exciting because it is multifaceted --
combining safety policy development, executive management,
foreign and national security policy, and science and technology.
I hope it is a satisfaction and an excitement that many of you
will be able to experience for yourselves in your own careers.
In closing, as we talk tonight about the vistas of professional
achievement and advancement that are open to you -- the students
of today -- it is appropriate that we also remember, and honor,
those who went before us. I am referring to the men and women
who, in times not all that long ago, had all the talent, all the ability, all the drive one could ask for -- everything that was
needed for success -- except opportunity. It is, in part, to
honor their memory, and to be worthy of it, that we, whose
opportunities are so much greater, have an obligation to make the
most of our talents and to help others as we go along. In these
ways, we will make those who went before us proud, and we will
provide role models for those who come after us to emulate.
