No. S-97-15
June 26, 1997
"AN EXPERIMENT"
COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
BY
DR. SHIRLEY ANN JACKSON, CHAIRMAN
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
AT
RUTGERS-NEWARK
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY
MAY 22, 1997
Good evening, Provost Samuels, distinguished guests, graduates, members of the faculty, ladies
and gentlemen. I am deeply honored to be delivering this Commencement Address as your guest
for the 1997 Rutgers-Newark Convocation Exercises. Not only is this a truly momentous
occasion for the graduates, it recalls, for many of us, the memories of our own graduation
ceremonies as "the place where it all began." We call these proceedings "commencement"
exercises--not a time of endings, but a time of
beginnings. And I ask you--the beginning of what? What is it
that you are beginning today?
Being a physicist, as many of you know, let me propose to the
graduates that you are about to begin an experiment--for life,
itself, is, for each of you, a grand experiment--replete with
hypotheses and parameters and variables and an unknown outcome.
But even for those of you graduating with a science degree, this
experiment will be like none you have performed before.
In this experiment, you will be both the scientist and the
laboratory specimen--both the observer and the subject. You will
have many interested audiences. Your peers, your parents, and--I
can say with experience as a professor--your former instructors
will be watching with rapt interest the outcome of your
experiment. But ultimately, the individual holding the greatest
stake in the outcome, the person who stands to benefit or suffer
the most, is you--each of you.
Like any experiment, we begin this one with a series of
questions--lines of inquiry that will help us to form a hypothesis: Who am I? What will my life be? Where will I make
my contributions? Many of you, feeling the rush of expectancy
for the moment when you finally will hold your diploma, believe
that you already have a hypothesis: I will be a mathematician.
I will be an artist. I will be an entrepreneur. Let me assure
you, in this case, the hypothesis evolves as the experiment
progresses.
Consider for a moment the potential variables to be anticipated.
Some of you will experience great challenges: career changes,
financial hardships, golden opportunities. All of you will face
difficult decisions. Some variables you will be able to regulate
and contain; others will be beyond your control. Time itself is
a pivotal factor in this experiment; not even the wisest among us
can tell you for how long you have this laboratory reserved. In
the words of Crowfoot, the 19th century Native American warrior
and orator:
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the
night. It is the breath of the buffalo in the
wintertime. It is the little shadow that runs across
the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Lastly, any experiment has parameters, and in this experiment
called Life, you must set your own parameters. These are the
elements over which you have control--your priorities, your moral
and ethical judgments, your level of ambition, your work ethic,
your degree of global awareness. By setting these parameters at
the outset, you ensure that the conduct of your experiment will
not be haphazard. Where will you place your energies? How will
you deal with success? With failure? What example will you set
for those who follow? These "parameters" will give those you
encounter a sense of where you are rooted, as well as a sense of
how easily you will be uprooted. These factors make up what I
call an individual's "operational vision."
Twenty-nine years ago, in the Spring of 1968, I sat much the same
as you are sitting here today, in the Dupont Athletic Center at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, awaiting the awarding
of my Bachelor of Science degree--full of expectancy, knowing
that my experiment was about to begin. I had my own hypothesis:
"I will be a physicist"--and I felt a sense of accomplishment at
having come so far. On that day in 1968, a friend of mine (Dr.
Jennifer Rudd) and I were the first African-American women to
graduate from MIT. She went on to medical school and is now a
physician here in New Jersey. I remained at MIT as a graduate
student, and received my Ph.D in theoretical elementary particle
physics in 1973.
For the next 18 years, I conducted research in theoretical
physics, solid state and quantum physics, and optical physics.
In 1991, I joined Rutgers University, at the New Brunswick/
Piscataway campus, as a Professor of Physics, while remaining a
consultant to AT&T Bell Laboratories in semiconductor theory. I continued to do research, to participate in conferences, and to
lecture, both in the U.S. and abroad. I had the opportunity to
function in a wide range of professional capacities, and I was
given a number of appointments, including as a member of the New
Jersey Commission on Science and Technology under three
Governors: Thomas Kean, Jim Florio, and Christine Todd Whitman.
The variables continued to change; my experiment continued to
evolve.
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 became the Chairman of the
U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on July 2, 1995.
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 charter encompasses the oversight of many
other uses of nuclear material as well, including, for example,
nuclear medicine, industrial radiography, and licensing the
first-of-its-kind U.S. high-level waste repository.
As for my experiment: educated as a physicist, I now find myself
in a unique position that combines the roles of Chief Executive
Officer, leading policy planner and Commission representative in
collegial decision-making, and official spokesperson for the
agency on both domestic and international issues.
Having served at the NRC for two years, I can say that the duties
of the agency, and of my role as Chairman, are extraordinarily
interesting and 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 performing nuclear safety
research. In reality, however, many disciplines are involved in
NRC activities. The agency is a crossroads at which technology,
law, economics, public policy, national security, and sometimes
foreign policy considerations intersect.
Let me give you a few real-world examples of these intersections.
One of the critical issues relating to nuclear power, in this
country and worldwide, is the permanent disposal of high-level
radioactive 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 workable facility for the
permanent disposal of nuclear wastes, and this delay has, in
turn, had a significant negative effect on public attitudes
toward nuclear power.
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 (DOE) 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, as well as
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. We must determine, once we receive an application from
DOE, whether its specific plans for a repository are
satisfactory. Try, if you will, to think of another issue with
comparably long-term implications--a period measured not just in
centuries, but in millennia!
Meanwhile, some utilities are running out of space to store spent
fuel at their nuclear power plants. To address that problem, the
Congress has been considering several bills 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.
Consider another issue, this time 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 recycled 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, the Department of Energy released its plan for
surplus weapons-grade plutonium disposition, which involves a
two-track strategy. The first course of action would involve
mixing the plutonium with glass, in a process called
vitrification, and then disposing of it as high-level radioactive
waste. The second strategy consists of mixing the plutonium with
uranium to create mixed-oxide fuel (or MOX) for use in commercial
nuclear reactors. Any recycling of plutonium in this country, or
any use of recycled or surplus weapons-grade plutonium in fuel
for commercial reactors, would require NRC approval.
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, some modeled on the NRC. We have
been providing 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. In response to that
awareness, I have proposed the formation of an international body
of nuclear regulators to focus specifically on the regulatory
agenda. This past January, I hosted 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. Next Tuesday, I and
the other members of this working group will be heading to Paris,
where we will establish ourselves as a formal entity, and
exchange our first papers on a series of topics related to
international nuclear safety.
As some of you may know, one of the legacies of Chernobyl has
been a large number of cancers, especially in children. We have
been helping Ukraine and Belarus as they monitor the health of
their children, and as they deal with various issues related to
childhood thyroid cancer and leukemia. Together with the
National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy, we
are involved in performing studies in these countries.
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 aging and
potentially dangerous nuclear plants, and, as I mentioned, the
disposition of plutonium from dismantled weapons. The Secretary
of Energy and I have been participants in those meetings.
My purpose is not to address or to suggest solutions to all these
issues tonight at your graduation ceremony, but only to give you
an idea of the kinds of challenges one federal agency, the NRC,
faces, and a sense of my own operational vision--which, in this
context, is to reaffirm the fundamental health and safety mission
of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to regulate
effectively, and to position the agency for change. To say it
another way, I have given you a peek inside my laboratory, and
some insight into my "experiment." I also hope that this
provides for you a sense of where a scientific career can lead.
In my case, a doctorate in physics provided a stepping-stone to a
senior policy and executive job in the Federal Government, as an agency head. Some of you also may choose to pursue careers in
science, technology, and public policy. Your paths may not
exactly parallel mine, but, I am sure, they will lead to
multifaceted challenges, and great personal fulfillment. Some of
you will work in the arts, others in criminal justice; some of
you will continue on toward another academic degree. Whatever
your next step, remember that the parameters you set now will be
crucial in shaping your future progress. What will you count as
the measure of your success? Will it be in terms of your
personal affluence? Your involvement in social issues? Your
advancement of a branch of science? Your service to your fellow-experimenters? No one who follows you will be able to replicate
your experiment exactly, but be sure that your results will
influence many. What will be your operational vision, and what
will be your legacy?
You have spent a great deal of effort in preparation for this
moment, and it finally has arrived. The laboratory doors are
open. You have your tools and your materials. Your parents and
your teachers have prepared you for this commencement as well as
they know how; and they, and I, are full of pride as we watch you
begin the rest of your collective life experiment. I, for one,
will be waiting eagerly to view your results, and to read the
record of your achievements. I wish for each of you the full
measure of success. Thank you.
