COVERT, MI — Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko will tour the Palisades nuclear power plant in Covert this week.
The tour will take place Friday, said NRC Midwest spokeswoman Viktoria Mitlyng. Palisades is one of the four-worst performing plants in the country as classified by the NRC and had several documented problems last year.
The announcement comes the same day that Jaczko said he would step down from his position at the agency. It comes after mounting criticisms of the NRC chairman's three-year tenure, including this from The New York Times:
...Dr. Jaczko’s management of the agency rubbed his fellow commissioners the wrong way. Last year, all four of them — two Democrats and two Republicans — sent a letter to the White House chief of staff complaining about his management style...The commission’s chief internal investigator also said that Dr. Jaczko was “not forthcoming” with his colleagues about the Yucca Mountain project, although his allies in Congress fiercely denied this.
U.S. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, has been one of the strongest proponents of the Yucca Mountain project in the House. Funding for the nuclear waste repository was cut by President Barack Obama's administration.
Mitlyng said the resignation and the tour are not related. The tour of Palisades has been in the work for a while now and is part of a weeklong tour of other plants across the country.
The announcement comes the same day that Charles A. Casto was named as the new administrator of the NRC's Region III office, which oversees plants that include Palisades. Casto was the lead NRC and U.S. ambassador who provided support to the Japanese government after the Fukushima Dai-ichi disaster. He was at the site from March 2011 to February, 2012. He replaces Cynthia Pederson, who was the interim director.
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