With so much information on the NRC website, it is difficult to keep everything up to date. The agency staff works hard every day on licensing actions, certifications, technical reviews and such, which means information can go out of date almost as soon as we post it.
But we’ve recently done several updates on important materials and wanted to point them out.
We recently overhauled the NRC’s Uranium Recovery page to include current information on the staff’s reviews of several applications for new uranium recovery licenses out West.
We also recently made a change to our Fact Sheet on Biological Effects of Radiation. The pie chart showed where Americans get their average annual radiation exposure from, and was taken from a 1980s-era report by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP). The NCRP had updated the graphic in 2009, almost doubling the amount of average annual radiation exposure because of the rise in medical procedures.
We had used the 2009 graphic in our brochure on Radiation Protection and the NRC and in our Radiation Protection section of the NRC website. But we had missed it in the fact sheet. It was an easy update, and today, for now at least, the fact sheet is current.
Another fact sheet we recently updated is Decommissioning Nuclear Power Plants. This is a lengthy one that contained information specific to each plant currently being decommissioned. The problem was that work continued after the last update was posted in January 2008, so we worked with the technical staff to make sure the information there is current. The decommissioning folks have been busy the last three years!
We work hard to keep these materials up to date. But if you see something on the NRC’s website that seems inaccurate, out-of-date, or contradictory to another item or statement we make elsewhere, please let us know so we can correct it! (An e-mail to OPA.Resource@nrc.gov will do the trick.) And be patient – we’re trying to keep up!
Dave McIntyre Public Affairs Officer
U.S. NRC Blog 