The draft provides a blueprint for the agency to plan, implement and monitor work needed to achieve the NRC’s mission for the next four years.
The draft plan describes the agency’s mission and its two strategic goals, which although slightly reworded for clarity and readability, remain fundamentally unchanged from the current plan.
The NRC’s mission is to license and regulate the Nation’s civilian use of radioactive materials to protect the public health and safety, promote the common defense and security, and protect the environment. The two strategic goals are: to ensure the safe use of radioactive materials and to ensure the secure use of radioactive materials.
The draft plan includes a new vision statement that reflects how the agency operates using the principles of a good regulator. The NRC’s new vision is: A trusted, independent, transparent, and effective nuclear regulator. The draft also includes new strategic objectives that describe, more specifically, the results needed to achieve the agency’s strategic goals.
Strategies to meet each of these objectives are described in the draft plan and reflect how the agency will respond to meet new challenges affecting nuclear regulations, such as processing license applications involving new technologies such as small modular reactors and continuing implementation of enhancements to improve reactor safety based on insight from the 2011 nuclear accident at Fukushima Dai-ichi.
The NRC issued its first Strategic Plan in September 1997 and is now required to update it every four years. The final Strategic Plan will replace the agency’s existing plan (FY 2008-2013). All interested individuals may submit comments on the draft Strategic Plan within 30 days of publication of the Federal Register Notice.
