 I'm Tom Wallach, Historian for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It's been 40 years since the NRC began operations on January 19, 1975. Its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, left a mixed legacy. The AEC's approach to reactor safety is still used today, but at the time few more in its demise. The nuclear industry complained the AEC was an overzealous regulator, while anti-nuclear activists argued it cared more about promoting nuclear power plants than ensuring their safety. Many hoped the NRC would be different by being independent and unbiased. President Ford's selection of the first five commissioners reflected this desire for a fresh start. They were different than the members that typically populated the Atomic Energy Commission, most of whom had nuclear backgrounds. Having members with diverse professional backgrounds and diverse perspectives added to the quality of policymaking and decision making. We were indeed a new agency, not a reincarnation of the AEC and the different guys, that we were independent of the executive branch, divorced from promotional considerations, and staff for effective safety regulation. International events soon challenged the scope of the NRC's independence. India's 1974 detonation of a nuclear device embroiled the agency in a controversy over its export licensing authority. The blasts confirmed public fears that nuclear fuel, supplied to developing nations, could be diverted to make weapons. When a U.S. manufacturer applied for an export license to refuel India's tar poor nuclear plants, many called on the NRC to deny the license unless India accepted new safeguard controls and a non-polariferation treaty. The NRC's decision wasn't simple. The White House warned the NRC was intruding on presidential power. The basic issue was a national security issue, which is the providence of the president and the executive branch. And of course, relations with the foreign government were also the province of the president and the executive branch. But the key document, the document which governed the licensing transaction and which contained the recapture provisions, was the possession of the NRC, an agency wholly independent of the executive branch. If the NRC rejected the license, it could negate U.S. treaty commitments to supply tar per s fuel. Free to the treaty's controls, India might consider reprocessing the reactor spent fuel into weapons. To solve this jurisdictional conflict, Congress authorized the president to reject NRC export decisions when they threatened non-polariferation objectives or the common defense and security of the nation. President Carter used the law to reverse a commission decision to deny tar per s license. Preserving relations with India was critical as the Cold War grew worse. In the end, the NRC retained its export licensing function, but also recognized executive authority. Domestically, operating experience at U.S. reactors raised new safety issues. In March 1975, workers inadvertently started a fire at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Alabama. Over seven hours, the fire destroyed nearly 2,000 electrical cables, many connected to reactor safety equipment. The fire indicated the NRC needed to supplement the AEC's focus on hardware failures with greater attention to human factors. The NRC instituted new fire safety regulations, training requirements, and a fire safety research program. Congress made the NRC an independent agency, but how independent was its staff? In January 1976, Robert Pollard resigned from the NRC as he claimed because the agency did not heed his concerns about reactor safety. He quickly erred his concerns in an interview with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes. Pollard's statements echoed earlier reports of employee intimidation at the AEC, and congressional investigations into the treatment of whistleblowers spurred NRC policies to encourage erring different professional opinions without fear of retaliation. Safety research deepened the impression that the NRC inherited the AEC's pro-nuclear bias. In 1975, the NRC issued the Reactor Safety Study, which sought to quantify the risk of a significant reactor accident. The AEC had launched the study with safety and promotional goals. It advanced reactor safety by using probabilistic risk assessment methods known as PRA. But the report's controversial executive summary used the study's results to implicitly promote nuclear power. The Reactor Safety Study's methodology received wide praise, but critics argued it was a pro-nuclear document that lacked peer review and was based on scanty data and questionable calculations. An independent review panel agreed with some of these criticisms and concluded the executive summary was flawed. In January 1979, the commission reiterated its praise to the main report, but withdrew any endorsement to the executive summary. The reversal was an embarrassment for the NRC, but it helped make PRA a valuable tool. Relieved of the burden of proving that nuclear power had superior safety, PRA could be used just to make reactors safer. To the nuclear industry, the many claims of the NRC's pro-nuclear bias didn't reflect reality. The time to approve and build a reactor had stretched from seven years to ten. A utility executive complained, the present regulatory process will strangle the nuclear industry unless some significant revisions are made. The NRC tried to streamline licensing with no luck. We sought to establish the framework for licensing reform, our early site approval, our combined construction permit, which would deal with the pre-approved standardized design and the elimination of the later separate operating license proceeding. We sought to promote it through legislation. That proposal disappeared in the wake of TMI. Decades later, and I emphasize decades later, licensing reform along the lines that we proposed was achieved. The regulatory process and its reform moves by inches, not by miles. For the NRC, the years between 1975 and 79 resembled the story's first chapter. We learned much about the characters, but many threads such as reactor licensing are left incomplete. There was progress on reactor safety, but Brown's very foreshadowed a more serious accident to come. The NRC's character development was fleshed out in these early years. It learned that it took more than legislation to be independent. It meant hiring a diverse staff, cultivating dissent and heeding critics. It meant conducting objective safety research and understanding its limits within the Constitution's separation of powers. Establishing its independence was an important step when, in the next chapter, the NRC confronted its greatest crisis, the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.