Consumer Safety Chief Leaves a Small Agency With Bigger Powers

By the end of her four-year term, which came to a close on Friday, she can say that she has presided over a significant increase of the agency’s powers. And Ms. Tenenbaum, 62, has not been shy about using them. The agency recently leveled its highest fine ever — $3.9 million — against Ross, the discount retailer, because it continued to sell what the commission said was defective children’s clothing, even after warnings from the agency.

She and the safety commission also waded into one of the most contentious topics in the sports world: protecting football players from head injuries. The result was the Youth Football Brain Safety initiative, which called for the replacement of youth league helmets with safer models paid for by the National Football League, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the N.F.L. Players Association.

“I just felt like it was something that needed to be done,” she said.

But before she could make much headway on issues, Ms. Tenenbaum had to persuade consumer advocates that she would work for them while reassuring manufacturers that the agency would not be unfair in carrying out its new powers. It was a difficult juggling act that some industry officials say Ms. Tenenbaum has managed to pull off.

“What I was most glad about is that she treated us and others in the industry as a resource, rather than the enemy,” said Carter Keithly, president of the Toy Industry Association. “We didn’t agree on everything, but she was always fair.”

For the Youth Football Brain Safety initiative, the N.C.A.A., the N.F.L. and the players association kicked in a total of $1 million to pay for the helmet replacements. “The support of Chairman Tenenbaum and the C.P.S.C. played an important role in making our helmet replacement initiative a reality,” Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, said in a statement. “We really appreciated her personal involvement and the agency’s in the work to make our game better and safer.”

Yet the commission under Ms. Tenenbaum’s leadership has not been exempt from criticism. Some of the biggest complaints followed the decision by agency lawyers to hold Craig Zucker, the chief executive of the company that made Buckyballs, liable for the recall of the magnetic children’s toy, even after the company was dissolved. Manufacturers have argued that holding an individual responsible for a widespread, and expensive, recall sets a disturbing example, and would discourage companies from being open in their dealings with regulatory bodies.

Ms. Tenenbaum said she could not comment on the case because it was continuing.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, one of the smallest agencies in government, was created in 1972. With a budget of about $120 million and 530 employees, the agency annually monitors more than 15,000 imported and domestically made products. Before Ms. Tenenbaum took the reins, it had been increasingly criticized in the light of deaths and injuries that critics said were the result of the agency being too close to the industries it regulated.

Ms. Tenenbaum, a lawyer, had no product safety experience when she was nominated for the job by President Obama. She had come up through the Democratic ranks in South Carolina, a state dominated by Republicans, serving as a legislative staff member as well as the state’s superintendent of education. In 1994, she ran an unsuccessful primary campaign for lieutenant governor, and 10 years later lost to Jim DeMint, a Republican, in the race to replace Ernest Hollings, a Democrat who was retiring, in the Senate.

Before her arrival at the safety commission, the Bush administration had sought to ease what it considered costly rules that placed unnecessary burdens on businesses, and the agency’s budget was largely gutted. Staff was cut and safety initiatives were stalled or dropped.

In 2007, a Washington Post investigation found that Nancy Nord, who was then the agency’s acting chairwoman, and her predecessor, Hal Stratton, had taken dozens of industry-sponsored trips that were paid for in full or in part by trade associations or manufacturers of products that were regulated by the agency. Ms. Nord said the trips were legal.

Nuclear Power’s Future May Hinge on Georgia Project

But something else is at stake with the reactors called Vogtle 3 and 4: the future of the American nuclear industry itself.

The Alvin W. Vogtle nuclear power plant near Augusta is using a new plant design, a new construction method and a new system of nuclear regulation for what the industry says is a faster, better and cheaper system that will lead the way for a new generation of reactors.

Until recently, a new reactor construction project had not been started in the United States for 30 years, and now Vogtle and a similar project in South Carolina, V.C. Summer 2 and 3, are supposed to provide the answer to nuclear power’s great questions: What does a new reactor cost? With the price of natural gas near historic lows, can it even be worthwhile?

As the current generation of reactors moves toward retirement, the two projects may be the industry’s last best hope.

“Everybody’s watching the construction of that plant,” said Barry Moline, executive director of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, speaking of Vogtle. Several association members are considering investing in a nearly identical plant proposed by Florida Power and Light in Miami. Mr. Moline said of Vogtle’s builders, led by Georgia Power, “If they can do it, that will be the model.”

And if they can’t, it could years before anybody thinks of trying again. The new designs are supposed to be 10 times less likely to have an accident and be easier to operate, but if they cannot be built roughly on time and on budget, then nuclear power will have trouble in the era of plentiful natural gas and emerging technologies like wind. Nuclear power could become a bypassed technology — like moon landings, Polaroid photos and cassette tapes.

Executives at Southern Company, Georgia Power’s corporate parent, say they are eager for the challenge. “It takes leadership to do something like this,” said Joseph A. Miller, known as Buzz, Southern’s vice president for nuclear development.

Southern, one of the biggest utilities in the United States, raced to grab incentives offered by Congress to restart the nuclear construction business and to try out a licensing system devised by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to avoid a repeat of the experience of the 1970s and ‘80s.

In those decades parts of plants were built, ripped out and rebuilt because of design and regulatory problems, leading to ruinous costs. Examples sit across the muddy construction site: Vogtle 1 and 2, which opened in 1987 and 1989, cost $8.87 billion. When they were proposed in 1971 the estimated cost was $660 million.

For Vogtle 3 and 4, the company submitted a license application with a design described as nearly complete and received an operating license when construction had barely started, contingent on building exactly what it said it would.

The older plants, in contrast, were built by welders and pipe fitters and electricians who were working from incomplete plans that were conflicting, vague or inadequate to meet regulatory standards.

In a second innovation, Southern chose a system in which large sections of the plant would be prefabricated in multiton sections, shipped to the site and welded together into gigantic modules, then loaded into place by the world’s largest crane.

But with construction now roughly one-third complete, it is clear that much is not going as planned, and that the schedule — which is closely linked to cost because of growing interest expense on the incomplete asset — has slipped by at least 14 months and possibly more.

Still, all is not lost. Some of the changes since the company committed to the project seven years ago have helped it along; interest rates are at historic lows and the price for labor and materials has been held down by recession.