The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on June 23:

When housing and banking regulators weren’t looking, Wall Street ran wild with deals that tossed the nation’s economy into a tailspin.

When energy regulators got too cozy with the drilling industry, oil ended up spewing through the Gulf of Mexico from the explosion of the BP Deepwater Horizon rig.

Now troubling signs have emerged that this pattern could be repeating itself, this time in the nuclear power industry.

According to an extensive Associated Press investigation, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is routinely keeping aging reactors within safety standards by weakening or ignoring the rules. That’s the equivalent of a teacher dropping grade requirements to keep students from flunking or a doctor ignoring troubling test results and declaring a patient healthy.

This alarming, reckless and reprehensible behavior by the NRC places expediency above nuclear safety, the commission’s most important responsibility. In the interest of keeping kilowatts cranking, regulators are pursuing this unwise path of least resistance.

The AP investigation found that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has twice weakened the safety standard for acceptable radiation damage to reactor vessels, a critical gauge that helps predict when parts might become dangerously brittle and prone to failure.

Many of the East Coast plants have violated or come close to violating the standard but received a reprieve when the commission chose to adopt a looser standard. (The reactors in question are older ones.)

Confronted by this investigation, the commission insists that safety isn’t being compromised. Even if no immediate danger exists, the downward inspection spiral is a near-certain path to an accident. In addition to the threats to communities near the facilities, the commission’s lax attitude could undermine credibility and development of additional nuclear energy.

The nation needs more nuclear power plants. Nuclear energy is a cleaner source than coal to produce electricity and is more reliable than wind and solar. Until recently, more Americans, including many environmental groups, had begun to look favorably on it.

But after Japan’s nuclear disaster, public opinion in the United States is at a shaky juncture. Unless regulators hold the power industry to the highest safety standards and avoid sleight-of-hand oversight, Americans again — and with good reason — will turn against nuclear energy. After the Three Mile Island accident, nuclear plant construction in this country ground to a halt for about three decades, and our nation continues to pay the price for its unhealthy dependence on dirtier energy sources.

The U.S. needs nuclear energy, but it also needs regulators who do their job and put safety first.