Are these standards being relaxed because they were initially set overly cautiously tight, or are they being routinely relaxed without appropriate engineering?
For example, the steam valve leakage. Apparently some leakage is acceptable. Over the years they have quadrupled the allowed leakage and gone from a "per valve" measure to a "total for all valves" measurement scheme. Is the measure there to predict valve failure? Is the measure there to control total radiation release? Cooling water loss? Steaming the staff? I'd have gone "per valve" if I was monitoring the health of the valves and "total aggregate" if I was concerned about the other effect. Did they decide that the "per valve" number was dominated by the other measure?
The article claims the existence of an engineer that thinks the standards are being loosened too much, but if you have three engineers and you can't make one disagree on some things, you have too many engineers.