NEI Nuclear Notes

I wanted to return to Jeff Donn's piece from earlier this week concerning nuclear safety inspections . As I mentioned in a post from last night, I've been working with NEI's Jim Slider on taking a closer look at it. Jim is an old pro who has worked in the nuclear industry for more than 35 years, beginning his career at NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation as a design basis accident analyst. One of the first things I asked Jim about concerned the figures that Donn cited in his report. According to the story, the GAO report AP obtained a copy of said that NRC cited 10,776 "low-level" violations and 257 "higher-level" violations at U.S. nuclear plants between 2000 and 2012 (see page 3 of the AP story that was posted at ABCNews.com for the aggregate numbers). Those data points puzzled Jim because according to the Reactor Oversight Process (ROP) that NRC instituted in 2000, NRC categorizes inspection violations from 1 (most significant) to 4 (...

Yesterday, Jeff Donn of the Associated Press (AP) published a story on safety inspections at nuclear power plants that seemed to raise more questions than it answered. Here's the introductory paragraph: The number of safety violations at U.S. nuclear power plants varies dramatically from region to region, pointing to inconsistent enforcement in an industry now operating mostly beyond its original 40-year licenses, according to a congressional study awaiting release. Here are a few items to keep in mind when considering this story and its conclusions: NRC inspections and industry trends show industry safety performance is high. The most recent report from NRC identified no significant adverse trends in safety . NRC conducts an average of more than 2,000 hours of inspections a year at each reactor. NRC will increase the number of inspections if recurring issues are identified, and NRC always has option to close a plant if an inspector deems it doesn't meet Federal s...