NEI Nuclear Notes

Jim Slider Fifteen years ago, the NRC and industry cooperated on reforming the way in which NRC decided where to focus its attention across the U.S. fleet of power reactors.  Among the guiding principles of the reform was to make NRC decisions on operating reactor oversight more transparent and predictable, and ensure that additional NRC resources were applied where they would have the greatest benefit to safety.  Combining performance indicators and inspection results, the Reactor Oversight Process ( ROP ) is widely regarded as far superior to the largely subjective and non-public method it replaced.  Over its 15 year life, the ROP has evolved.  As NRC and industry learned from experience, adjustments were made in various features of the ROP to ensure the program continued to meet its objectives and adhere to its guiding principles.  Two years ago, at the Commissioners' direction, the staff undertook an independent review of the ...

The following guest post comes from Victoria Anderson, senior project manager for risk assessment at NEI. Since the NRC published the Probabilistic Risk Assessment Policy Statement in 1995, both the industry and NRC have worked to use risk information to better focus implementation of regulations at our country’s nuclear reactors. Risk information has helped advance maintenance efforts, routine inspections and testing procedures to ensure that licensees direct resources to the equipment and practices that are most important to safe, reliable operation of their plants. In one such effort, in 2004, the NRC published a voluntary rule – 10 CFR 50.69 , Risk-informed categorization and treatment of structures, systems and components for nuclear power reactors – that would allow licensees to refocus their equipment special treatment requirements on the structures, systems and components that are the most important to protecting the plant. Specifically, licensees implementing this volunta...