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NRC NEWS U. S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, REGION III 801 Warrenville Road, Lisle IL 60532

NRC Staff to Discuss D.C. Cook Restart Plans

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with American Electric Power Company officials Tuesday, April 18, to discuss the status of D.C. Cook Nuclear Power Station's preparations for resuming operations. The plant has been shut down since September 1997.

The meeting, which is open to the public, will be held at 1 p.m. EST in the plant's Training Building. The plant is located at 7700 Red Arrow Highway between Bridgman and Stevensville, Michigan. NRC staff members have been meeting periodically with plant and utility officials to discuss the status of the plant's preparations for restart. Additional public meetings will be scheduled prior to restart.

During the April 18 meeting, NRC and utility officials will discuss D.C. Cook Unit 2's preparations to restart, and review the progress of restart plans and activities.

The NRC recently revised its schedule for the two principal remaining inspections which will assess the readiness of Unit 2 to restart. The inspections, originally scheduled for early April, were rescheduled at the licensee's request to begin May 8. The Restart Readiness Assessment Team Inspection, which will be conducted by a 10-person team, is scheduled to last two weeks. The second inspection, which will review any maintenance and modification work which has been deferred until after restart, will last a week. This schedule is consistent with the licensee's current plan for completing restart preparations.

Following the completion of the inspections and other NRC assessments, the NRC staff will advise the licensee of its view of the readiness of Unit 2 for restart. The second reactor on site, Unit 1, will receive similar scrutiny before it resumes operation.

Both D.C. Cook units have been shut down since September 1997 after an NRC design inspection questioned the capabilities of key plant emergency systems to meet their design requirements.

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