NRC: News Release - Region III - 2005-042 - NRC Staff to Meet with Dominion Generation Co. Officials to Discuss Possible Equipment Flooding Issues at Kewaunee Plant

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NRC NEWS
U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

Office of Public Affairs, Region III
801 Warrenville Road, Lisle IL 60532
www.nrc.gov

No. III-05-042		November 3, 2005
CONTACT:	Jan Strasma (630) 829-9663 Viktoria Mitlyng (630) 829-9662	E-mail: opa3@nrc.gov
NRC STAFF TO MEET WITH DOMINION GENERATION CO. OFFICIALS TO DISCUSS POSSIBLE EQUIPMENT FLOODING ISSUES AT KEWAUNEE PLANT Printable Version
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet Nov. 8 in Lisle, Ill., with representatives of Dominion Generation Co. to discussion the safety significance of possible flooding issues at the Kewaunee Nuclear Power Plant. The facility is located at Kewaunee, Wis. The meeting will be at 1 p.m. in the NRC Region III Office, Suite 210, 2443 Warrenville Rd., Lisle. The meeting is open to public observation. At the conclusion of the business portion of the meeting, members of the public may make comments and ask questions of the NRC staff. An NRC inspection in Sept. 2004, found that under certain circumstances, the turbine building could flood and cause a malfunction of safety equipment needed for safe shutdown of the plant. The preliminary safety significance of the issue was determined to be greater than "green"which means more than very low safety significance. The NRC evaluates regulatory performance at nuclear power plants with a color-coded system which classifies findings as green, white, yellow, and red, in increasing order of significance. The utility entered a forced outage in Feb. 2005 to make extensive system and structural modifications to address the problem. "This apparent violation is of concern to us because the utility missed an earlier opportunity to discover and correct this issue in 2003, when minor flooding in the turbine building challenged the function of certain safety equipment," said James Caldwell, NRC Regional Administrator. "We will continue to monitor the plant’s ability to effectively identify and solve problems." Following the regulatory conference, Kewaunee performance improvement initiatives will be discussed. No decision on the final safety significance, apparent violations or possible enforcement action will be made during the conference. Those decisions will be made by NRC officials at a later time. NRC Inspection Report 050011, issued Oct. 6, covering the flooding issues, is available in the NRC’s online document library, known as ADAMS: http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html. Use accession number ML052800430 to locate the report.