NRC TO DISCUSS PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF AN IN-DEPTH
INSPECTION AT PERRY NUCLEAR POWER PLANT
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The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will meet with representatives of FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company in Painesville, Ohio, on Thursday, May 26, to discuss the preliminary results of an in-depth inspection conducted at the Perry Nuclear Power Plant. The plant is located at Perry, Ohio.

The meeting, which will be open to the public for observation, is scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. in the Barberry Room at the Renaissance Quail Hollow Resort, 11080 Concord-Hambden Road, Painesville. Before the meeting is adjourned, NRC staff will be available to answer questions from the public.

The three-part inspection was conducted by the NRC as a part of its heightened oversight of the plant, which resulted from past problems with safety system equipment. The inspection focused on the utility’s corrective action program ( how it finds, evaluates, and fixes problems), the plant’s operating procedures, staff and management performance, engineering, emergency planning. The inspection also reviewed the plant’s performance during its recent refueling outage. The team began the first part of the inspection in January.

"The Perry plant continues to operate safely," said James Caldwell, NRC Regional Administrator. "However, the NRC has increased its oversight of the Perry plant because of previous equipment problems. This extensive inspection was conducted to provide the agency with important insights into plant operations and the effectiveness of FirstEnergy’s performance improvement initiatives."

In August of last year, the NRC announced it was increasing scrutiny over the Perry plant as a result of several equipment problems which occurred during the period October 2002 through May 2004. The NRC found that these problems were of "low to moderate safety significance" and, in two of the instances, the utility had not taken adequate corrective action initially to resolve the problems.

The final inspection report will be publicly available in the NRC’s Agencywide Documents Access and Management System, or ADAMS, at http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams.html. Use Docket Number 05000440 to locate the report. Help in using ADAMS is available from the NRC Public Document Room at 1-800-397-4209.

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Thursday, February 22, 2007