NRC SCHEDULES REGULATORY CONFERENCE
TO DISCUSS TURKEY POINT NUCLEAR PLANT EVENT
Printable Version

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scheduled a regulatory conference with officials of Florida Power & Light on Tuesday, October 10, in Atlanta to discuss an event at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant, located south of Miami near Homestead, Fla.

NRC and FPL officials will discuss the significance of an event last March involving the temporary loss of the residual heat removal capability on one of the two reactors at the plant. An NRC review found that plant operators and staff failed to adequately assess and manage the increase in risk of maintenance on equipment supplying electricity to the residual heat removal system. That maintenance caused a loss of the ability to remove heat for seven minutes. The reactor coolant temperature increased, but the reactor was shut down at the time and plant staff immediately corrected the problem. After the event, FPL also began daily risk reviews of all outage activities and entered the matter into its corrective action program.

The NRC evaluates regulatory performance at commercial nuclear power plants with a color- coded system which classifies findings as either green, white, yellow or red, in increasing order of safety significance. The NRC’s preliminary evaluation determined that this issue at Turkey Point is “white,” meaning it is of low to moderate safety significance.

The meeting is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. in the NRC’s Region II office, located on the 24th floor of the Atlanta Federal Center at 61 Forsyth Street SW in Atlanta. The public is invited to observe, and will have one or more opportunities to talk with NRC officials after the business portion, but before the meeting is adjourned. Persons wishing to participate in this meeting by toll-free audio teleconference should contact the NRC’s Joel Munday at 404-562-4560 or JTM@nrc.gov.

No decisions on final safety significance, any apparent violations or possible enforcement action will be made at the conference. Those decisions will be made by NRC officials at a later time.

NRC news releases are available through a free listserv subscription at the following Web address: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/listserver.html. The NRC Home Page at www.nrc.gov also offers a Subscribe to News link in the News & Information menu. E-mail notifications are sent to subscribers when news releases are posted to NRC's Web Site.

Privacy Policy | Site Disclaimer
Thursday, February 22, 2007