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	NRC NEWS U. S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, REGION III 801 Warrenville Road, Lisle IL 60532
	CONTACT:	Jan Strasma (630) 829-9663/e-mail: rjs2@nrc.gov
		Angela Dauginas (630) 829-9662/e-mail: opa3@nrc.gov

NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT: RIII-97-34

April 8, 1997

CONTACT:

Jan Strasma 630/829-9663

Angela Dauginas 630/829-9662

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff has scheduled a public exit meeting at Perry Nuclear Power Station to discuss the results of a special NRC design inspection at that plant. The Perry plant is located 7 miles northeast of Painesville, Ohio.

NRC officials will meet April 22 at 1:00 p.m. with representatives of Centerior Service Corporation, operator of the plant, at the Training and Education Center located at the plant site. The meeting will be open to public observation. NRC officials will be available afterwards to speak with the news media and members of the public.

The design inspection began on February 17 of this year and concluded on March 27. It was led by Morris Branch from the NRC's headquarters office in Rockville, Maryland, and supported by five inspectors from the engineering firm Stone & Webster.

Design inspections focus on reviews of a plant's original design and configuration and the utility's conformance with the plant's safety analysis report. The NRC staff planned a number of these inspections after recent findings that licensees at the Millstone plant in Connecticut, and at other facilities, routinely performed full-core offloads during refueling outages without performing the necessary safety evaluations. It was also discovered that other facilities' actual as-built configuration or operations were inconsistent with the design basis information described in their licenses.

During the Perry plant inspection, no issues were discovered that raised immediate operability concerns. A written inspection report is expected in mid-May.