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Abstract

This report presents the resolution of generic safety issues related to nuclear power plants. The purpose of these evaluations are to assist in the timely and efficient allocation of NRC resources for the resolution of those safety issues that have a significant potential for reducing risk.

Issues primarily concerned with the licensing process or environmental protection and not directly related to safety were excluded from prioritization/screening. The issues were broken down into five groups: (1) TMI Action Plan items, documented in NUREG-0660⁴⁸ and NUREG-0737⁹⁸; (2) Task Action Plan items, documented in NUREG-0371² and NUREG-0471,³ as well as all Unresolved Safety Issues (USIs) not originally identified in these two documents; (3) new generic issues identified from various sources; (4) human factors issues, documented in NUREG-0985⁶⁵¹; and (5) Chernobyl issues, documented in NUREG-1251.¹¹⁷⁴ Future supplements to this report will include additional issues that completed major milestones as well as updated information on issues that have been resolved.

The agency’s Generic Issues Program process for resolving GIs is described in MD 6.4, “Generic Issues Program”, and SECY-07-0022. These documents provide recent program improvement initiatives. This new process includes five distinct stages that may be exercised: Identification, Acceptance Review, Screening, Safety / Risk Assessment, and Regulatory Assessment. Prior to implementation of MD 6.4 (1999), the safety priority rankings were HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW, and DROP and were assigned on the basis of risk significance estimates, the ratio of risk to cost and other impacts estimated to result if resolution of the safety issues were implemented, and the consideration of uncertainties and other quantitative or qualitative factors. With the issuance of MD 6.4, in 1999, the agency discontinued the use of priority ranking model described above.