Nuclear Regulatory Commission Speaks About Nuke Plant's Safety Record

Nuclear Regulatory Commission representatives hosted a well-attended town hall at the Limerick Township building on Wednesday night to report on the Exelon Limerick Generating Station's 2010 performance. Branch chief Paul Krohn, senior resident inspector Gene DiPaolo and resident inspector Nicole Sieller were on the panel to deliver the report and answer audience questions. They also briefly spoke about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in Japan. 

Krohn said that the Limerick plant was in the top tier of grading on the commission's “action matrix”, a scale that delineates degrees of regulatory response to inspection reports. Violations are identified as green, white, yellow or red, with green indicating that the violation has little impact on safety while a red violation is an unacceptably unsafe condition. 

If a plant has findings of green and above, the NRC conducts baseline inspections the following year. Each level on the scale brings more regulatory oversight to a plant, with the lowest level meaning a plant is shut down until all its issues are corrected. 

Sieller gave two examples of green-level violations that were discovered at the plant. One involved procedure for maintaining a diesel generator at the plant and the other was the failure of a temperature sensor in a cooling room. Both conditions were corrected as quickly as possible once they were identified.

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