Parent company getting better marks for its nuclear complex

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, NRC has issued five orders and multiple threat advisories to licensees of commercial power reactors to strengthen their capabilities, improve security force readiness, and enhance controls over access authorization, NRC Regional Administrator Howard Miller wrote. “Through several significant inspection activities, we have confirmed that you have effectively implemented the required security enhancements and have addressed concerns raised within the security force.” He said the recent force-on-force exercise at Indian Point “is an example of NRC’s efforts at ensuring the adequacy of site protective strategy and capabilities.”

The study involved the participation of all technical divisions in evaluating performance for the first half of 2003.

Indian Point spokesman James Steets said the NRC report proves Entergy is making strides in upgrading the facilities. “We’re very pleased that they confirmed what we’ve been saying that we’d be making improvements to Indian Point 2,” he said. Steets said the NRC’s report shows the upgrades have been “important and significant” and upgrades to Indian Point 3 have also been important.

In a letter to Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the company which owns and operates the facilities, Miller said Unit 2 had made “sufficient progress” to be downgraded from the Degraded Cornerstone Column of the Reactor Oversight Program Action Matrix to the Regulatory Response Column.

“While progress has been made, we maintained oversight above baseline level sin light of some continuing issues related to human performance and corrective actions, and your significant on-going effort with design control initiatives,” Miller wrote.

“Entergy made progress in both licensed operator training and in upgrading the security program at the site,” he wrote. “Progress in reduced work backlogs was somewhat limited by significant efforts related to refueling outages on both units and site integration efforts.” Nevertheless, Miller said improvements were noted in areas that received “particular management attention, for example, corrective maintenance backlogs were maintained relatively low.” He said, though, that, “Continued efforts are needed to more fully address human performance and corrective action issues and to implement your design basis improvement initiatives.”

Performance at Unit 3, though, has declined “slightly as indicated by an increased backlog in maintenance, an increase in the number of human performance efforts, and an increase in unplanned reactor trips.”