Lara Uselding
Public Affairs Officer, Region IV
 

NRC inspectors held a public meeting in Omaha, Neb., on May 17, to share preliminary information from a recent restart readiness inspection at the Fort Calhoun Station, operated by the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD). The plant entered into the NRC’s increased oversight category in 2011 after it shut down for a refueling outage. The outage was extended due to historic Missouri River flooding followed by an electrical fire and other restart complications.

The meeting is one in a series we’re holding to keep the public informed. The 15-member team of inspectors looked at 169 out of more than 450 items that need to be resolved prior to the NRC making a decision on restart. The team recommended closing three of the 18 main categories known as the restart checklist. The three areas the team believes OPPD has appropriately addressed are third-party safety culture assessment, quality assurance, and integrated organizational effectiveness.

In essence, the plant’s officials have made improvements on some of the causes that led to the performance decline.

It’s important to note that as the team prepared for the inspection and began its review of the 169 items, they identified that 66 of those items were not fully ready for inspection as plant management stated. That means NRC inspectors were only able to fully inspect 60 percent of the original scope and will go back for a follow-up inspection.

A 5.9 magnitude earthquake, a hydraulic oil spill and the release of an International Atomic Energy Agency report highlighted the last week at Fukushima Daiichi.

Recent developments related to the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant blacked out following Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami include:

Plant Stable After Saturday Quake

Just before 3 p.m. Saturday, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture shook the plant. No damage was found, according to a TEPCO release. Although inspections did reveal a spill of about 4 liters from the overflow pipe of a treated water tank servicing units 5 and 6. The same tank had overflowed onto the ground the previous day, and testing at that point indicated radioactive materials were below detection limits. To keep it from leaking again, TEPCO reduced the water level to about 1 meter below the top of the tank.

Unit 3 Equipment Leaks Oil

Just before the earthquake, a worker found about 20 liters of oil leaking from remotely controlled heavy equipment removing debris from the upper levels of unit 3. Oil did not enter the unit's spent fuel pool, according to a TEPCO release. Crews cleaned it up, and an inspection showed the oil came from a detached hose on a hydraulic cutter.

IAEA Releases Report

Niamey (AFP) May 23, 2013

French nuclear group Areva, the world's second-largest uranium producer whose mine in northern Niger was hit by a car bomb on Thursday, extracts more than a third of its mineral in the impoverished west African country.

Areva has been present in Niger for more than 40 years, operating two big mines near the northern town of Arlit through two affiliated companies - Somair and Cominak - whic

Stu Reiter
Senior Advisor, E-Government
 

Last August, we noted our efforts in support of President Obama’s May 23, 2012, memorandum on Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People. That memorandum launched a comprehensive Digital Government Strategy to make government services and information available anywhere, anytime, and on any device, and in formats that facilitate additional use by public developers and entrepreneurs.

The NRC took this memo seriously and in March we implemented the agency’s first mobile solution for the 2013 Regulatory Information Conference, allowing attendees to access the conference agenda and download conference publications from their own mobile devices. We plan to further grow capabilities for future conferences.

To improve access to information, we have also used RSS feeds to make a number of NRC resources more readily available. These include reports on the operating status and power output of commercial power reactors, daily events and activities occurring at commercial power reactors, power reactor inspection reports, and NRC daily news releases.