Following last month’s earthquake in Virginia, everyone’s interested in learning more about the quake’s effects on the nearby North Anna nuclear power plant. The plant’s operator, Dominion, has information to share, so the NRC’s ready to listen.
NRC staff will meet with Dominion management from 1 – 5 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 8, in the Commissioners’ Conference Room on the first floor of the NRC’s One White Flint North building, at 11555 Rockville Pike in Rockville, Md. Having a public meeting on such short notice is very unusual, but Dominion’s information on such a unique situation needs to be discussed in a formal, open setting as soon as possible.
The NRC wants to make sure you have the opportunity to see what’s been learned, so the meeting will be available on the Live NRC Meeting page. Members of the public can attend the meeting by coming through security at the NRC’s One White Flint North entrance, at the corner of Rockville Pike and Marinelli Road in Rockville. The NRC is across the street from the White Flint Metro stop.
Dominion is expected to discuss its latest analysis of ground motion at the North Anna site, which sits about 12 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter in Louisa, Va. The company is also expected to describe its next steps in determining whether the plant meets NRC requirements to restart.
The two-reactor North Anna plant shut down safely following the quake, with both reactors operating as designed. Ongoing analysis by both the NRC and Dominion indicates the earthquake may have subjected the plant to more ground movement than specified in the plants’ designs. An NRC Augmented Inspection Team has been examining North Anna for the past week and the team plans to continue its work for another week. When the team completes its inspection, the NRC will hold a meeting near North Anna to discuss their preliminary results, and a final report is expected by the middle of October.
Scott Burnell Public Affairs Officer
U.S. NRC Blog 
what kind of reactor it is nuclear or thermal??
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Sara
A reactor that is shutdown is a disadvantage to the power company that owns it. All security requirements and measures remain in place.
I would like to know what are the disadvantages while one-reactor is shutted down? What other security options can be taken while keeping reactor working?
Why can’t people just wise up? Nuclear power is here to stay, so they could better utilize their time that they spend fighting it, by learning ways to make it better than it is today. Protesting and complaining is disruptive at best….the perfect example of wasted energy (pun intented)!
Japanese authorities made the decision about how and when to issue evacuation orders around the Fukushima site. The U.S. State Department, with input from the NRC, also issued an evacuation order for U.S. citizens living within 50 miles of the plant. That “travel advisory” was later modified, and additional modifications are expected.
Very interested to find out more about James Greenidge’s comment above on evacuation plans. Frankly, I have never thought about that.
All NRC webcasts are archived on the video page of the agency’s website here: http://video.nrc.gov/ . The webcast for today’s meeting is listed both on the video page and the Live NRC Meeting page here: http://www.nrc.gov/public-involve/public-meetings/webcast-live.html .
The NRC is across the street from the White Flint Metro stop.
Don’t let anti-nukers hijack the hearing! DON’T shy mentioning Fukushima –as they WILL — but slap them back reminding the public that this freakish “worst case scenerio” x3 resulted in zero deaths nor damage outside the facility, and any local health effect has been way less than from a normal coal plant on a NORMAL day — so the mass evacuation there was largely an over-reaction too! Chemical plants and Bio-labs storing and experimenting with plague-class pathogens aren’t demanded to have evacuation plans. Wonder why!
James Greenidge
Will the meeting be recorded and available to view after it has concluded, or will it only be available to watch it live?
–Sarah Alexander
Construction Inspector
NRC/Region II/CCI/DCI/Branch 2