Month: May 2013

Fort Calhoun – A Mixed Report Card

Lara Uselding
Public Affairs Officer, Region IV
 

nebraskaNRC 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.

While OPPD has made progress, there is still a lot of work to be done. The team found the plant hadn’t done a good job of evaluating whether a discovered condition exists in other areas of the plant and then implementing actions to address it. Because of this, the NRC has determined a number of restart checklist items are not ready for closure. In addition, NRC inspectors identified new performance deficiencies. Those preliminary findings still need to be evaluated by NRC management and results will be documented in the team’s inspection report. The report will be issued within 45 days.

The NRC will conduct follow-up inspections to look at the remaining open performance areas and to determine if plant personnel, equipment, and processes are ready to support the safe restart and continued safe operation. There will be additional public meetings in the local area before any decision about restart.

An Update on Taking the Next Step – Building a 21st Century Digital Government

Stu Reiter
Senior Advisor, E-Government
 

digital_govLast 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.

In addition, through our newly available Developer’s Page we are providing the ability to search and retrieve NRC documents from NRC’s documents collections, operating reactor inspection reports and other NRC information resources.

As part of our Digital Government Strategy program, we are developing plans that will continue to focus on making high value data and content available for application developers and opportunities to use mobile devices to improve existing services. So stay tuned.

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