David Skeen
Director, Japan Lessons-Learned Directorate
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Today
is the second anniversary of the terrible earthquake, related tsunami
and the resulting nuclear accident in Japan. Two years ago, the world
watched in horror as the tragedy unfolded. Almost from those very first
days, the NRC began to focus on learning from the incident to enhance
our reactor safety – and to make sure such an incident would never
happen here at home.
For example, U.S. nuclear power plants are using existing programs to address issues identified during last year’s
walkdowns,
which examined each plant’s earthquake and flooding protection
features. Our resident inspectors are watching over that work using our
Reactor Oversight Process, and we expect to audit approximately 20
plants (10 for earthquake walkdowns and 10 for flooding) in the spring
and early summer to ensure the plants remain protected from such
hazards.
We
also continue to work with the plants on their re-analysis of flooding
and earthquake hazards. We prioritized the flooding re-evaluations last
year, examining several factors to give plants one, two or three years
to submit their work. The first set of plants should have their
responses in by tomorrow, and we’ll review the re-evaluated hazards
before issuing a safety assessment for each site. The first set of
earthquake hazard re-evaluations, for plants in the central and eastern
United States, will be due in September. We’ll give those documents a
similar review and resulting safety assessment for each plant.
The
plants have also obtained additional equipment that can help keep the
reactor and spent fuel pools cool if normal power sources are lost for
extended periods of time, as was the case at Fukushima. This work
responds to one of three Orders we issued to U.S. nuclear power plants
in March 2012. Every plant provided a status report on complying with
those Orders in October 2012, and we’ve found that all plants appear to
be on track to meet the Orders’ requirements by the required deadlines.
The
plants have also recently submitted their integrated approaches to
comply with the Orders, and we’re reviewing those plans. By the end of
April we’re also expecting the plants to provide the their assessments
of how many staff a plant needs to have on hand to respond to a loss of
power involving every reactor at a given site
The staff’s
latest update to
the Commissioners on Fukushima-related activities provides a more
detailed look at how each of the NRC Near-Term Task Force’s
recommendations is being implemented. While all of the Fukushima-related
items are important, we’ve made sure U.S. reactors are paying proper
attention to maintaining plant safety, any ongoing work of greater
safety benefit or other existing high-priority actions protective of
safety.
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