United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Office of Public Affairs

Washington, DC 20555

Phone 301-415-8200 Fax 301-415-2234

Internet:opa@nrc.gov

No. 98-142 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Wednesday, August 12, 1998)

NRC SEEKS PUBLIC COMMENT ON WAYS TO DEVELOP

NEW NUCLEAR POWER PLANT ASSESSMENT PROCESS

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is seeking public comment on techniques

that might be used in developing a new method to assess licensed nuclear power

plants’ performance.

Comments are due by Oct. 6. They are being solicited from interested public

interest groups, the nuclear industry, state representatives and concerned citizens.

Last September, the NRC began reviewing its nuclear power plant assessment

process with the goal of improving the way that job could be done. This review was

discussed in a public briefing of the Commission in April, after which the

Commissioners directed the staff to seek public comment on some concepts that had

been proposed.

Here are the four major issues on which NRC is asking for comments, with some

typical areas to be explored in each one:

REGULATORY OVERSIGHT APPROACH: The amount of interaction the NRC

should have with licensees in order to protect public health and safety, and the types of

actions that should be taken in response to various findings; the elements of a riskinformed, baseline-inspection program; allocating additional inspection resources on

such factors as safety system availability or the number of operational incidents; the

role of licensee self-assessments in an oversight approach.

INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT PROCESS: The means for focusing NRC

attention on poor performing plants; methods for clearly communicating assessment

results to the public and the industry; how often plants are assessed; types of NRC

response to various findings.

RISK-INFORMED ASSESSMENT GUIDANCE: How information from

probabilistic risk assessment and other sources might be incorporated into the oversight

process to develop an approach by which plant areas with the highest safety risk get

the greatest focus.
INDICATORS: Means for measuring safety performance and improving or

declining performance trends; linkages between indicators and risk; the possible use of

financial data in the assessment process.

More detailed questions about each of these issues are included in a notice

published in the Aug. 7 edition of the Federal Register. That notice also contains

background information and the Commission’s voting record and individual

Commissioner comments on the staff’s proposed concepts for developing a new

nuclear power plant assessment process. The Federal Register notice also will be

posted on the Internet at: http://www.ruleforum.llnl.gov/cgi-bin/rulemake.

In addition to seeking public comment, the NRC staff tentatively plans to hold

one or more public workshops in September to discuss the assessment process.

Specific dates, times, locations and agenda will be announced later. Further

information may be obtained by telephoning Timothy Frye at 301/415-1287 or David

Gamberoni at 301/415-1144.

The NRC staff will use information gathered through this public comment period

and the workshops in developing a final proposal to be presented to the Commission by

early January 1999.

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