NRC NEWS

U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, REGION III

801 Warrenville Road

Lisle IL 60532

No. III-01-005 February 7, 2001

CONTACT: Jan Strasma (630)829-9663/e-mail: rjs2@nrc.gov

Pam Alloway-Mueller (630)829-9662/e-mail: pla@nrc.gov

NRC TO MEET WITH EXELON FEBRUARY 13 TO DISCUSS

RADIATION PROTECTION FINDINGS AT QUAD CITIES NUCLEAR PLANT

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff members will meet February 13 in Lisle, Illinois, with

representatives of the Exelon Generation Company to discuss recent inspection findings on radiation

protection at the Quad Cities Nuclear Power Plant. The plant is located in Cordova, Illinois.

The meeting, called a Regulatory Conference, will begin at 1 p.m. CST in the Third Floor

Conference Room of the NRC’s Region III Office, 801 Warrenville Road, Lisle. Participants will

discuss an inspection finding that preliminarily has been assessed as “white” in safety significance.

Color assessments are used to determine the NRC’s response to the findings which may include

additional meetings with plant officials as well as follow-up inspections to review the company’s

response.

A white inspection finding is one that has low to moderate safety significance.

The meeting is open to public observation and will be available through videoconferencing in

Room O-5B2 at NRC Headquarters, One White Flint North, 11555 Rockville Pike in Rockville,

Maryland. NRC staff members will be available after the session to address questions and comments

from members of the public.

The Quad Cities regulatory conference will cover a potential white finding associated with

planning problems concerning occupational radiation doses that were incurred during a recent refueling

outage when workers were replacing safety relief valves.

NRC inspectors found that planning problems caused the actual radiation dose for the valve

replacement work to exceed the projected doses by more than 50 percent. Specifically, inspectors

found that a related cooling and ventilation system was out of service at the time of the valve work

which resulted in higher temperatures in the work area. Because of the higher temperatures, individual

workers could only be in the required area for a short length of time, but cumulatively, the workers

spent more time in the area than what was originally projected. This resulted in the higher cumulative

dose for workers. Additionally, inspectors found that less experienced workers performed the valve

replacement job, also contributing to more time spent in the work area and consequently higher

cumulative dose.
Although the cumulative dose for the job exceeded the company’s projected dose for all

workers involved in the valve project, no individual worker received radiation doses above NRC

occupational limits.

The NRC uses a four-category rating system for its inspection findings; from green, through

white and yellow, to red, depicting increasing safety significance. A similar rating system is used for

the quarterly performance indicators, which are statistical measures of the safety performance of

various plant functions.

Further information on these inspection findings, including the text of the inspection reports, is

available on the NRC’s web site at:

<http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/QUAD/quad_pim.html>

Following the February 13 meeting, the NRC staff will continue its review of the finding and

determine its final assessment and the agency’s resulting actions. The outcome of the NRC staff’s

review of these findings, which normally takes four to six weeks, will be on the NRC’s enforcement

web page at:

<http://www.nrc.gov/OE/> Select the “enforcement actions” link.

Additional information on the NRC’s reactor inspection and assessment program is on the web

site at:

<http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/index.html>.

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