NRC NEWS

 U.S. NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION

 2443 Warrenville Road

 Lisle IL 60532

 Web Site: http://www.nrc.gov E-mail: opa3@nrc.gov

No. III-05-028 May 20, 2005

CONTACT: Jan Strasma (630) 829-9663 

Viktoria Mitlyng (630) 829-9662 

NRC TERMINATES SPECIAL OVERSIGHT PANEL, BEGINS

AUGMENTED REACTOR OVERSIGHT PROGRAM FOR DAVIS-BESSE

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff has terminated its special Oversight Panel for the

Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant and returned the monitoring of the facility to an expanded version of

the agency’s Reactor Oversight Process. 

The agency established its Davis-Besse Oversight Panel in April 2002 to coordinate the NRC’s

regulatory activities in response to the corrosion damage to the reactor vessel head and other safety

issues at the plant. The panel included NRC managers and staff from the Region III office in Lisle, Ill.,

NRC Headquarters in Rockville, Md., and the NRC resident inspectors at the plant.

Davis-Besse -- operated by FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Company and located near Oak

Harbor, Ohio – resumed operation in March 2004 after being shut down for about two years to address

equipment and staff performance problems.

“Since Davis-Besse returned to operation, the plant has operated safely,” said James Caldwell,

NRC Regional Administrator. “With the record of safe operation at power for more than a year now

and their satisfactory completion of the order requiring independent assessments and a successful midcycle outage, the NRC can make the transition from a special panel to an augmented oversight

program.”

The NRC Oversight Panel will meet with FirstEnergy officials on May 24 to discuss the

transition. The meeting, which will be open to public observation, will begin at 6 p.m. at the Camp

Perry Clubhouse, 1000 Lawrence Road, Bldg. 600, in Port Clinton. At the conclusion of the meeting,

before adjournment, the NRC staff will be available for public questions and comments.

The Reactor Oversight Process includes monitoring of plant safety performance with statistical

measures called performance indicators and inspections of plant safety performance and activities by

NRC resident inspectors and specialists based in the regional office and NRC headquarters.

Although oversight of the plant will be returned to the normal program, it will be substantially

expanded to include additional inspections focused on corrective action program implementation and

additional requirements imposed on the plant in an NRC Confirmatory Order issued at the time of

startup.
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The Confirmatory Order required Davis-Besse to contract with outside organizations to

perform independent assessments in the areas of operations, engineering, corrective actions, and safety

culture. In addition, FirstEnergy established action plans to reduce the backlog of maintenance and

corrective action items, improve the corrective action program, and ensure a safety culture where

individuals feel free to raise safety issues.

The NRC will perform inspections beyond the regular oversight program to monitor these

independent assessments and the status of the action plans.

The NRC uses a color-coded system to measure the safety significance of problems and

inspection findings at nuclear plants ranging from green, through white and yellow, to red, the most

significant.

A white finding at Davis-Besse dealing with inoperable emergency sirens identified during

testing in May 2004, remains open and will result in an additional inspection later this year to review

the utility’s corrective actions. 

The letter notifying FirstEnergy of the transition from the NRC Oversight Panel to the normal

Reactor Oversight Process is available on the NRC’s web site at:

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html. Use accession number ML051400049 to

locate the document. 

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