Nearly all of the commercial nuclear power reactors in the U.S. meet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s highest regulatory standards, the agency said in a press release this week.
NRC has issued its 2021 performance reports to all 93 of the country’s operating nuclear plants, the commission said, and of those sites, 91 were in NRC’s highest performance category.
The two that weren’t, Callaway in Missouri and Davis-Besse in Ohio, were in NRC’s second-highest compliance category in 2021, meaning that the agency had to step in on regulatory issues and conduct additional inspections. Plant operators at those sites “needed to resolve one or two items of low safety significance” during the year, NRC said.
None of the nation’s nuclear programs ranked any lower on NRC’s regulatory action matrix, the commission said.
“The work of the nuclear power plant operators for almost every reactor fully meets our stringent safety and security performance objectives,” NRC Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation Director Andrea Veil said in the release. “Yet even those high performing units will undergo thousands of inspection hours this year under our normal ‘baseline’ inspection program.”
NRC said that it should hold a meeting to discuss the details of its annual assessment results sometime in the spring or summer. As of Friday, the commission had yet to schedule a date for that meeting.
