Bay City Tribune

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held their annual public meeting on the South Texas Plant's (STP) nuclear safety status at the Bay City Civic Center Wednesday night.

John Dixon, Binesh Tharakan and Wayne Walker, three representatives of the NRC, were on hand at the public meeting to deliver their safety inspection findings at STP during 2008.

According to Tharakan, resident inspector, The NRC conducted over 5,000 hours of inspection activities at STP in 2008.

"Based on these activities, the South Texas Project was in the licensee response column of the NRC action matrix," Tharakan said.

"This means that South Texas Project fully met all of the cornerstone objectives that are in the assessment period."

"In summary, the South Texas Project Nuclear Operating Company operated STP in a manner that preserved public health and safety in 2008," he said.

Because there were no significant safety findings throughout their inspections, the plant will continue to have baseline inspections conducted in 2009 plus a generic safety inspection when the reactor head for unit one is replaced in the fall.

"The NRC will conduct a generic safety inspection of this very infrequent activity to verify the South Texas Project has taken the necessary precautions to ensure the new reactor head will perform as required," said Tharakan.

Joe Sheppard, STPNOC president and chief executive officer, told the public that safe use of nuclear power to produce electricity was a "shared, mutual interest" the plant had with NRC.

"It is our continuing pledge that we'll strive for excellence in our operations; we will always make safety our top priority; and that we will carefully nurture and protect that trust that has been given to us by our community to operate our facility here," said Sheppard.

One audience member questioned STP officials regarding the need for replacing unit one's reactor head.

"The reactor vessel head has what we call a number of penetrations - there have been issues in the industry where the wells around some of those penetrations have degraded and in some cases they have leaked," said Sheppard.

"We have had no issues like that at South Texas, but based upon operating experience, and based, again on the experience of other facilities, we would expect that at some point in the operation of the facility sometime in the future that we might have some issues with those wells."

"Therefore we are proactively replacing the heads with new heads that have improved materials that have proven to be very resistant to this kind of degradation."