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Neil Sheehan Public Affairs Officer, Region I   It’s easy to imagine the sense of distress that must have washed over a portable nuclear gauge user one recent morning when he realized the device he had stowed in the back of his truck was missing. The gauge had apparently tumbled from his vehicle as he...

Eliot Brenner Director, Office of Public Affairs   Art Linkletter, a 1950s and ‘60s radio and television host, used to interview children for his show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” In that spirit, at last year’s “Take your Child to Work Day” at the NRC, we seized the opportunity to see what kids knew...

Stephen Dingbaum Assistant Inspector General   The NRC’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is an independent, objective office tasked with auditing NRC programs and operations with a focus on — among other things — detecting fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement. The office’s most recent...

Thomas Wellock NRC Historian   Despite not seeing eye-to-eye on many matters, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, nevertheless, continued to exchange information about nuclear reactor safety even during the Cold War. Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and the information exchanges stopped. It wasn...

Prema Chandrathil Region III Public Affairs Officer   On Friday, the Palisades plant in Covert, Mich., shut down so plant personnel could find and repair a leak somewhere in the reactor’s cooling water system. Soon after, the NRC dispatched an additional inspector from the Regional III office, located...

Adam Glazer Librarian, Public Document Room   The NRC hosts hundreds of meetings throughout the year. Many of the meetings are held so you, the public, can share your thoughts about nuclear power issues. While the meeting topics vary, the way to find out about them doesn’t — you check the Public...

Neil Sheehan Public Affairs Officer Region I   True to forecasts, New England states bore the brunt of the winter storm dubbed Nemo. With respect to nuclear power plants in the region, only one – Pilgrim, in Massachusetts – had its operations interrupted by the powerful Nor’easter. At 9:17 p.m. Friday...

Lauren Casey Enforcement Specialist Office of Enforcement   The NRC establishes regulations, inspects those we license to make sure they are meeting those regulations and, at times, steps in to enforce regulations that licensees are violating. This last activity – enforcement – is a very important part...

Joey Ledford Public Affairs Officer, Region II   The NRC is piloting a new oversight process for nuclear units under construction that is reminiscent of the old riddle, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” Obviously, the Reactor Oversight Process, or ROP, has been in effect for years. The NRC staff...

Maureen Conley Public Affairs Officer   The government has made good progress in reducing risks from uranium contamination on Navajo land, five federal agencies told Congress in a report last week. EPA compiled the report with input from the NRC, the Department of Energy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs...

Viktoria Mitlyng Senior Public Affairs Officer Region III   We gathered at the NRC’s Region III office near Chicago on a recent Saturday morning to continue our dialogue with the public about the Palisades nuclear plant. We decided to host our second webinar on this plant on a Saturday in response to...

Victor Dricks Senior Public Affairs Officer Region IV The NRC has established a special panel to coordinate the agency’s evaluation of Southern California Edison Co.’s proposed plan for restarting its Unit 2 reactor and ensuring that the root causes of problems with the plant’s steam generators are identified...

Clay Johnson Chief, Security Performance Evaluation Branch   They are dressed in camouflage, fit and well-trained, and they creep quietly toward the perimeter of a nuclear power plant under cover of darkness. Their realistic weapons reflect dully in the moonlight, but these weapons fire blank ammunition...

Victor Dricks Senior Public Affairs Officer Region IV   At 4:40 p.m. Central Time Tuesday, officials at the South Texas Project nuclear power plant near Bay City, Texas, notified the NRC’s Operations Center that a fire had broken out in the main transformer of Unit 2, causing an automatic shutdown. Unit...

Lance Rakovan Senior Communications Specialist   One of my jobs at the NRC is managing the agency’s Meeting Facilitation and Advisor Program. This means, I train employees to facilitate public meetings and recommend ways to make public meetings as meaningful as possible. One of the challenges I face...

Eliot Brenner Public Affairs Director   Two years ago, at the end of this month, the NRC made its first foray into social media with this blog. We didn’t know what to expect, but we knew we needed a new way to provide information to the public about – and explanations of – the important, but [...]

The NRC’s public comment period on the scope of an environmental impact statement for the waste confidence decision and rule ends January 2. The waste confidence decision and rule is related to the safety of spent fuel storage. So far, we have received more than 400 wide-ranging comments and suggestions...

The Salem nuclear power plant’s Unit 1 “tripped” on Dec. 21st. Brown’s Ferry Unit 2 tripped the following day. In both cases, something happened that caused the reactor to automatically shut down to ensure safety. In other words, a trip means a plant is doing what it’s supposed to do. Let’s look at the...

The terms “chilling effect” or “chilled work environment” are important ones for the NRC. And they’re not referring to the winter weather. At the NRC, “chilled” refers to a perception that the raising of safety concerns is being suppressed or discouraged – either outright with discrimination —...

This past weekend I had the honor of leading a delegation of U.S. officials to an international conference in Japan designed to keep up the global momentum of enhancing nuclear safety after the Fukushima accident. We met in Koriyama City, some 30 miles west of the scenic Japanese coast, where recovery...

To implement what we’ve learned from 2011’s Fukushima Dai-ichi accident, the NRC in November 2011 created a group of more than 20 full-time employees focused exclusively on these activities. This Japan Lessons Learned Project Directorate is now a year old, and everything it’s accomplished to date highlights...

One of our employees, Janine Dehn, was recently honored with the “Patriotic Employer Award” for “contributing to national security and protecting liberty and freedom by supporting employee participation in America’s National Guard and Reserve Force.” Janine was nominated by Guard and Reserve Specialist...

NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane stood before plant workers at the Fukushima Dai-ichi and Dai-ni sites Thursday, praised their efforts after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and said the global nuclear community must learn the lessons unfolding from the tragedy. Macfarlane, who is leading a delegation...

Given the interest in the NRC’s San Onofre-related meeting in Maryland next week, it’s a good time to step back and see where things stand in reviewing the plant’s restart request. Of course, the San Onofre nuclear power plant has been safely shut down for almost a year now, after the plant discovered...

Just over five weeks after Sandy battered the Northeast, all three of the reactors that experienced a shutdown as a result of the storm are now back at full power. Two of the affected reactors, Salem Unit 1 and Indian Point 3, returned to service not long after Sandy struck on Oct. 29. Indian Point ...