The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has notched back emergency preparedness concerns at the Columbia Generating Station in Richland, Wa., that arose during a plant inspection in May, dropping the status of the problems cited from white to green, the lowest status in the watchdog agency's scale.
The plant will no longer be cited, as the concern level has been notched back to the lowest level of significance, the Tri-City Herald reported.
The concerns were dropped to “green” after a regulatory conference in June that was held at the request of plant owner and operator Energy Northwest.
The snafu was procedural, centering on an interpretation of evacuation or shelter regulations. “Some Energy Northwest officials misunderstood regulations to conclude that scenario, called a 'puff release,' called for an evacuation recommendation,” the filed report said.
“They provided information that led us to conclude that emergency planning personnel had sufficient experience that if shelter in place was appropriate, they would make that recommendation,” said Victor Dricks, a spokesman for the NRC.
Meanwhile, the power plant is operating at 65 percent of capacity, while work on an outage-utilized valve continues. The coupling that retracts a wedge from a pressurized (1,400 pounds per square inch) water pipe broke during the 50-day refueling outage that was concluded in late June.
The wedge is expected to be manually pushed free during a triage operation, but the fix will not be completed fully until the next power outage.
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