Picture Credit: "Nightscribe" 5-9-02
NRC IMC0350 Panel members, listed from left to right,
are: Douglas Simpkins, DBNPS Resident
Engineer; Douglas Pickett,
NRR Project Manager; Anthony Mendiola,
Section Chief-PDIII-2, NRR; William
Dean, Deputy Director, Division of Inspection Program,
NRR, IMC0350 Panel Vice Chairman; James Dyer
(standing), NRC Region III Administrator; John Grobe,
Region III Director, Division
of Reactor Safety; and Christine Lipa,
Branch Chief, Division of Reactor Projects, Region III.
Comments regarding this panel and the meeting:
The NRC IMC 0350 Panel presentation was conducted at the Oak Harbor Junior High
School on 5-9-02.
The NRC Region III Administrator, Mr. James E. Dyer,
opened the meeting at 7 PM, with introductions.
Pictured here with the panel, Mr Dyer (who is not a member of the Panel),
"launched" the Panel meeting.
There will be a meeting every month, once the work gets underway soon. Mr. Dyer was also
there to convey
the proper sense of serious business!. Here, he is seen speaking to the executives of
FirstEnergy Nuclear
Operating Company (FENOC).
The panel is established for providing appropriate NRC Oversight of Restart
Activities. This is the first
public meeting set up. It was conducted specifically for the purpose of introducing the
NRC Panel, and for
discussing the IMC 0350 Charter. Some questions were directed to the FENOC Team from Mr
John A. Grobe,
the IMC0350 Panel Chairman, regarding, for example, the progress status of the FENOC
"Extent-of-Condition"
Inspections. The "IMC0350" (Inspection Manual Chapter 0350) is
described in very specific detail on www.nrc.gov
website, Go to button "what we do", and select "Inspection".
Once you get started reading it, you'll be enlightened
to the great degree of scrutiny and review that the NRC Panel must perform in its
oversight role. The specific inspection
procedures to be implemented for this retart review process are contained in the area of
the NRC website. The numbers
identified for these NRC implemented inspection procedures are IP 95002 and IP 95003.
The public can be assured that this NRC review will be very thorough, and
extremely rigorous, conducted by the people
that know Nuclear Reactors. No "VIP" panel formed by dissident
anti-nuclear protestors could do the task justice.
Those kind of panels would simply get in the way of the restart activities and use
delaying tactics to keep DBNPS
from even reaching the point where a restart would be ready for NRC consideration.
On the contrary, the NRC is quite
capable of providing regulatory purview at any level required, and they are also
sufficiently powerful from a legal perspective
as well. If they were to discover a violation of NRC requirements or Federal
regulations such as 10CFR50, the NRC
would determine risk significance of the condition, then a severity level commensurate
with the seriousness of the cited violation
would be thus identified. From the severity level assigned for the event condition,
the commensurate fine or other NRC mandated
sanction would then be applied. For the most severe cases, an order suspending or
cancelling a license would be the severest form
of enforcement.
