NRC to hold open house for Limerick

Staff will be on hand to review plant’s 2016 safety performance

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission plans to hold an open House on Monday, May 22, to discuss the safety performance of the Limerick nuclear power plant.

The open house will be held at the temporary location of the Limerick Township Municipal Building, 155 S. Limerick Road, from 4 to 5:30 p.m.

On hand to discuss the plant’s 2016 performance and the agency’s oversight of the facility will be agency employees who are responsible for plant inspections, including the resident inspectors based at the site on a full-time basis.

Based on its 2016 reviews, the NRC has determined that the Limerick Generating Station, owned by Exelon, operated safely in 2016. As of the end of last year, the plant had no inspection findings or performance indicators outside the normal range, according to a press release.

As a result, the facility is currently under the NRC’s baseline level of oversight, which entails thousands of hours of inspection each year.

“The current safety performance of the Limerick nuclear power plant qualifies it for our normal battery of inspections,” NRC Region I Administrator Dan Dorman said in the release. He added that staff members in attendance at the Monday open house will be able to speak about the kinds of inspections the NRC performs at Limerick throughout the year.

Under the NRC’s Reactor Oversight Process, the agency gauges plant performance through the use of colorcoded inspection findings and performance indicators, which are statistical measurements of plant performance.

Any inspection findings or per-

formance indicators (PIs) that are greater than green (very low safety significance) trigger increased NRC oversight. The Assessment letter for Limerick indicates that “inspection findings had very low safety significance (i.e., green), and all PIs were within the expected range (i.e., green).”

The NRC meets with the public each year following the March release of the Annual Assessment letter.

DIGITAL FIRST MEDIA FILE PHOTO A view of Exelon’s Limerick Generating Station. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scheduled an open house for Monday, May 22, to share information with the public about the plant’s 2016 safety performance.