Press Release-96-083, NRC Changes Frequency of ON-SITE Emergency Planning Exercises
| ML003710649 | |
| Person / Time | |
|---|---|
| Issue date: | 06/14/1996 |
| From: | Office of Public Affairs |
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| Category:Press Release | |
| References | |
| Press Release-96-083 | |
| Download: ML003710649 (2) | |
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United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission Office of Public Affairs Washington, DC 20555 Phone 301-415-8200 Fax 301-415-2234 Internet:opa@nrc.gov No. 96-83 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Friday, June 14, 1996)
NRC CHANGES FREQUENCY OF ON-SITE EMERGENCY PLANNING EXERCISES The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is changing its regulations governing the frequency of on-site emergency exercises at licensed nuclear power plants.
The action partially grants a petition submitted by Virginia Electric & Power Company.
The revised rule will permit nuclear power plants to conduct exercises testing their on-site emergency plans every two years, rather than every year.
These on-site exercises may now be combined with the full-participation emergency exercises that licensees will still be required to conduct every two years, along with state and local government agencies that have off-site jurisdiction within the plants' plume exposure emergency planning zones.
(These zones are within an approximate 10-mile radius of the plant.)
To ensure that adequate emergency response capabilities are maintained, licensees will have to conduct training drills during the interval between formal exercises.
They also will have to permit any state or local government within the plume exposure emergency planning zone to participate in these drills upon request.
At least one of the training drills will have to include a combination of some of the principal functional areas of the licensee's on-site emergency response capabilities.
These principal functional areas include such activities as management and coordination of emergency response, accident assessment, protective action decisionmaking, and plant system repair and corrective actions.
In contrast to more formal exercises, the training drills need not activate all of the licensee's emergency response facilities.
Supervised instruction will be permitted, and the operating staff will have the opportunity to resolve problems rather than having drill controllers intervene.
The drills also will be able to focus on on-site training objectives.
The NRC believes these changes will not lessen emergency preparedness, since licensees will be required to maintain adequate emergency response capabilities and conduct realistic drills between the full-participation exercises.
The changes may result in the reallocation and more effective use of resources within some licensees' emergency planning programs.
Virginia Electric & Power Company, operator of the Surry and North Anna nuclear power plants, submitted its petition on this subject on December 9, 1992.
A notice of filing of the petition was published in the Federal Register for public comment on March 4, 1993, and comments received were considered in developing the rule.
A proposed rule was published in the Federal Register for public comment on April 14, 1995.
No substantive changes were made as a result of the comments received.