The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has finished its annual assessments of the safety at America's 100 operating power reactors. Eighty held its highest safety performance rating at the close of 2013, with safety standings fleet wide improving somewhat compared to the previous year.
Within the regulatory action matrix that categorizes sites by the level of oversight deemed necessary by the NRC, nine additional plants were slated for supplemental inspections for one or two items of low safety significance. These units were Browns Ferry 3, Clinton, Fitzpatrick, Grand Gulf 1, LaSalle 2, Point Beach 2, Prairie Island 2 and Turkey Point 3. The Robinson plant in South Carolina was also on that list but has since improved its standing.
Last year saw modest improvement over 2012 in terms of the proportion of plants requiring the least amount of oversight from the NRC. In 2012, 81 of 104 reactors in operation ended the year in the NRC's highest-performance category, while 18 required supplemental inspections for minor issues. At the more severe end of the enforcement scale, though, 2013 saw nine plants (Browns Ferry 2, Duane Arnold, Monticello, Pilgrim, Point Beach 1, Sequoyah 1 and 2 , Susquehanna 2 and Watts Bar 1.) finish the year in the NRC's degraded cornerstone column. (It's worth noting that Sequoyah 1 and 2 and Watts Bar 1 have moved into the highest performance category since the start of the new year.) That compares to three units in the degraded cornerstone column in 2012. Brown's Ferry 1 remained the only unit in the agency's multiple/repetitive degraded cornerstone column. Meanwhile, Fort Calhoun continued to take part in a separate oversight process to address multiple problems found during an extended outage and is not included in the matrix.