Although federal inspectors recently upgraded the regulatory status of Michigan's Palisades nuclear plant, they plan to continue extra inspections at the facility through next year.
The plant underwent an intensified inspection program following a yellow finding by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last fall related to the loss of a DC bus that led to a complicated reactor trip. According to the NRC's regulatory action matrix, the agency has since moved the Entergy-owned plant from the degraded cornerstone column to the licensee response column that elicits the lowest level of regulatory scrutiny.
Nonetheless, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission administrator said at a public meeting Tuesday that the plant will undergo an extra 1,000 hours of inspections in 2013, the Kalamazoo Gazette reported. The enhanced inspections will continue during and after a refueling outage scheduled for the end of that year.