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June 21, 2009

PPL will appeal regulatory report

The assessment came after a force-on-force drill at the site in Salem Township.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the Susquehanna nuclear plant a less-than-tolerable assessment for its response to a security exercise in March, but PPL Corp., the plant’s majority owner and operator, will meet with the NRC next month to appeal.

The NRC grades incidents at nuclear plants on a color-coded scale that begins with green for minor safety significance and continues through red for more problematic issues. A finding above green “will result in an increase in NRC oversight in the affected area,” such as increased inspections, according to NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.

The NRC releases little information about security issues because they could be used to facilitate actual attacks on facilities.

PPL is hoping to avoid the added oversight by meeting on July 1 at the NRC’s Region 1 office in King of Prussia, near Philadelphia. “Any time we have a discussion, we can understand exactly what they’re looking for and they can understand what our actions were,” PPL nuclear spokesman Joe Scopelliti said. “As soon as they told us about the finding, we took immediate corrective action. The issue has been corrected; now it’s more of we’d like the opportunity to discuss it with the NRC.”

The assessment came after a force-on-force drill at the dual-reactor site in Salem Township, during which security experts attempt to gain access to the plant while plant security, who are made aware of the drill, repel the attackers.

“It’s something that’s known, but coordinated … to gain access and to see what potential weaknesses, basically to test your security force to see how your security force would react to intruders coming to the plant,” Scopelliti said. “It’s not really a graded. … What this particular thing means is they have what they consider a finding, and we would like to discuss the finding. … We believe we are one of the most secure facilities in the country, if not the world.”

For security reasons, the meeting is not public, but according to the agenda, PPL will have an hour to offer additional information and make its case, followed by an hour of discussion between the company and the agency and 10 minutes for PPL’s closing remarks. After that, the NRC will make its final finding.

Whether that finding will be made public is unclear. “It depends on what the NRC’s action is, but typically anything involving security we don’t put any information out because that’s tipping your hand, and that’s not something we could do with security,” Scopelliti said.

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