Problems and Delays Overshadow NRC's Initial Success in Improving Reactor Operators' Capabilities

GAO discussed Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) actions to improve reactor capabilities which were found deficient by numerous investigations following the accident at the Three Mile Island (TMI) Nuclear Powerplant.

GAO found that, within 2 years of the TMI accident, NRC required and utilities implemented several actions to improve and strengthen the training and qualifications of reactor operators and other key control room personnel. These were interim solutions to the problems identified by the TMI investigation, and GAO believes that in the short term these actions resulted in improved safety at nuclear powerplants. After initial actions were taken, NRC efforts in this area began to lose momentum and implementation problems and delays started to occur. The impact of the NRC implementation problems may have been lessened by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), which assumed a leadership role in assuring that the capabilities of control room personnel were improved in accordance with the NRC Action Plan. INPO is currently performing the first step of the long-term NRC program, a generic position task analysis for key personnel, and eventually plans to complete many programs similar to long-term NRC actions, which are currently behind schedule. NRC is monitoring INPO work and is revising its schedule for completion of tasks to correspond with INPO timeframes.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Daniel C. White Team: General Accounting Office: Resources, Community, and Economic Development Division Phone: (301) 353-4761