Contact: Edward Conaway
361-972-7643
ecconaway@stpegs.com
www.stpegs.com

Wadsworth, Texas -- August 9, 2001 -- Federal regulators have approved a request from the South Texas Project (STP) to ease or eliminate restrictions on nuclear power plant components with little or no effect on safety. Safety at STP will not be compromised, and the precedent-setting action could greatly reduce maintenance costs for STP.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) granted the exemption August 3 after an exhaustive safety review that spanned three years and included more than 14,000 hours of scrutiny by agency staff. STP pioneered the new maintenance process for the industry, with NRC concurrence, because of the plant's extensive experience in probabilistic risk assessment.

Risk assessment techniques and analytical tools, which also are used in industries such as commercial air transport and the space program, identify the range and likelihood of plant events. The evaluations quantify reactor safety and provide insights to improve already high safety levels.

"This is a truly significant and unprecedented achievement for STP and the nuclear energy industry," said James Sheppard, Vice President of Engineering and Technical Services at STP. "We're going to implement this change very carefully over the next two years. When fully implemented, this will produce significant savings and improve our competitiveness in electricity production costs at STP. It can do the same for other nuclear power plants that institute it," Sheppard said.

Until now, all safety-related plant equipment had to be formally tested and certified regardless of whether the components were fundamental to safe operations. That significantly increased the cost of many routine parts and precluded the use of less expensive replacements that meet performance criteria but lack formal certification.

Approximately 90 percent of STP's components have no risk or low safety significance. Their importance to safety is determined by combining probabilistic risk assessments with operating experience and engineering data.

"We congratulate STP for its trailblazing efforts that streamline and improve the maintenance system while still adhering to the highest performance standards," said Ralph Beedle, Nuclear Energy Institute senior vice president and chief nuclear officer. "This decision provides a template that could eventually be implemented industrywide. Not only will it benefit customers by reducing maintenance costs for non-safety components, it also will enhance safety by making financial resources available for those components and pieces of equipment that do help assure the power plant’s safe operation. The NRC’s approval of STP’s plan also is in keeping with the agency’s evolution to a risk-informed, performance-based reactor oversight process."

The NRC rule change exempts components with no or low safety significance from the requirements of Parts 21, 50 and 100 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 10. The equipment now can be replaced with commercial equivalents, or repaired or replaced according to commercial standards. The exemption also ends some in-service testing of pumps and valves.