Nuclear Regulatory Commission November 27, 2009 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has received and requests public comment on a petition for rulemaking dated October 16, 2009, filed by the Professional Reactor Operator Society (petitioner). The petition was docketed by the NRC and has been assigned Docket No. PRM-26-3. The petitioner is requesting that the NRC amend the regulations that govern fitness for duty programs. Specifically, the petitioner requests that the definition of ``unit outage'' be changed to ``site outage'' and be amended to clarify the way licensees schedule manpower on the front and back end of outages. The petitioner believes the suggested amendment would require licensees to abandon past practice that could impact licensees' ability to safely execute future outages and would help to ensure that nuclear utilities continue to perform outages in a safe and efficient manner.

The NRC staff is soliciting public comment on NUREG-0800, ``Standard Review Plan for the Review of Safety Analysis Reports for Nuclear Power Plants,'' (SRP) Appendix 18-A on Guidance for Crediting Manual Operator Actions in Diversity and Defense-in-Depth (D3) Analyses (Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS) Accession No. ML092950353). This Appendix defines a methodology for evaluating manual operator action as a diverse means of coping with Anticipated Operational Occurrences and Postulated Accidents that are concurrent with a software Common Cause Failure of the Digital Instrumentation and Control (I&C) Protection System. This Appendix supersedes, and incorporates with limited modifications, the guidance in Section 3 of Digital I&C Interim Staff Guidance (ISG), Digital I&C-ISG-05, Revision 1, Highly Integrated Control RoomsHuman Factors Issues.