Nuclear Regulatory Commission April 7, 2017 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is granting an exemption to allow a departure from the certification information of Tier 1 of the generic design control document (DCD) and is issuing License Amendment No. 63 to Combined Licenses (COL), NPF-93 and NPF-94. The COLs were issued to South Carolina Electric & Gas Company on behalf of itself and the South Carolina Public Service Authority (both hereafter called the licensee); for construction and operation of the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Station (VCSNS) Units 2 and 3, located in Fairfield County, South Carolina. The granting of the exemption allows the changes to Tier 1 information asked for in the amendment. Because the acceptability of the exemption was determined in part by the acceptability of the amendment, the exemption and amendment are being issued concurrently.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is re-issuing for public comment draft regulatory guide (DG), DG-1285, ``An Approach for Using Probabilistic Risk Assessment in Risk-Informed Decisions on Plant-Specific Changes to the Licensing Basis.'' The guide was initially issued for public comment in 2012 as noticed in the Federal Register under NRC Docket number NRC-2012-0110. Subsequently, the NRC decided to incorporate additional information related to evaluation of the defense-in-depth philosophy that was not included in the original publication of DG-1285. This proposed revision of the guide, Revision 3, includes significant expansion of the guidance on the meaning of, and the process for, assessing the defense-in-depth evaluation factors.