On March 9, 2012, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it directed its staff to issue three Orders, which are effective immediately, to United States commercial reactor plants. According to the NRC, this expedited mandate attempts to implement “lessons learned from the accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.”
Two of the Orders will apply to every U.S. commercial nuclear power plant, including those under construction and the recently licensed new Vogtle reactors. More specifically, the first Order requires the plants to better protect safety equipment installed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and to obtain sufficient equipment to support all reactors at a given site simultaneously.
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