Lessons learned from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection program of emergency operating procedures

The purpose of this paper is to inform the nuclear industry of the state of emergency operating procedures (EOPs) at the light water reactors that were inspected by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) during 1988 and 1989 and to detail the lessons learned from these inspections. The inspections are conducted by a team of five to six professionals for 1 week on-site. These teams typically consist of senior operations inspectors, human factors specialists, reactor systems engineers, and certified licensed operator examiners. Although the inspections included a distribution of plants very different in design, many of the problems manifested in the EOP programs were common to all groups. The great majority of EOP problems that were identified by the EOP inspections resulted from inadequate or incomplete implementation of EOP programs. Although the inspections focused on the EOPs themselves, the kinds of problems that were identified led to an examination of the programmatic weaknesses that caused those problems and allowed them to go uncorrected