The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says the FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in Oswego County performed safely over the past year. NRC officials say that its staff devoted 4,790 hours reviewing the plant over the past year, but did not finding anything that caused the agency to increase oversight.
"They met all of the requirements for our reactor oversight process inspection program for the year, kept them in their licensee response program, so routine inspections -- no inspections that would be out of the ordinary," said Eric Miller, the acting senior resident inspector at FitzPatrick.
The positive review for FitzPatrick comes about a month after it had to shut off because a minor equipment failure caused a leak of non-radioactive oil into Lake Ontario.
Miller said the other upstate nuclear power plants, Nine Mile Point facility in Oswego County and Ginna in nearby Rochester, performed similarly. But Fitzpatrick's owner Entergy's other plant in New York, Indian Point near New York City, is under increased oversight from the NRC after several forced outages.
