The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has docketed an application from Dominion Energy South Carolina for the subsequent license renewal (SLR) of the V. C. Summer plant’s Unit 1 reactor. The action was announced in Monday’s edition of the Federal Register.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week issued a preliminary “yellow” finding to Dominion Energy for failing to resolve a two-decade-long problem with cracks in the piping of the V. C. Summer plant’s emergency diesel generator (EDG) fuel oil system.

A Soviet-era dam downstream from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine collapsed last evening, causing the water level of the Kakhovka Reservoir north of the dam to drop and raising new concerns over the already jeopardized safety of the Russian-occupied nuclear facility, Europe’s largest. The reservoir supplies water for, among other things, Zaporizhzhia’s cooling systems.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission offered an overall reassuring message last week regarding the performance of the nation’s commercial reactors in 2021.

“The work of the nuclear power plant operators for almost every reactor fully meets our stringent safety and security performance objectives,” said Andrea Veil, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. “Yet even those high-performing units will undergo thousands of inspection hours this year under our normal ‘baseline’ inspection program.”