PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) – Federal regulators fined the owner of Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station $60,000 for an incident in which a control room supervisor fell asleep on the job and fellow workers failed to immediately wake him.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which ordered the fine Friday, also found that one of the supervisor’s co-workers recorded the nap on a cellphone camera without waking the supervisor. The NRC said that worker did not submit a report on the June 29, 2004 incident, which occurred around 4:40 a.m.

Six employees were on shift at the time in the control room area, but not all were necessarily aware of the supervisor’s nap. The supervisor was alseep in a chair for about four minutes before a shift manager wakened him by banging on a desk, the NRC said.

The incident was not brought to plant officials’ attention until last August – more than a month afterward – when the NRC informed Pilgrim after being contacted by another plant worker. Plant managers suspended the entire crew while it investigated the incident.

The napping supervisor and the worker who took the video footage were both fired by the plant last year.

The NRC concluded that the incident violated four agency requirements and constituted “willful disregard” for safety regulations and personnel procedures designed to identify and correct security failures.

The NRC has ordered eight fines against nuclear plant operators since the start of 2004. Such enforcement actions are highly unusual and reserved for serious lapses, NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said.

The NRC emphasized there were safeguards at Pilgrim to prevent a disaster at the time the supervisor nodded off, but that the federal agency remained troubled by the incident.

“There’s no more important a job at a nuclear power plant than the control room,” Sheehan said. “Not only should they be awake, but they need to be ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.”

A spokesman from Entergy Corp., the Louisiana-based energy company that owns Pilgrim, said the firm will not appeal the NRC decision. The spokesman, David Tarantino, said the incident was isolated.

Mary Lampert of Duxbury, a critic of nuclear power and plant watchdog, criticized Pilgrim’s owners over the incident involving the napping worker.

“Hopefully that $60,000 is enough to buy some No-Doz or build a Starbucks on site,” said Lampert, director of the group Pilgrim Watch.

Pilgrim, a 34-year-old reactor, produces about 670 megawatts of power at any one time, supplying electricity for about 670,000 homes.