MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – The Vermont Yankee nuclear plant had a good day Friday, winning high marks in the results of an inspection by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, while its parent company won an environmental award.

The NRC said it performed a once-every-three-years review called a “Component Design Bases Inspection,” and found just three minor areas on which to fault Vermont Yankee. It categorized all three as “green,” meaning they had “very low safety significance.”

The NRC inspection is separate and distinct from the comprehensive audit of the plant demanded by the Legislature in preparation for its vote on whether Vermont Yankee’s license should be extended for 20 years beyond its currently scheduled 2012 shutdown date, said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan.

Plant spokesman Larry Smith said Vermont Yankee officials were pleased with the inspection results. “This was a large team inspection of many weeks and many hours, very thorough and probing,” Smith said.

The NRC said the inspection took three weeks in late July and early August and that the team spent 700 staff hours on it.

Smith said the plant was working to correct the three green findings. The NRC said they included:

• “An issue involving the proper evaluation and documentation of test results for plant backs up power batteries, although actual battery capacity was found to be sufficient;”

• A faulty analysis of what would happen if the plant lost electricity and entered “station blackout” condition;

• And failing to run backup generators at their maximum levels during testing, though the NRC found they would have worked as needed in a blackout.

“None of these issues would have resulted in safety equipment being unable to perform the intended function if needed,” the NRC said.

While they pleased plant officials, the NRC’s findings did not impress Bob Stannard, spokesman for the anti-nuclear Citizens Awareness Network. He cited recent leaking and structural problems with the plant’s cooling towers as signs that the plant needed a more thorough inspection than the NRC had given it.

He called the federal agency “the nuclear equivalent of FEMA,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose reputation was hurt by a response to Hurricane Katrina that was widely seen as late and inadequate.

Meanwhile Friday, Vermont Yankee owner Entergy Nuclear announced that it had been named to the Dow Jones Sustainabiliy Indexes, which ranks companies deemed as having top environmental records. Entergy said it was the only U.S. utility to make the Dow Jones Global Index for the third year in a row.

AP-ES-09-26-08 1841EDT

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